I'm normally like, hey, whatever, man, but now I have to
do it. Okay, ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country. Mister Garba Schaff Tear down this
wall. It's a Rickchet Podcast's number six hundred ninety seven. I'm Rob Long,
Peter Robinson and James Lovelas are off this week. I am joined by
the Great Steve Dyward and We're going to have a long, interesting, stem
winding conversation with the Great Victor Davis Hanton. Stay tuned. Are they are
cheap fakes video? They are done in bad day, and I think that
it tells you everything that we need to know about how desperate, how desperate
Republicans are here Hotter, thank you for introduction, for sharing your family story.
You know I've often said anyway, not a joke, Not a joke.
Hello and welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. It is Friday, June twenty
first. It's the longest day of the year. Doesn't feel like but I
guess it's going to be. I am Rob Long, coming from New York
City, joined by Steve Hayward. Steve, where are you? By the
way, I'm actually in Marin County behind enemy lines, believe it or not.
Exactly right, Well, did you see that, Like the Bay Area
now is advertising itself to the rest of central California, which is really hot,
by saying it's misty here or it's cool here. It's beyond misty.
It is freezing cold here, and we're all wearing puffy jackets. It's unbelievable.
That's one hundred degrees here. So well, James Lylacks, who's usually
here, is off today, and Peter Robinson's usually here is off today.
So Steve is just you and me. So a Monday, at a celebration
of the twelfth anniversary of the Dreamers Act, I remember that one President Biden
announced a new immigration order to provide a pathway to citizenship for people who entered
illegally but have since married citizens. And they have to have been here for
ten years. So that's about half a million immigrants. Apparently we'll qualify for
that. You know, I thought the move was going to be just get
tough on immigration between now and you know, November was six or whatever,
and then loosen the strings. But I guess that isn't That isn't what he's
doing. Yeah, I mean There's three things occurred to me quickly. One
is, is he trying to lose the election? I mean, surely they
know the polls that immigration has become, you know, the number one or
two issue with people, and people are because they don't like what's happening.
Second thing is it does look like a purely cynical political play to try and
attract Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. Okay, I guess I get that,
but it may cost them more than it gains them. But then,
third, you know, one of the more revealing things Biden said in another
issue, but it relates to this one, was two three weeks ago or
maybe more, he said, oh, the Supreme Court said I couldn't forgive
student loans, but I didn't let that stop me. Oh so, you
know, a whole branch of government says what you're doing is illegal, and
you know, what's this about the rules? Nobody's above the law, right,
I didn't let them think all the law stop exactly. And you know
DACA from what ten twelve years ago, that's always been under legal cloud and
I think still is. And I think this new move is also vulnerable to
a challenge by the way the Deep Senate says, maybe they would like a
federal court to do an injunction. See those mean Trump judges are stopping us
from being compassionate, and that's why you have to vote for me. I'm
not persuaded, certainly, but that could be their crazy thinking and does seem
like a bigger mouse trap that he's building to try to catch a mouse that
he could easily catch by simply saying we're going to enforce the border, right.
I mean, that is such an obvious thing. It's hard to argue,
even if you're in favor of immigration reform and am seeing all those other
things that that wouldn't be if that's not a component to it. I just
just talk about politics for a minute. I mean, I you know,
there's always that moment where you think, am I just missing something and they
have a secret plan that I can't imagine what that secret plan is? But
why aren't they running around with a hair on fire? I mean, I
would be doing that if I was an incumbent president and an incumbent presidential staff
and campaign operation looking at this, I think it just doesn't seem like it's
like that. You know, you're a poker. You were playing poker and
the guy is sitting there and he's got this smug look on his face.
You think, is he bluffing or does he really have the cards? And
I cannot imagine that anyone in Biden world thinks they have the cards. You
know, our mutual friend John pot Harts has been saying for a while that
this campaign of Biden's reminds him of the George hw Bush campaign in nineteen ninety
two, And of course John was there for that. He worked in that
bush By and the wheels came off of everything. Nothing they did worked.
They kept being confident, well, things will turn around for us, without
having a theory why. They're totally out of touch with reality. And he
thinks the same exact things happening to Biden. I mean a couple of little
things. And I'm sure you know from your show business perspective you'd appreciate is
you have always dreadful videos showing Biden barely functioning, wandering off, and and
they're pushing back on it in a way that simply calls more attention to it.
Right. You had greeen John Pierre out saying these are cheap fake videos
and that just gives the right, It just gives the story another whole two
or three news cycles. And I'm guessing somebody, maybe Biden, maybe doctor
Jill, maybe their political strategists, say you've got to go out and push
back on this. It looks just as pathetic to me as when Donald Trump,
on the second day in office, made Sean Spicer go out and defend
the claim that it was the biggest to knock to the peast ever, right
right, remember, so ludicrous And all it did was call attention to you
know, one of the obvious defects that Trump has, which is grandiosity.
So the same thing's happening here. I don't everybody seems to have lost their
grip on political reality, and maybe both parties it's an all. You know
the little British comedy called Blackadder, and there was just one guy on black
Adder, the sort of the sad little character. He'd always say, I
have a cunning plan, and then he would tell you what the plan was,
and you think, oh my god, we're all going to die.
I think that's what that light was. Oh my god, we're all gonna
Dutch. It does feel like their their attitude is, you know, we
just have to let we just have to hold our breath and let Trump be
Trump. That their solution and their strategy is. And I think this is
a bigger This is one of the biggest problems I think with with with with
American politics and American leadership in general, is the idea that I don't have
to do anything. The other guy is so horrible and he's gonna make his
own mistakes. I can just stand there and he's gonna make his own mistakes.
Yeah, and I'm gonna The smart play here is for me to try
to win this election by one vote. Yeah, and we're so smart.
We can slice up the electorate, and we can slice up all of the
precincts so we can figure out which household, all that stuff, all that
crap that they do, and they do it in show business too, right.
And the irony is that if you're once you start thinking that way,
you will only win by one vote. Once you start thinking I'm gonna be
as smart and I'm gonna I'm gonna be strategic, then you could only be
strategic that way. The whole operation It becomes about how do I just win
one vote to and he won more vote in Pennsylvania and yeah, and that
is like the I mean, that is just the worst lowest form of leadership
I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, you know who else had that
theory was Jimmy Carter in nineteen eighty. They thought and said all the way
through O Reagan is so unacceptable that people have to come around and even though
he's little ahead of us in the polls, we may be able to play
an inside straight in the electro college. And they lost by ten points,
lost forty four states. I think there's something similar with Trump. I think
there the left is either doesn't perceive but the smart ones do, or they're
just in denial about the fact that he has a similar appeal, that he
runs ahead of his polls, and so they may be in for a very
rude shock. And so you know, right now, I think I've said
this before, I right now think Trump's going to win comfortably. That could
change, may very well change, because you know, if you have Trump
working for the other side, right But you know, right now, you
know, I don't see Biden getting any better for him. Yeah, I
just it's it's a strange thing. You're like, well, I understand why
Biden doesn't get it because he's you know, out to lunch. But I
don't understand why nobody else in his world gets it. So I mean,
maybe it's just too complicated. And speaking of complicated, well sorry, I'm
gonna have one thought of that, which is On the other hand, the
recent history, especially of Obama's reelection campaign in twenty twelve, remember something about
Obama. He was the first president ever re elected with a lower vote total
than his initial election. Most re elected presidents get more votes. But what
they did, brilliantly and very scientifically was fined every marginal vote that was sort
of weakly for Obama and get that person of the polls in the key states
like Ohio. And I got to think that democratic machine still exists, and
I think the Biden people may be counting on that, and they might be
right to have some confidence in that drill. Yeah, but you know,
the Obama thing was interesting because he started with such a cushion. I mean,
his win in two thousand and eight was the smashing popular of a victory
and a smashing electoral college victory, and so he could afford to like leak
support for four years, which he did. He could afford to like turn
off people who have wanted this moderate guy a chance by being too far left.
Hey, just kind of do that, and he's I'm still gonna win.
That's how I mean. He was like one of those billionaires who loses
one hundred million dollars, like, yeah, no, I don't even know
it's self a change man, can I can still do it? But all
of this stuff is so they've made it so complicated, and they've this arrogance
of the marketer. And you think by now they would know. You think
by now they would know things are complicated. For instance, you Steve,
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for making an amazing product. The good thing, Steve, for you and
me is that we don't have to be smart today. We can be dumb
because we are joined by one of the smartest guys around, Victor Davis Hanson.
Victor does not need any introduction. We're gonna do it anyway because it's
good podcast hygiene. You know him. He is the Senior Fellow in Classics
and Military History, the Hoover Institution. He's authored a bajillion I think the
actual numbers of bajillion books, including the The Cry in the Wilderness called Mexophornia,
which came out many years ago and is absolutely pinpoint relevant today. Unfortunately,
it should be a book that we look on and see in the past,
but we haven't solved the problem yet. And his latest book is The
End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Victor. Welcome, Thank
you for having me. You guys, So, I have a couple of
questions because I want a little bit of a history perspective. Yeah, I
I'm doing as you. I mean, you may not know, but this
I'm sort of going off to seminary next fall. I'm going to come.
Yeah. So I'm doing a lot of reading, and I'm doing a lot
of like New test Old Testament, Hebrew Bible reading, yes, and kind
of and like. And there's a point at which, you know, there's
the there's a point which it just feels very bronze age, and then there's
a point when suddenly it's Greek and Alexander and Roman and they have been fighting,
these empires have been fighting in that land for ever. It seems like,
yes, well, it becomes part of the Holy Land, so to
speak, what is now Jordan. The West Bank Gaza in Israel becomes part
of the so called West in about three point thirty one when Alexander wins a
battle of Isis, and then he absorbs what was the the cane Persian Empire,
and in that empire is Judea and the Jews, and he pretty much
he and his successors the Seleucids and leave them alone. And then that empire
is absorbed by Rome. Part of it. The Adelids give it to Rome
in the second century AD, but by the first century BC, excuse me,
the first century BC, that comes under Roman domination, and then you
have Herod the Great, who's a client king, and everything seems to be
working well until the Romans decide that they can't give any more exemptions to the
Jews, who won't honor the emperor because now they've transition as a deity.
So then we have the Vespasian and Titus destroy Jerusalem, and that starts the
beginning of the diaspora. But there'll be a number of revolts after that as
well. That's when Greek and Latin start to become part of the Exus Jesus
of not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament. Is I mean
the New Testament will be will be written somewhere around forty five to ninety a
d. And there's some There are two moments in the Hebrew Bible, I
guess, or the Tanok they I guess they always happen a new name for
the Tanak. They're kind of chilling. One is Alexander zips through Judea on
his way to Gaza and they eat. There's no there's no mention of like
any I think it's herodous. There's no mention of the Jews. They don't,
they don't show up. They're not. But to to read it and
to see these names, yeah, I know they're they're Persian subjects and they're
they don't they're not. They've been they've been given certain exemptions under the Persian
Empire. And they're not sure what his siege of God. They don't know
what's gonna When he's besieges Tire and Gaza, he nobody, he doesn't know
who's going to win. And he's only twenty one twenty three at this point.
So a lot of people not just the Jews, but a lot of
people are just waiting to see if he's really going to destroy the Persian Empire
and then they'll make cut a deal with him. But they don't want to
go out on a limb and join him and then find out he's going to
lose. Well why And there's another kind of creepy or mentioned in the creepy
moment, but like thrilling moment really in the movie where you know how it
ends, and it's I think it's in Second Maccabees or something, and they
are it's a part of the sort of political assessment, and they're saying,
look, everybody's so crappy to us here, the Persians and the Greeks.
There's a new empire over there a little farther west in Rome. Let's why
don't we Why don't we see if they'll come and help us get independent?
And when you're reading it, it's like you're in a movie and you want
to say no, no, no, no, no, that's not going
to be good either. That's not a solution either, no, But it
does. It's both. It's really and depressing to think that people have been
arguing over this eleven mile wide in some places, peace of land for thousands
of years, and we thought, we thought we had a solution. I
mean, ir yeah, it is. I mean, you're it's ironic when
I walk across the Stanford campus and hear all of these people saying from the
river to the sea and their settlers and their interlopers about the Jews. And
we've got to remember that the Jews were they began to spread after the destruction
of the Second Temple and the City of Jerusalem. But there was still a
large population of Jews, and we had the Maccabee re evolutions, et cetera.
But when the Empire fell in the West, that became part of the
Byzantine Empire, and the Byzantines allowed the Jews to stay there and they had
pretty good relations until the mid six hundreds when Islam came in and took and
took the Holy Land. So we're talking about I think you could argue that
there's evidence of Jewish civilization with a written language as early as thirteen or fourteen
hundred pc some evidence. So then you're talking about two thousand years before Islam
even came to the Holy Land. And who was there was the Jews that
were there, and there were Jewish settlements, not a lot, but that
were continuous all the time, people families that lived there all the way up
until modern time. But it's a very strange thing about radical Islam is that
once Radical Islam goes into an area, they claim it as its ancestral homeland.
They do that with Spain. That was one of the biggest talking points
of Osama bin laden LuSE. This was ours, No, it wasn't.
You came in in the seventh century and tried to steal it, and then
you occupied it for four hundred five hundred years, but you were always at
war with Iberians. And the same thing is true of the Holy Land.
The same thing is true of North Africa. It was it was punique.
Actually it was indigenous Berbers, and then the Punic under the Carthaginians came in
the eighth century, and then they were wiped out by the Romans, and
then the Romans from essentially one forty six all the way into the four fifties,
and then the Byzantines recaptured it and the Vandals took it, and then
they recaptured it from the Vandals and held it for almost one hundred and fifty
years and then the Islam was the last those were the last arrivals on the
scene. And yet when you talk to people, I've been to all of
those Middle East countries in North Africa, and yet you talk to people,
they think it's been Islamic from the beginning of time. And it's really weird.
It's a very rare, weird mindset when you talk to people like that.
I was just gonna see what's to jump in. I was in Tunis
a few years ago, and you know, hiking around Carthage, and it's,
first of all, it's amazing to think that all we're looking at is
about ten percent of what's there, that there's more underneath all those neighborhoods and
houses have been built over the years. And then they show you the Carthaginian
sort of naval yard. This is a big circle, big round thing,
and it's it's kind of like, I mean, this is wrong, this
is absolutely the wrong interpretation. But were like this, this is kind of
small, like the Romans were afraid of these guys like this looked like I
mean, like at locals, like it's a local doc. You know,
it's not that big. Well, part of the problem was that the city
actually reached its highest population right before it was destroyed, about five hundred and
fifty six hundred thousand people. And Scipio the philosopher, supposedly with Polybius at
his side, destroyed that city. I mean, we have a description an
Appian, very graphic. They destroyed it blocked by block. They didn't so
salt in the ground that was a medieval add on, but they leveled it.
And then they prohibited anybody from settling it. And then the Grocca I
tried to bring in some left wing people and make kind of a utopian veterans
communal city, and that just failed. And then for one hundred years it
was this desolate and then when Caesar came, he created something called Carthago Nova,
and that was a new city of Carthage, and it was not quite
on the same side of the rubble, it was near it. And that
harbor you're seen is the Roman rebuilding of what was wiped out as the Carthaginians.
So there's almost none of the old Ginian Punic city, but the remains
today are the Roman city. When the Roman city, my gosh, it
was at I think by the first century AD. It was the fourth largest
city in the Empire, after Rome and Constantinople and Antioch. Victor at Steve
Hayward out in I'm well, First of all, I think Rob did this
too quickly. You know things are bad when Rob Long is going off the
seminary and he's like, he's like Augustine going to hit the oregas as the
vandals are outside the city. God, you figured it out exactly like Fellas.
Yeah. And the irony is is I'm today in San Francisco, believe
it or not, speaking at a panel on climate change, and it's freezing
cold here. It's you know, any more perfect, right, It's colder
than even it is usually here. But look, Rob went off the seminary.
I saw the title of your new book, The End of Everything,
How Wars descend into Annihilation, And I thought, ah, Victor's taking a
cheerful turn for a change. Look there, there's great history here. But
I think there's also parable, which I think is your intention, or at
least that's what I've taken away from it. The subtext, and it's not
very much sub is that America is not immune from the peril of thinking.
It's that things can happen quickly that we are led by gullible and ignorant leaders.
And you know, I think back to Lincoln's Lycem address, which you
know, I know, you know, he said, look, we have
these two big moats around America. This is eighteen thirty eight, right,
and so nobody can really invade us and take us down. It's too hard.
If we're going to fall, it will be the authors of our own
destruction. And I still think there's a lot that that's true, and maybe
it connects to what you're after here. But you point out that a lot
of people have made a similar mistake over the years and thinking either they're immune
that allies will come rescue them. I've done the whole bullet point list of
some of your observations. Give us a scenario to this goes beyond the four
corners of your book a little bit this question, But give us a scenario
or two of what you think are our largest vulnerabilities that our leaders are oblivious
to or not taking seriously. Well. In the book, all of these
societies had had long pedigrees, They all had very impressive fortifications, they had
large empires. They all thought they were invulnerable, and they had no idea
of the temperament of an Alexander the Great, or Scipio or Memet, especially
Hernan Cortes. And they all thought as you said, and I pointed out
that the Allies would save them, or they could negotiate, and they all
knew that complete annihilation was very rare and roarer. But when I looked at
the present world, and I looked at all the people who have been leveling
existential threats, I mean existential by saying we want to wipe you off the
face of the earth. That's Kim Jong Own. I was surprised that early
he is threatened to send missiles into Athens. He's threatened to send them into
an Ecosia. He said about Nagorno, the corridor that they just ethnically cleanse
one hundred and fifty thousand Armenians. He said, this was the solution our
grandfathers used, and we'll use it again. He's threatened to wipe out the
Kurds. We've had Putin. I think I counted seventeen news accounts of Russian
media Putin saying they would use nuclear weapons if they felt it was necessary in
Ukraine. And then China issued a video remember about having to wipe out Japan
if it intervened in Taiwan. And then I looked at the reaction. Everybody
said, this is crazy. They never do this. This isn't even Iran.
Mister Ruff and Johnny said twenty years ago that Israel was a one bomb
state. So there's a pattern here, and when I look at the United
States, it kind of unfortunately falls into the pattern. One of them is
financial insolvency. All of these cities did not have the wherewithal that they thought
they had. So we look at the United States, we are borrowing a
trillion every ninety days. And what's funny about that is there's no one on
either side has a plan. I mean, I thought at some point somebody
would say, well, Alan, Simpson and Bowles had a plan, a
very simplified tax code, which had we adopted when Obama formed the Commission in
two thousand and nine, we would be balanced budget and we would have half
the death paid off. But no one's talking about that. And yet the
interest on the dead is, Neil Ferguson pointed out not too long ago in
an article, is larger than our defense budget, and the interest rate is
five five and a half percent, so it's about thirteen or fourteen percent of
the entire budget. So that is hampering us. When Trump says he's going
to rebuild the military and up it back to four or five percent GDP,
you want to know where he's going to get the money, and that the
only way you get the money is to cut The second thing is the borders
have collapsed. All these societies could not enforce their borders for a variety of
reasons. But our border is not for us. It doesn't exist. They
don't believe in borders. They feel that they're constructs, and in this globalized
mindset, everybody has an inbreak natural right to go wherever he wants. That's
a charitable view that the uncharitable is that this is what they call the new
democratic majority or demography is destiny, to quote some of the books that they
write. But we don't know what ten million people are doing in this country,
and we'll never I think it will take twenty years if you had conservative
administrations to fix this. And by fixing, I mean find out all the
ten million people are here, give them background checks to port the bad people,
give some process to get a green cart. It's a control mess.
And it was by intent, and then of course something is deadly wrong with
their military. And that's something that happened in these case studies that I showed.
We have forty five thousand people who did not they were not recruited.
The Pentagon says, well, it's because the job market is tied, or
people are obese, or they're in gangs, or they're not. But they've
lowered the standards and they still can't get them. But when you actually don't
listen to the Pentagon, but you go online and very carefully, it's very
hard to do. But a couple of us have looked at it. They
do have demographies of the people who are not joining. Latinos are joining,
Blacks are joining, women are joining everybody, but you know who, white
males. White males are not joining the military. And when you look at
the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, they died at roughly seventy five and
seventy four percent wwise. They're numbers and the demography, so basically the military.
When Mill went on congressional testimony with Austin and Gilgad or whatever his name
was, Chief of Naval Operations in twenty one and They said that they were
going to hunt out white rage, they were going to read Professor Kenny's book,
and then they bounced out eighty five hundred people who had most of them
had natural immunity, and they said they went vacks. They sent a message
that these people were not wanted or that they wanted to be promoted or retained.
They were going to be DEI standards. And they just said, fine,
I don't want to do it, especially after Afghanistan, that humiliation,
and so now we don't have the people that we send that volunteer to go
to god awful places like Helman Province or Fallujah. The condition of the military,
the morales bad I hear from people is giving me flashbacks. And I'm
not sure whether to invoke the old Santa Ana people who don't remember the pastor
doing to repeat it, or the or Marxist line. The history repeats FIRSTUS
tresiting then as farse. But I'm having flashed the Carter years when you had
a lot of the same thing happening. Very low morale inflation had put some
of these soldiers below the poverty line. Things didn't work Desert one, and
I thought it was not possible to exceed the gullibility and ignorance of the Carter
administration. But right now, I would take ze big new Berzinski and cy
vance back in a heartbeat compared to our current leadership, which seems to me
an order of magnitude worse than the Carter people were. Yes, I'm glad
you brought that up. I've wrote an article, but I didn't realize,
and you're the Reagan historian. I didn't realize when I went back and spent
about four or five days reviewing that campaign how close that race was. Yes,
in June and right about now. I mean, I think the polls
were slanting, but Reagan was either a point back or three points up,
and went back and forth, and he really didn't break that open until wasn't
there a poll Stephen like ten days before by Gallop that had Carter even ahead.
Yes, I think that's right. Yes, And so I think it's
very similar because we hear that Trump is ahead with he's making historic inroads with
youth, with Latinos, Blacks, even Asians are coming back. But when
you look at the national polls, Fox had Biden ahead. So either that
that in road is only in these swing states. And then the California population
of New York makes up for it on the national level or there they're not
accurate. And it reminds me so much of Reagan, and what they said
about Trump and Reagan were eerie. That Reagan had no federal he had never
been, had never been a federally elected official, that he was going to
blow up the world. George W. Bush had called him voodoo economics,
and uh, he was too old, and Carter was going to slice him
up in the debate. It was. It was very reminiscent. So that
gave me a little bit of hope that this election, if they keep doing
what they're doing, and Carter was pandering in the same way. I mean
Biden when he sells out Israel for a few thousand votes in Michigan, or
he drains the strategic petroleum or this latest amnesty or the tariffs are working with
Obador now to send people away from the border, or the student loan forgiveness.
He thinks that he can patch up all of these little slivers of you
know, pandering, and they're going to make a majority. I don't think
it's going to work, and I don't think people like what he's doing.
But so I think it could break. I think it could be broken open.
I think if Trump is careful and gets you know, I don't know,
that's a broken record. But if he doesn't, if he doesn't go
after and call people, you know, right he said about Paul laying the
other I started laughing. He said, get that dog off of the I
mean, if he hadn't said the word dog, it might have been more
effective. But he could blow this thing apart. He really could. It
does feel like a change election, right, It does feel like that's what
I think it change election. I do because there's just so much It just
feels like there's so much powder in the keg here. It's just going to
have to go. I would imagine within two to three weeks, Israel will
feel that it's pretty much decimated Homos, and then when we get into late
July or August, it's going to do something about his blaw and that's going
to be a big, nasty war and that's going to put a lot of
pressure. Part of the subtext of what netnw who's video was about is that
they're not giving them the actual Jaydam adapted all of that stuff that's necessary to
stock up for his belaw, and that's going to be right during the election.
And I think if Biden comes out, I mean, his blow doesn't
get the kind of romance that the Palestinians do. It gets some, Yeah,
but it's very hard for a young, stupid, useful idiot on say
Berkeley campus to start waving HASB law flags. It's easier with Hamas, and
so I think that if he sells Israel down the road and they get into
an existential war with HESBI law and you get major damage to hypha and stuff,
it's going to really hurt him. I think, by the way,
quick prediction Victor, I think that if that comes to pass, and I
think it will, I think the Prohamas pro Palestinian left is going to aim
to shut down as many American campuses as they can, and I think they
will succeed. Yeah, it's hard to know the stand. Did you see
today that the Stanford outgoing president Richard Salier, who might know he was a
classicist and I didn't think he was particularly muscular giving all these second third chances.
But they are going to prosecute the so called journalists that claim that she
was just happened to be there. Right, And so I think they understand
that if they get they all know deep down inside that if any it's sort
of like the French, you know, a whiff of grape shot, or
they they hung Admiral being Voltaire and encouraged the others that type of from Voltaire,
that famous thing about what the British do If they just had one strong,
muscular president that just put these kids in jail for vandalism, burglary,
violence, assault, felony charges, it would all dissipate. Yeah, So
what you're looking for is one act of courage and academic a victor. Yeah,
I saw you're a historian, one Saikawa haunted. Jump up on a
car and can we zoom out for a minute, just talk about big sweeping
things for a second. Margaret Thatcher, the the the serendipity of having Thatcher
in Downing Street and Reagan in the White House. It was a huge unexpected
thing to happen. Really. Yeah, but now it looks like if you
look at the rest of Western Europe right now, there is a in co
it and probably in progress in information, a kind of center right maybe collection
of coalitions that are happening all over the place, in places that you never
expected in France, for instance, or Holland, or in Germany or places
where this feels new, and it's almost like we're America's out of step a
little. It is. I just got back from France. I took one
hundred and sixty people for the eightieth anniversary of D Day and traveled around all
over the country and talked to people. And you know what's funny is that
we all thought that Europeans were crazy, that they were these crazy socialist and
one world government and naive, and they all there was a lot of truth
to that, but compared to what where Biden has taken us, they are
We're way beyond that. They don't There's certain issue is that they you talk
to them, and they don't believe, and they don't allow this sexual transformation
of twelve year olds with dangerous surgeries and hormonal They're beyond that. They don't
believe anymore in open borders. They really don't, especially the Swedes, you
know, and they understand they're pretty or much more open about radical Islam than
we are as too, and that that's new. They're also they're also very
if you went into Versailles at the are you went into Verdun at the Ossi
area, or you went into any of these monuments about d Day that the
French and you went and desecrated them like they did the Lafayette Statue. The
French would go basilistic. I think they would. I think they put you
in jail so that I think we all have to realize that we're in a
jack of This isn't even a democratic party, this is a Jacobin revolutionary party.
And I think their attitude is we're going to run up so much debt
that when you take over, you're going to have to raise taxes and that'll
be our legacy that you had to become more redistributed, redistributedive. We're going
to let in so many people, You're going to have a whole generation to
do on do what we did. We're going to so we define the Middle
East until as Obama did to the Hesba law, Ranamas Lebanon access that you're
going to have big trouble. It's going to be there. I think that
that's what they're after to just cause so much mayhem that it will be lasting
and it will make the Republicans and the Conservatives have to do things they don't
want to do like, they'll have to, I don't know, raise taxes
or cut entitlements or do something. And then the left is going to say,
well, yep, maybe look at that. That's yeah, and that's
good. Maybe you'll have to raise taxes and help the poor. So so
that's what they're doing. There's a lot. I guess what I'm trying to
say is there's a logic to their madness. Mm hmm. Well, it's
always been the issue that economic conservatives have always thought, well, we can't.
We clearly can't run up instead, that's crazy. But economic liberals are
like, no, of course we can. We have we have one hundred
we have access to one hundred percent of the GDP if we want. We
just passed a law and tax it. Modern monetary theory exactly, we could
do whatever we want. And they're kind of right. I mean that that
absolutely is in fact true. I mean, but as margut Thatchers said it,
pretty soon you run out of the people's money. How many of these
you know, how many of these empires that you've studied, the big sweeping
in and out across the land, and certainly even across the Holy Land,
how many of them fell because they just went broke. I think all of
them did, and thee the Byzantines did. The buzant Tings were completely broke.
The Romans were broke, and you know, the first century Juvenile wrote
that famous satire about bread and circuses, and there was a million people at
Rome, and probably half of them didn't have any source of employment, so
you can tell. I mean, they had a word in Athens called redheads,
and that meant that the silver tetra drachma, which was the coin of
the realm and the Athenian Empire, was veneered, so that raised head of
a person's profile. You know, of Athena, for example, the thin
veneer wore off very quickly and then they had red hair because the copper showed.
And Aristophanes has a take on that. But it was there were you
know, if you look at the classical city state, Athens paid people to
go to the theater in the fifth century, and by the fourth century they
were paying people to vote, and they had twenty thousand people working for the
government in various bureaucracies, and they didn't have the money anymore, and they
were and so's never happened here. That's amazing. We're in California, Steven,
No, so well, we had a seventy six We had a ninety
eight billion dollar as you remember, ninety eight billion dollar surplus just eighteen months
ago. Now we then we had seventy seven billion. Now we're down to
forty five billion, we're told. And I don't see any hope at all.
This state, this state is a model of where the United States is
going, and it's completely dysfunctional. I where I live, everything is dysfunctional,
nothing works, and it's very scary. The book is called The End
of Everything, How War is the Sent into Annihilation, but the epilogue is
titled How the Unimaginable Becomes Inevitable. So I'm giving you a chance here,
Victor, to not destroy everybody's weekend. This is your opportunity. It's not
inevitable, right, and we were Americans. No, it's not. It's
not inevitable. We can change it if we, if we, if we
decide to the only thing you know in my whole here is I live in
a town that's ninety five percent Mexican American, and my brothers were married to
Mexican American people, and I can't I'm not exaggerating. I have not met
and Mexican American over forty male who's self employed, and there's a lot of
them who is not voting for Trump. They all are, I know their
kids aren't, and maybe their wives are. But I think you're going I
think you're going to see forty five or fifty percent of the Latino vote in
California get close to Trump. And that's that. Really. If that happens,
then a lot of the bad things that are happening will start to I
mean, the whole tribalism, chauvinism, white this, you know, Marxist
oppressor, oppressor, victim, victimizer. When you start seeing minorities get close
to fifty to fifty, then that all disappears. Then the left, of
course would shut the border in two seconds. But that's my hope. And
economic Trump has been very It's such an irony for someone who was so uncouth
and called a racist and all of these blasphemies, and yet he has appealed
to working class people, including minorities, far more than McCain or Romney or
the I think the two rules of American politics right one is the obverse of
the traditional rule, which is they say, you know, you vote for
the guy you want to have a beer with. And I actually think it's
sort of the obverse or the CONVERSI, which is that you vote for the
guy you think would have a beer with you. Yes. Now I know
Trump doesn't drink beer, but I think most people look at him and think,
I bet you this guy would be fine sitting on my sofa. And
you know, you know, you know in that in two thousand and sixteen,
you know that she did not want to be in your house. And
I think the other one is that, well, the other the other rule
is that you you the winner of the race is the person Is that a
politician or the candidate who could behave like a normal person for ten seconds?
Yes, because it's very hard for people in politics or even on camera to
behave like a normal person for ten seconds. So this guy who I mean,
I full disclosure, I'm not a fan, but I see him broad
and around, this guy who like lives in a tower and has a gold
toilet and is the weirdest person I've ever been, think that he is somehow
more normal than any like I was. It was just, you know,
you're a musing with people. What's going to happen. You know why,
why why wouldn't they just replace Biden? Just replaced Biden. And then the
question is with whom the who? There's nobody normal, There's no there's nobody,
And that is like the essence of the problem. Yeah, it is
Trump has he has a he feels at home with them, with the working
class. He does. So I have a an axiom I teach the students
when I teach the presidency, which is the trick of the presidency and means
the candidates is this, Americans want to look up to our president. We
want to put them on a pedestal, but we want to gaze at them
at eye level. That's our democratic sensibility. That's a paradox. Of course,
the people who can figure that out of the ones who win landslides Franklin
Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, right, George W. Bush to a certain extent.
And the Democrats problem is they keep throwing up these obvious elitists who look
down this like Al Gore and John Kerry and Hillary Obama is a sort of
special case. But and then Biden is just an old hack they settled on
because they were terrified at Bernie Sanders. I think there are some plausible Democrats
out there, but you don't hear much about him, like the governor Shapiro
Pennsylvania actually, and even Jared Poulis of Colorado I think is a creditible guy.
But nobody's talking about them. They're all talking about the identity candidates.
Yeah, and they can't. They have no future because yes, if they
were to be reasonable on the border, or climate change or electric vehicles,
they would they would be Yeah, their base would would canibalize them, right,
and that the party is really a Jacobin party. It's been hijacked.
It's funny, and they always project so that of course they say that the
Republican Party has been mega. But when you I was looking at today at
a whole list of Republican issues, and you look at the MAGA issues except
on tariffs and entitleed, entitlements, maybe budget, there's not that much difference
between a traditional Republican. If Trump gets in there, he will pret he
will get conservative judges. He'll close the border, he will up the defense
budget, he will be reasonable about energy, he will try to be energy
independent. He will try to be no better friend and no worse enemy to
or Allah he won't try to destroy all what they say, it'll be pretty
much. One thing he won't do is have an optional military engagement in the
Middle East on the ground. Yeah, but I suspect that that is in
keeping with a vast majority of Americans. I think that is not ultimately the
most the deepest worry, which I think is probably unfounded. But who knows
is American boots on the ground in Gaza and some kind of peacekeeping force after
it's turned into a pile of rubble or Ukraine or something, And that is
I think in twenty twenty four, is unacceptable to Americans. He's on the
right of almost every issue, maybe the exception abortion, and that's complicated.
Trump is on the side of the American people on the border, on foreign
policy, on deterrence, on the defense budget, on woke, on DEI,
on energy, on inflation, every single one of them. He's on
the right side. And that's very hard for Biden. For all the institutional
support he has, academic, corporation, entertainment, the media, it's still
going to be very hard for people to vote against their perceived interest on these
issues. I know you got to go, and I don't want to keep
it. I just have one more question about this, because what we were
just talking before you join us, and we're talking now, it looks to
me, to me, looks like it doesn't look that complicated for the Democratic
Party to pull this out. Just get rid of his old die and a
numbskull he's got as vice president and find somebody with some gravity. Don't make
this big mistake, like it's such an obvious mistake. I mean, if
you're reading, if this is, if you're were the history of this election,
it's like, why did you guys not see the train coming down the
other other end of the tunnel. I know they've done it before. I
mean Roosevelt understood he was going to probably die, or they told him he
was going to die in forty five. So they got rid of Henry Wallace.
They just and they were unceremoniously about how they got and they just said,
you're done for He was not a bad guy. I mean, he
was a communist, but he turned out he was good. You know,
I had a soft spot because he was a farmer, but he turned out
right wing right before he died. Actually, yeah, But my point is
that they could easily open up the convention, release the delegates, and then
I think either a Josh Shapiro or maybe Gavin Newsom would win, and they'd
say to Kamalo, you know you're welcome to run. We hope you can
win the nomination, but you didn't get enough votes. Open it up.
And I think that's actually why we have this historic I think everybody's pointed that
out as June debate. We've never had it before either one of the candidates
was nominated. It is a stress test for Joe and if he can take
the adderall or whatever he's rumored to take like he did in the State of
the Union or the first day, he may be able to do that.
I think he'll be fine and they'll keep with him. Not fine, but
I mean he'll be fine that night. But if he has declined geometrically not
arithmetically, and I think he has then and he stumbles, I think they
will get him off the ticket. Right after looking at it from history right
now, I might have a controlling theory of our current the past twenty five
years, which is that it's sort of the age of blunder. Very smart
people making very big mistakes in every realm in the public health realm with COVID,
in the financial realm with the financial collapse in the China nation build realm
in Iraq invading Ukraine from a very smart Kenny leader Valderia Putin who didn't realize
just how hollow his armforce. With all these like big mistakes. What what
is the closest moment in your historical sort of sweeping understanding where you're reading the
history and you're shouting at the page, don't do this stupid thing. You
still have a shot at getting at not doing this. I mean, is
it Napoleon going to Moscow? What is the moment where it's sort of like
this, where you're reading it you're thinking, why were these people driven to
suicide? You sound? Ian Kershaw wrote a really good book called Faithful Choices,
and we went through ten things in World War Two that were all preventable
going as you said, going in the Soviet Union. Why didn't the Japanese
just sidestep Singapore Pearl Harbor and take the duchiest Indies and into China They had
all the oil they needed, learned to be no war And a lot of
it is perceptions. I think people they get caught up in the mood of
xhilaration, hysteria, and they don't step back and look at the actual Mussolini.
Why would he invade Greece and go into France right at the end of
the brands, and when you look what he had, he was told,
you have no army, you have no don't do it, you have five
you have ten percent of the GDP of Britain, don't do it. But
they get caught up, and I think that happens. And the other thing
is that I do think there in a lot of these places they're institutional training
of these leaders. It creates a predictable orthodoxy. And they get all of
these titles, or they go to law school, or they get their BA,
or they go to the Ivy League or the surroundment. And these brands
supposedly guarantee competence. But when you look at history, most of the people
who were pretty pretty good were mavericks, or if they did go through those
chain of command or the curses of norm that they didn't like it or they
had trouble. George Patten was a brilliant, I mean he really was a
military genius, and he was dyslexic. They hated his guts, he yelled,
and there's something to trump about that. His first term I thought was
so much more successful if you looked at just what he did than other Republican
presidents, and partly was that he was not part of that consensus. And
I think that's really important. I know that when I look at my field
and I said, who was Schleimann who connected a historical event with the Homeric
poems? Or who was Michael Ventrist who deciphered leniar b Or who was Melman
Perry who proved that the Homeric corpus was composed? Orally they were all either
amateurs. Ventrist was a worked on codes, he was an architect. They
were out outside the world of classics. And when I look at I've been
reading about Fauci the last week. That guy is just typical of just getting
award after award, and he knew nothing of virology, immunology, anything,
and he had fifty billion dollars to disperse to loyal psychophones. And so I
think that's a lot of it. In the modern state, or any state,
you've got to be very careful of bureaucracies, administrative groups, institutions that
tell us that this person is very competent and because he got this this brand
or this degree, or he went to this particular school, and I just
don't think they have a record of I think one good thing about all this
campus disruption is there's a lot of parents that are not sending their kids at
these school I have a lot I get under enrollment here. Yeah. I
get a call every week from some Stanford alumnus and said, Hey, I'm
not sending my two kids a Stanford. I know they're going to bring the
SAT back, and my kids got a great SAT. But I don't want
him anywhere near that campus because I won't he said. And one guy just
called me and said, I won't recognize him at Christmas if he goes there.
Wow, seats right, So I go that will be good. Yeah,
we can do. And if Trump can cut at tax their endowments and
put some strings on federal money maybe and get rid of the student loan program
and let the universities back their own loans, they could have real change.
Anyway. Well, that's well that it does feel like a change, a
cycle of change rendering. I hope since we start to see it in Europe
and maybe it's coming here, So once again, I'm just going to say,
just for people, how many books have you written? A million?
No, my wife says twenty six. Right. You really should know by
the way she says that, because she asked me how long they take,
and I said between two and three thousand hours. And then she's just said,
these are the amount of times that we never see You're you're you're slumped
over some book on the plane. Once you get a life, you're done.
So I think my I got a bad case of COVID right now,
and I'm getting over. I had long COVID for a year and then I
got over and I felt great after beating I said, you can't beat long
COVID. I got over. I took one hundred and sixty people to Normandy.
I had a long flight home and she and I got COVID and I'm
having trouble with that long COVID again. But my point is that she just
told me, why don't you enjoy life? No more? Out of state
speaking, just it's sort of like your decision to go to the seminary.
Yeah, I think my seminary will be Yeah, you're going to try.
I think I'm going to stay out here on the farm. Well, I
speaking as a loyal and incredibly, I don't know what we wrapped reader.
I have to save all your books. I have to. I hope you
continue to not have a life, and you continue to not enjoy your life
so that you can keep writing. The most recent book is The End of
Everything? How wars to send it into annihilation? And I asked you one
last question. Absolutely, there's something wrong with the New York bestseller list.
They don't that's not based on actual because the reason I asked that is I
wrote a book, The Dying Citizen, and it was number one on Amazon
for three weeks. It sold well over two hundred and thirty thousand. It
was only on there for one week. This book, I know, has
not sold as much. It's put on the New York Times for five weeks.
And there's no reason it's Amazon's numbers don't correlate with And what do they
do? What do they use? Is it bookstores? Are a certain bookstore
or bult certain books? Dear Times, there's the Economist magazine recently did a
very deep dive study on this and they published it two three weeks ago,
and what they found was and it is the Economist. They're pretty mainstream,
but they found that the New York Times bestseller list is definitely statistically significantly biased
against conservative titles. Yeah, and are you serious? That's pretty serious.
They've got a whole bitch right. That makes sense. That makes sense because
the Trump Book, the Case for Trump, and the Dying States, and
even the World War two have outsold this book. This book's not political.
But this book has been on there for five weeks, and I because I
was sick with COVID for two and I was gone for two. I haven't
done any publicity until this week, so I don't understand why. And it
hasn't been reviewed. That has got a nice view in the Wall Street Journal
a few others, but I don't understand they're calculus because they're not. That
book has not sold enough books to be the top twenty, you know what
I mean. It doesn't make sense. And I don't know why that is
slipped through the ideological screen. Probably they have an AI that reads your book
and decides whether it or maybe there's some judge who got sick of woke and
said, I'm going to irritate people by putting this book on I don't know
yeah, don't don't put any money on that one. Okay, Well,
I'm thrilled that it's doing so well because it certainly deserves to. Hey,
Victor, thanks for joining us. Good luck for both of you, and
feel better. Yeah I will, yeah, but not too much because we
want another book. Okay. By you know, think about Victor. I
always feel like when he I feel a little bit like I'm asking him questions,
like I don't want to pay him to be in his class, Like
if I have it here, i can I can ask him like, oh,
you know, I was reading this thing the other day, could you
explain that? And I'm just hoping anyone else is interested in it. But
when you have Victory kind of want to ask him questions about the sweep of
human history from two thousand BC to twenty twenty four. Yeah, I mean
you always realize right away that he's got eight or ten levels of depth of
knowledge in these matters. And of course there's a gravitas about him too,
right. I mean you almost feel like you know he'll say as I was
saying to Alcibiades right before the Syracuse I mean, and I mean the point
I don't mean that's a joke entirely is that the point is that he is
one of those rare persons who can actually bring to life in a vivid and
direct way and relevant way, something that you thought is just a remote interest
in, you know, pain loving antiquarianism. It's not that at all.
There's not a hint of pain loving antiquarianism about him. No, and he's
somehow he's like managed to be it's kind of cheerful, even though what he's
saying, well, what did you just say, We're all doomed? Like,
oh, probably. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I
always love having having Victor around, and I'm a sort of now thrilled that
James and Peter weren't here because they tend to aug the chit chat and we
had a nice chit chat with him. If you are listening to this and
you remember Ricochet, we thank you, and if you were not, we
would like you to join. Go to ricochet dot com if you'd like to
meet your fellow Ricochet members. There are meetups scheduled throughout the summer and in
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discover us, and that's how we keep the show going. Steve, any
big summer plans, No, I mean, you know, classes are over,
so I'm going to try and rest and relax and catch up on some
leisure reading. Oh that's yeah, all right, Well I'm just gonna I'm
gonna hang out and drink beer and smoke a sgar. That's my my July
plan. Well, thanks for joining me, and thank you of course again
to Victor, and we'll see you next week. Ricochet, join the conversation.