OK Boomers: Victor Davis Hanson, Pagers, Zelenskyy, and the Fellows “Talkin’ ‘Bout Their Generation”

>> George Carlin: A lot of these cultural crimes I've been complaining about can be blamed on the baby boomers. These people were given everything. Everything was handed to them, and they took it all, took it all, sex, drugs and rock and roll, and they stayed loaded for 20 years and had a free ride.

But now they're staring down the barrel of middle-age burnout and they don't like it. They don't like it, so they've turned self-righteous and they wanna make things hard on younger people. They tell them abstain from sex, say no to drugs, as for the rock and roll, they sold that for television commercials a long time ago.

>> Bill Whalen: It's Tuesday, September 24, 2024. And welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns. I'm Bill Whalen, I'm a Hoover distinguished policy fellow, and I'll be your moderator today, joined by two of our regular Goodfellows, that would be the economist John Cochrane and the geostrategist, lieutenant general H.R. McMaster.

We're gonna have to do without Niall Ferguson today, but that's Neil's loss because we have a very special guest today joining us, a Goodfellows fan favorite, the one and only Victor Davis Hanson. In case you don't know who Victor Davis Hanson is, let me briefly explain. Victor is the Martin Ely Anderson senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution, a frequent guest on TV, prolific columnist, and he is also now a podcaster in his own right, the Victor Davis Hanson show.

If that's not enough, he also has a website, victorhanson.com. it's VDH, his blade of Perseus. Victor, I'm very curious if you're Perseus, what Medusa you're trying to slay, but maybe you get in the show. But thanks for coming back on Goodfellows, Victor, it's great to see you.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for having me, everyone, appreciate it.

>> Bill Whalen: So we're gonna do two segments today. Segment B, the B block is going to be devoted to baby boomers, the premise being that 2024 might be the last presidential election in which a boomer is a nominee of a major presidential party. So we're gonna kick around what the boomers have rot.

All four of us on the show are baby boomers, I believe, so let's talk about our generation, or my generation, the who famously saying. But the A block, let's get into overseas affairs, let's talk about the Middle East, and let's talk about Ukraine. Victor, I turn to you.

A debate going on in this country simply put, is it kosher for the Jewish nation to set off pagers, to set off walkie-talkies, to blow up its opponents? One school of thought being, Victor, this is what a small democracy surrounded on all sides and vastly outnumbered, does for survival.

There was school of thought that maybe this is not how wars and international warfare is conducted. What say you, Victor?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, given that Hezbollah has sent 8,000 rockets into Israel and displaced 60 to 70,000 civilians and no one has really said anything. And given the pressure on Israel to avoid collateral damage, I think you could argue that there are very few, if any, people who are walking around Lebanon with an archaic walkie-talkie or pager.

I mean, most of them have cell phones and who would have a pager? And that Hezbollah ordered on spec from a shell company unless they were a Hezbollah terrorist. So it was a very effective way of minimizing collateral damage, taking out Hezbollah activist or terrorist, exposing them to family and friends or people in their apartments who they really were.

How large that group was, taking along with them the architect of the 243 people who were killed in Lebanon in 1983, of which we had a $7 million bounty on. So I think it was a win-win situation and it's a preliminary, just to finish with Israel is telling the world that they've had enough with Hezbollah's rocketing.

And if they don't stop it, they feel they have the wherewithal to do damage that would make something like the 2006 Shia destruction of the neighborhoods in Beirut looked minor in comparison. So I think they're just saying we've had enough and we're gonna deal with these terrorists in the way that we see best.

And we'll try to do it humanely, but we don't really care what the UN says anymore, the EU, or even for that matter, what people in the US Congress, like the squad, say.

>> Bill Whalen: H.R., is this something that is unique to Israel in terms of hot wiring pagers and walkie-talkies, or do other governments do this?

And you have top secret classification, maybe things you cannot tell us. But I'm just kinda curious, as if this is what the face of modern warfare looks like now.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, I can't comment on it.

>> H.R. McMaster: But I can use a historical example, I mean, of course, most people are aware now of Stuxnet, a lot of that has been in public reporting, I can't confirm or deny it.

But in the public reporting about Stuxnet, which was the spinning out of control of centrifuges that created the destruction of a portion of Iran's nuclear program, that was an intervention into a hardware supply chain as well. We also know that there have been cases where surveillance capabilities have been placed into hardware, for example, remember the super micro incident from years ago?

This is not unprecedented, but the scale of it is kind of unprecedented. And as Victor said, I think it's completely appropriate to go and consistent with what St Thomas Aquinas tells us about juice and bellow, and is consistent with the guidelines associated with discrimination and proportionality. I mean, these are people who for four-plus decades, have waged a war against Israel and against the United States, as Victor said, have a lot of American blood on their hands.

And so I think that this attack, this three really, it's a three-phase attack, is what we're talking about, which was the explosion of the pagers. Then they go to the walkie-talkies, then they hit them with the walkie-talkies, and then they can't talk to each other, says, we need an emergency meeting.

They're probably just tryna figure out who's still alive and who's dead and who's wounded, not wounded. And then Israel determines where they're meeting and then strikes that building. So I think completely appropriate, extremely effective at really decapitating Hezbollah leadership. And you'll hear a lot of people say, it really doesn't matter, going after leaders, that's nonsense.

All of these people have been active in that organization for decades, they have important relationships not only throughout the organization of Hezbollah but with their Iranian masters. So it was extremely effective series of attacks against Hezbollah leadership. And I think it's likely it's a precursor to an invasion of southern Lebanon by the Israeli defense forces to create a buffer zone up to the Litany River, about 40, 30 kilometers into Lebanon.

So that, as Victor mentioned, the 60 to 80,000 Israelis who had to evacuate a territory, 10% of Israel can go back to their homes.

>> John Cochrane: Lemme add, this is half statement half question, so I invite my better-educated Goodfellas to say, no, John, you're wrong. This was beautifully targeted in the sense of maximal damage to known terrorists and minimal to civilians around them.

The only response one could have is Israel should just give up and go home, well, go home, give up and commit suicide rather than fight back. You knew, it was funny when I was listening to NPR and they had some expert on the terrible mental health crisis this is causing among people associated with Hezbollah cuz they don't know what's gonna blow up next.

And the memes on the Internet about what's gonna blow up next are very worth it if you get anything like my Twitter stream. The rest of Lebanon is not Completely unhappy about this. They are not happy to have a gangster state running things in the bottom and inviting Israeli attacks all the time.

So a lot of stuff I've seen on Twitter is Druze and Christians and lots of other people in Lebanon saying, yeah, great, get rid of these gangsters who are ruining our country. The next two issues are the rockets. And Israel is surrounded by something like 100,000 rockets, stuff I've seen beautiful pictures of just what it is.

Hezbollah has built houses around rocket launchers throughout southern Lebanon. And here I think it is a dramatic loss for Hezbollah. I mean, so what Israel is able to do is blow up pagers and now they know where all those rockets are because what Hezbollah didn't count on was that lidar existed.

And so Israel knows pretty much where every rocket is in a way that Israel was not able to counter the tunnels in Gaza. So houses with rockets in them Israel knows where they all are and they're all going to get blown up. The tunnels in Gaza less so.

And that's an important lesson going forward. And Israel was able to blow up pagers but is not able to blow up the rockets. Too bad it wasn't able to get into that supply chain. But the one view that I heard here is why are we fighting so much about southern Lebanon?

Well, if Hezbollah has to pull back, this isn't an orderly retreat of an army with all its stuff intact. It gives up all of those rockets and all of those houses holding the rockets. You can tell now why the moving back from southern Lebanon is so important to Israel and so damaging to Hezbollah.

Opinions Guys, did I get any of this right?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, absolutely, I would just add that these series of actions fit into a broader context.

>> Bill Whalen: And Viktor, I think that what we're seeing is the activation of the ring of fire around Israel and a situation in which Israel is on a greater threat than it's been maybe since 1948.

And so you have the attacks against the leadership, but also what Israel has been doing is striking against the supply chain for the rockets. Many of the targets that they've struck in Syria, for example, have been associated with retrofitting some of these rockets with precision guidance capabilities. And also the raids that you've seen in the West Bank where Iran has really accelerated the delivery and increased by orders of magnitude the delivery of weapons into the West Bank as well.

So you can see really this is a multi front war. You had the Houthis who've been firing at Israel. And of course, think back to April with the hundreds of projectiles fired at Israel from Iranian soil. So it is kind of like a seven front war for Israel.

And this is why I think it's important to place these strikes in broader context of Iran's proxy war to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews. That's really what they want to do. That's what they tell us they want to do. And every conversation should begin with that, I mean.

>> John Cochrane: The status quo, if you guys should send up a couple, you know, dozen rockets a day and we shoot them down with very expensive Iron dome missiles, that status quo is over. And I don't think asking Israel to go back to that, well, that's simply not tenable.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I would just comment that I agree with both of you that their strategy of serially sending off ten or 15 rockets a day, displacing the population, destroying the economy, stopping international flights to Israel in a war of attrition, Israel has decided it's not gonna sustain that anymore.

And there's no, there's no restrictions on it now. And there's a couple of things that I would just point out. I think John was right about the pagers. I talked to an Israeli not too long ago, about two days ago, and he pointed out that a lot of the pagers that blew up were Hezbollah people that were monitoring rockets in individual houses that they didn't know about.

So they actually got intelligence when they saw these explosions go off or they heard the families go to the funeral of a particular house, there was a likelihood that the Hezbollah people were actually neighborhood watchers that were posted where the rockets were to make sure that nobody tampered with them.

So it was even a better bonanza because it actually did show where the rockets were in some cases. And then you get back to the other point that you both made. Ultimately, it's all about Iran. If Iran just had a government like the authoritarian Shah, which is not a great government, but if it just had something marginally better, you wouldn't have this turmoil.

And ultimately, everybody in the west has a rendezvous with this government. They can say what they want, but under your administration, HR, when you guys declared the Houthis a terrorist organization, you cut off money that was funneled to Hamas, you embargoed Iran, you got out of the Iran deal, you hemorrhaged it, $100 billion in oil revenue.

It was far less capable of doing what it's doing now. And that offers a blueprint to go back to. So I think that's helpful as well. But the weirdest thing is we're having the Iranian president, I think he's in the United, he's coming to the United States and he's getting Secret Service protection that might be superior to what we gave Donald Trump, which is so bizarre that you can't even imagine it.

Then when you put Robert Malley in I know you put Robert Malley in the equation. We don't even know what's happened to him. He still hasn't faced consequences. He was a prep school roommate of Anthony Blinken, who, I don't know what his stance has been, but it hasn't been very forceful.

Then we had Kamala Harris to Opa bragging that she's put this embargo on 2,000 pound bombs to Israel. I'm not sure I see the difference between what she just said, given the Biden fixation on 250,000 Muslim voters in Michigan. Seems to me very analogous to what the first impeachment of Donald Trump was when he allegedly, for political reasons, fixated on the Biden corruption and did not cancel, but suspended military and congressionally approved aid to Ukraine.

It seems to me that the Biden administration has suspended congressionally approved munitions to Israel. The only difference is that Israel is in a hot war right now, when at that time, Ukraine was in a cold war, suspension of actual firing. But nobody's going to impeach Joe Biden for looking at political benefits by suspension in an election year of suspension of aid.

>> John Cochrane: We'll see if no one's going to look at that. Trump might win the election and he might want to look at a lot of things, and that's a separate issue. But I want to ask you guys the long run here, because you're talking about Iran. There's two long runs.

One is the long run of what goes on with the land, but the other long run for both Israel and for us West Israel supporters, do we allow, do we continue with terrorist groups in charge of territory in southern Lebanon, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in Yemen?

This is something that we decided we didn't like in Afghanistan in 2001. The current ceasefire negotiate, blah, blah, envisions that these groups continue as effectively sovereign states. They are running territory and sitting there and it's mow the grass is supposed to be the status quo. I think Israel has moved on.

It doesn't tell us what the long run strategic desires, but it has to be that this doesn't go on, that Gaza is not run by Hamas. Hezbollah does not run southern Lebanon. An aircraft carrier shooting missiles at Israel. Victory over these groups and sending them out of governing territory is an intermediate thing.

Iran supports them, Iran does not wanna have a war with Iran, Iran wants to fight to the last Arab, as the saying goes. But not having these groups still in charge and in the West, what are we doing? What is the UN doing? What is Europe doing? Saying, you have to negotiate with these groups, leaving those groups in power as the intermediate.

I think Israel has decided those groups don't stay in power, we're gonna wipe them out. The only question is, do we still believe in victory?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, I would just add that, I think there's also a lot of electoral calculations in the Middle East. I think a lot of people feel that if they were gonna have a hot war, Hezbollah would respond, and they would go into war like Iran.

It would reflect badly on the Harris candidacy or the Biden that would look like they were. So I think that at least until the election, it's in the interest of Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas not to blow up the Middle East. Because they feel that if they get crazy Trump in there, they don't know what they're gonna deal with.

And that would reflect badly on Harris's chances if what Jake Sullivan called his quietest portfolio turns out to be a full-scale war, right before the election. After the election, depending on who's elected, I think that it's more likely to be heating up, because if Trump is elected, they feel they better go ahead and do something wild until he's president.

And if Harris is elected, it doesn't matter anymore because she's probably considered sympathetic to them and she's not up for election, they won't embarrass her. So I think after the election, it's gonna really heat up.

>> Bill Whalen: I wanna talk about that further with regard to Ukraine and Zelenskyy's visit to Pennsylvania.

But first, an exit question on the Middle East. Gentlemen, we're not recording another Goodfellows until the second half of October, which means the October 7th anniversary of the Hamas attack would have come and gone. Let's quickly go around the table here. What is October 7th gonna look like in major cities and college campuses, Victor?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: They've been kinda quiet. And we're speaking on the Stanford campus and the new Stanford president from what we understand is not going to be as tolerant or sympathetic to people who trash the president's office. Or defile iconic sandstone colonnades that have to be this obscene, antisemitic graffiti has to be removed by tweezers, it's so delicate.

So I think that people across the country feel that they don't like the idea of guest in our country. And many of these protesters are on student visas insulting the halls, breaking American laws, so there's no public support. And I think given the firing of these presidents, a lot of the current presidents feel that it's now not just insurance of not being fired by appeasing these people, but rather the opposite.

If you do appease them, you're gonna incur some consequences. I think that's a positive development. So I just don't think we're gonna get the level of violence that we had. And then there's the final thing that, of course, if you read Molly Ball's 2021-Time essay which she called a cabal and a conspiracy.

She said one of the reasons that Biden and Harris won were they were able to modulate the tempo of demonstrations. She said that. And so I think that a lot of people on the left feel that the last thing that Harris needs just one month before the election, our campus is blowing up and monuments to face, bridges occupied, etc.

>> Bill Whalen: H.R.

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, to say, first of all, overseas there was an effort on the part of Hezbollah to prepare for a massive attack against Israel on October 7th. I believe that the timing of this triple attack with the pagers, the walkie-talkies and then the strikes, plural in Beirut were designed to foil that plan in the United States.

And on October 7th, I think it's just an extraordinary display of ignorance when you see young people on these college campuses protesting really in effect for Hamas. And I think what we should do is counter that with education and facts. For those who are still open-minded enough to consider the facts that the greatest victims of Hamas have been the Palestinian people in Gaza.

The greatest victims of jihadist terrorists across the region, many of which groups and militias are supported by the Iranians are the people of Yemen. The people of Syria, Iraq, and of course, of Lebanon. Think back to the Cedar Revolution in 2005 when the Lebanese people said enough of this and rose up against it.

Now, of course, the Lebanese people have been through multiple traumas since then, but I think there has to be a recognition of what John said up front. John, your point about, hey, there are people in Lebanon who are sick of Hezbollah. And I think what we have to recognize is the greatest victims of jihadist terrorist organizations are Muslims and Muslim-Americans.

And I think is also extraordinarily ignorant by US politicians and maybe even bigoted to assume that the Arab American population in Michigan is somehow going to be sympathetic to any of these groups. Of course, one of the reasons that they're here in the United States is they had to flee violence associated with jihadist terrorist organizations.

So I think that it's time for education, maybe as we approach the anniversary of October 7th.

>> John Cochrane: I would add Iran, too. One of the favorite things I've seen on Twitter lately is this new sport in Iran is to run up behind a cleric, topple off his turban and run away.

That everybody's happy with that. This has been a clarifying moment in the US. The pro-Hamas extreme left in the US is revealed, and it's very small. Yeah, there's some nuts on college campuses, but the dominant part of the US stands behind Israel and understand terrorism what it is.

And the cognitive dissonance it takes to be Greta Thunberg and the unicause and think that Hamas is for climate justice and so forth, really makes it small. So in the US it's small and they may make some noise, but it is nothing that we'll look forward to that much.

Europe is a different question. So Europe has very large, unassimilated Muslim minorities who are very, quite loudly pro-Hamas in all of its celebrating terrorism. Wanting the destruction of Israel, wanting the destruction of Jews and so forth. So at least on the very biased sample of my Twitter stream, I would forecast a lot more outburst in Europe of the pro-Hamas sentiment and a lot.

And even less ability, unwillingness of the authorities to stand up for it cuz they still seem to wanna protect this sort of thing.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, let's shift to Ukraine. Victor, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was in of all places, Scranton, Pennsylvania yesterday touring a munitions plant with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

I want your thoughts on this because on the one hand, the man wants weapons, he's trying to make a point. On the other hand, we are days away from a national election and a foreign leader coming around and hanging out with one party. It looks kind of political, what say you?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I think it does I think it's a lot worse than that for a variety of reasons. Look, we're 43, we used to have October surprises. Remember George Bush's drunk driving seven days before the 2000 election? And things like that, Russian disinformation, laptop disinformation, all of that in 2016.

But now with early voting and mail in balloting, we have September surprises because there's a couple of things that were disturbing the early voting or mail in balloting, although had been delayed his visit. And by the way, he was flown on a US taxpayer supported military C17 into the United States.

And he was flown in by the Biden Harris administration, of which Harris is an incumbent running for president. And where does he go in this first stop? He goes to the one state that's gonna likely decide the election, and more importantly, they've timed it, so he goes in during early and mail and balloting that's beginning.

And where does he go? He goes to a state where jobs have been jobs, jobs, jobs, unemployment, static economy, goes to a munition plant, which is advertised as an export to Ukrainian for artillery shells. And it keeps people working. And then it gets even worse because what does he do then?

Does he keep out of politics? No, he gives an interview to the hard left pro Harris New Yorker magazine, and he says that Donald Trump doesn't know what he's talking about. Maybe that's true, but it's not his business as a guest on taxpayer dime to go into a swing state 43 days before an election as people start voting and trash the main rival to the person who basically flew him in.

And then he compounds that, he calls JD Vance dangerous, and he says he's too radical. So he weighs in to try to tilt the scale, and then there's a final fill up to the whole thing. So somebody tried to kill Donald Trump just a little bit more than a week ago.

And the person, if you read his crazy manifestos, one of the prime reasons he tried to kill him was he felt that Donald Trump was too soft on Ukraine. And this guy had gone to Ukraine. He's a nut. I don't think he was very effective. So you have a person who is trying to kill the president because of his stance on Ukraine, and then you have the Ukrainian president come over the United States and trash Donald Trump.

So all of the optics are bad. And the only thing that I think they don't realize is that public opinion is split on Ukraine, and this was so obvious that it might look crude rather than just sneaky.

>> Bill Whalen: H.R., I don't think Churchill came to America in 1940.

I'm not sure Roosevelt would have wanted him in America in 1940 as he was running on keeping us out of wars. But are there any kind of rules to how these are played in terms of foreign leaders coming in the middle of election? Because this country has played in the middle of Israeli elections.

We have had political consultants go over there and run opposition campaigns. But is there any protocol here in terms of a foreign leader coming in this close to an election, as Victor suggests, putting his thumb on the scale?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, it is associated with the UN General assembly.

That's when you have a lot of leaders coming to the United States. I do agree with Victor, though. It was an error for him, I think, to go to Pennsylvania to go to a munitions factory. I think what you want is you want performative effects, I mean you want formative effects, not performative effects here.

And I think that what would have been smart is, if you're going to UNGA, stopped by Bedminster as well as Washington, talk to both candidates, talk to Vice President Harris and President Trump. And I think that would have been a lot more effective from Zelenskyy's perspective. When Benjamin Franklin went to France from 1776 to 1778, he canvassed the entire political landscape associated with the monarchy and the court and was quite effective at doing so.

So I think it's a missed opportunity for Zelensky. I think you're gonna see, you see more and more of this these days, which are visits and phone calls during elections. There's been a lot of outreach to President Trump during the run up to the election. But again, I agree with Victor, it was a tactical error on Zelenskyy's part.

Zelenskyy, he's in a tough spot right now, though, in terms of the war and the cacophony of voices that are raising doubts about sustained support for Ukraine. And this, of course, has a magnified psychological effect in Ukraine. We pay attention to it, like, in the context of the election.

Ukrainians read and parse every single word that candidate Vance or President Trump says. And there's also a movement on the right in Germany as well, that is against sustaining support for Ukraine. So I think he comes at a time of significant concern for him, but I think he blew it in terms of the visit to Pennsylvania.

>> John Cochrane: I also want to cut Zelensky a little bit of slack. The guy is in a hard position. Russians are advancing on his eastern front. He needs to keep his country together, win a war. If he got a little bit wrong on the nuances of US politics, I'm not sure any of us could go to Ukraine, get the nuances of Ukrainian politics right.

And I think a lot of his intention could be and should be to try to persuade a Trump administration and the many cacophonous voices in the republican party that support for Ukraine is very much in our interest and the West's interest. If he didn't handle it right, I'll grant you that, but I think that is really, I think is important.

Why does he go to a munitions plant? Because he knows that Trump and JD Vance want American manufacturing, and he wants some American manufacturing, too. You just like to be allowed to buy what we have to export.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, but he didn't go to one. And there's other munitions plants.

He chose Pennsylvania, and he chose it right when early voting. And it was part of a plan. Gotta remember during the midterm elections, this is what Biden and Harris did. They had their activists leak the Dobbs, the repeal of Roe versus Wade. They started draining the petroleum reserve, they started canceling student debt, and the supposed red wave turned into a little ripple.

And right now, we've already seen he's draining the reserve again. And all of a sudden, on the 50th day, and I'm not an economist, John, so correct me, all of a sudden, the Fed decides they just have to cut interest rates 50 days before the election. And then we bring in Zelensky.

And it's part of this desperation of these October-

>> John Cochrane: Separate issue, which is the skullduggery going on at the election. The intelligence agencies are already at it again. They're crying wolf for the third time, Russia, Trump, blah, blah. You know, guys, we've heard this.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, I know.

I really resent it.

>> John Cochrane: Gets Zelensky a little bit of slack and that he, why does he wanna go here? He wants to point out to Trump, he needs.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I just think it was bad optics. When you, you get a pro Ukrainian zealot tries to shoot a president, and then you get the Ukrainian president coming over to a swing state right before an election, when early voting starts.

Then he gives an interview to the New Yorker, and he calls one of the candidates dangerous and a radical, and he calls the other one, he doesn't know what he's talking about. And then you think, well, wait a minute, there is no elections in your country. You have suspended habeas corpus, you have suspended elections, you've suspended opposition parties And then you come over here and weigh in on a democratic process in our country.

So I'm not, I understand what you're saying, but I think it was self destructive. And it really reminds me of what we do. We have no business. And Bill Clinton started it when he sent campaign teams, as I think Bill was alluding to, into Israel and right now.

>> H.R. McMaster: Obama is there.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, Obama too. And I think right now we're trying to-

>> John Cochrane: Netanyahu needs to go, what the heck?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: We're trying to overthrow the government of Israel, we really are. And I think that's horrible. To interfere in the internal relations of Israel and to predicate maybe congressionally approved aid as kind of the incentive.

So I don't like it when we do it, and I think he shouldn't do it. And that's not to say that I don't understand that he's in an existential fight, but everything about it is gonna hurt him.

>> John Cochrane: He's in an existential fight. And all of the, we've been talking about this now for a couple of years.

All of the reasons that we need to hold back and not escalate and so forth have been proved false. On the first day we were discussing, why doesn't the US send them F-16, well, Russia will. Well, finally they get F-16s. Are we gonna let them bomb the Russian bases from which glide bombs are going, that would be terrible.

The escalatory, they've even now invaded Russia. And we've been talking about the nuclear threat. Ukraine's invaded Russia. No one's talking about nuclear. Letting Ukraine win remains the important thing that we could do in our sleep if we wanted to. And persuading the US that this is important for the US and the west remains not only important for Ukraine, but for everybody else.

>> H.R. McMaster: Just quickly, a missed opportunity for Zelensky is he should have thanked President Trump for being the first, for the first time allowing the sale and provision of defensive capabilities to Ukraine. The decision that President Trump made in December of 2017 to provide javelin missiles, as well as the other support that we've given Ukraine during the Trump administration.

And then also the fact that during the Trump administration's first year, he placed more sanctions on Russian entities and individuals than the previous eight years of the Obama administration. He closed to Russian consulates, expelled scores of Russian undeclared agents. So I'm not saying that President Trump still doesn't hold this kinda soft spot for Putin and believes that maybe he can get a big deal with Putin.

But I think Zelenskyy missed an opportunity to make some of those points.

>> John Cochrane: You don't go to a foreign country and insult any politicians and we shouldn't totally agree. I just wanted to cut him just a little bit of slack because.

>> H.R. McMaster: It's a desperate situation. But it's a very serious situation now, John.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: How hard was it, John, for him to have come over on his own expense? Go to the White House, talk to Harris, then have a photo op with Vance and say that I respect their hesitation or reservation. And my job here is to present the Ukrainian people's argument to both sides and go to maybe Texas or California and not Pennsylvania and not during the early and avoid all of that.

>> John Cochrane: Absolutely.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: It would have been very effective had he done that.

>> John Cochrane: It was a mistake.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: And he didn't do it, I agree. And not give an interview to the New Yorker magazine.

>> John Cochrane: No, if he understood us politics and culture better, he probably would have done that.

It was a misstep. Absolutely granted.

>> Bill Whalen: All right, gentlemen, time is up for the segment. Let's move on to the B block.

>> Bill Whalen: In the B block we're gonna talk about baby boomers. And all four of us belong to the baby boomer generation. Born between 1946 and 1964, boomers make up about 20% of the American population.

If you've had a boomers, Gen Xers, millennials, and Gen C, that's about five out of six Americans. It's by the way, I'm giving a talk on this later today. That's why I selfishly inserted this into the show. It's why HR and I are wearing suits, by the way.

It's a, this is an odd configuration. HR is literally in the room next to me right now. So when he talks, I can hear him coming in two different directions. But I'm going to talk about the boomers, and I want to get your guys thoughts on boomers as well.

Victor, it's an easy generation to mock. I'm sure you've seen the insurance commercials where they show the boomers coming up to the airport gate and they asked what time does group five board? And they say 3 hours. So we can have all kinds of fun picking the peccadillos.

But when people ask you about the boomers, what are your thoughts on boomers?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it's a mixed bag. Our generation, I was, I entered college in 1971 and the newly opened UC Santa Cruz. And there were some good things that happened with the emancipation of women and civil rights advancement.

And more interest that that generation brought to the environment and all of that. But on the whole, it was a destructive generation. The drug use, the promiscuity, the narcissism and the polarization. Cultural revolution of the sixties really started the idea that if you had a political difference with someone.

Then that political difference was going to be a totalitarian difference in the sense that it was going to involve a social, cultural, economic, political front. And everything about you was going to be in opposition to this country. And I have to be very careful, because you got to remember that the baby boomer generation voted overwhelmingly for Richard Nixon in 1968.

They really did when they got the 18 year old boat in 72. And it was just not even close with McGovern. So they were caricatured. There were a lot more silent majority boomers than the loud ones that got the attention. But for the loud ones that got the attention and have now moved in, as Roger Kimball said years ago, just tenured radicals and are retiring.

But had positions of enormous influence in government, the bureaucracy, the media, corporations. A lot of the changes that some of us on the conservative side saw were not so good, came from the ideology of that generation, and they're not done yet. And they finally, I don't think they had a very.

They didn't have a realistic or empathetic view of their parents. And I'm speaking from people in my own family. But that generation who went through the Great Depression, the so-called greatest generation. And then the 12.2 million who went to World War II in various capacities and helped defeat fascism and Nazism.

And then went back and won the Cold. They were, for all their mistakes in Vietnam, they were a great generation. And they, I think, decided that they were not gonna have their children suffer as they did. And they tended to indulge us more than otherwise, would have been true had they been, had been, had they not had to go through all of that.

But our generation, I don't think, showed them the deference that they deserved at least this element of our generation. Again, I wanna reiterate. I'm not talking about everybody in the baby boomer.

>> Bill Whalen: HR we're looking at a boomer president for at least the next four years. If Trump wins, maybe the next eight years of Kamala Harris wins, which means they will have had an unprecedented almost 40 year run on the American presidency.

What is the boomer legacy when it comes to foreign policy?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, you know, it's a complicated one and, you know, I'm about to go back for my 40th reunion for my graduation from West Point. And the term that we use is the long gray line. And when you think, when I thought back about who was the class that was coming back when I was a first-year senior at West Point, it was a class of 44.

So you get a sense of this long gray line, which is the title of a great book by Rick Atkinson about the West Point class in 1966. But you get a sense of continuity across generations, of course, there are changes, but certainly in the military profession, I've seen a lot of continuity.

I came into the army, really under the leadership of officers who had seen the army prior to Vietnam. And then, during the trauma of Vietnam and personnel policies that were destructive to the army and then organized a renaissance in the army in the 1980s, I was a beneficiary of that.

But in terms of your question, Bill, foreign policy wise, I think after the victory in the Cold War, that we entered into a period of overoptimism and complacency based on some unrealistic and flawed assumptions about the nature of the post-Cold War world, right. That the arc of history had guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies over closed authoritarian systems, that great power rivalry was a relic of the past.

And that our technological prowess, technological military prowess, would guarantee our primacy and security for the foreseeable future. And then what we've seen, I think, since the 2000 were a series of strategic shocks, disappointments, and that over-optimism, I think, shifted in the Obama years toward pessimism and even resignation.

And so what I endeavored to do to help disrupt President Trump is to help him disrupt what needed to be disrupted and chart a course in between that, in between the overoptimism and complacency and the pessimism and resignation. And I think that's what we need now, is a rational, clear-headed view of the world in which we prioritize our interests and we recognize the limitations of our power and our resources.

We're not gonna conciliate the furies in the Middle East but also recognize that if we disengage from these complex problems abroad, they can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores. So I think what we've seen maybe as the legacy we're coping with is this swing, from maybe undervaluing the cost and risk of engagement and then undervaluing the risk and cost of disengagement.

And I think that's what you've seen in the Middle East under the Obama administration is the cost and risk of disengagement, de-escalation, and trying to manage conflicts instead of advance our interests.

>> Bill Whalen: John, you and I could do an entire good fellows on fiscal responsibility and the boomers, or lack thereof, and I wanna depress the good people watching and listening to the show with the statistic.

But simple question, John, is our generation too comfortable when it comes to debt? And do we lack a confrontational gene when it comes to things like entitlement reform?

>> John Cochrane: I don't think that's necessarily a generational thing, I'll instead riff on what my colleagues have said here, I mean, 1968 was a really dividing year in America, and that's when our cultures are ripped apart, as I think Victor pointed out.

Well, it's not everybody turned left in, but the current right and left defined themselves in 1968 in the Vietnam War, in McCarthy versus Nixon, and have been at it ever since. That cultural shift is really amazing, I mean, I was young in the late 1960s, early 1970s. We didn't listen to music from the 1920s, but the music that, the way we dress, that culture, certainly of the left, highly educated part of it, America has been pretty much added ever since.

I mean, they've changed their passions, first it was anti-nuclear, and now it's anti-climate, but they've been, first it was given to the Russians, and then given to the Iranian terrorists. But whatever, it's been remarkably constant ever since, and on that left, it's really conservative means something, conservative means that you value the constitution, the traditions, the norms that your society brings to you.

And you understand there's a certain wisdom in following those norms. And the boomers decided, no, we get to make it up on our own, to the point where today, pretty much explicitly, most of the democratic party wants to throw out half the constitution because it gets in their way.

So that individualism, that your country, your religion, your traditions, your culture is meaningless, make it up as you go along is, I think, a part of that half of America that is the elite left. Another big difference of the boomers is the boomers were defined as a baby boom, our parents had a lot of kids, the boomer generation had a lot less kids, and the boomers kids generation is basically reproducing.

So when you think of baby boom, it naturally brings up the huge question underlying of the collapse in birth rates in America, especially among the highly educated left were very different as parents. And it's kinda funny that the boomers didn't have kids, poured enormous effort into those kids compared to the greatest generation, just kind of, I was let out alone to play and look at the attention that goes.

And producing what, producing kids who are just skyrocketing amounts of anxiety and spend all day on Twitter. So we've been, as a generation, not very good as parents, and certainly inculcating the tradition that you go on to be parents yourself among our children, the next generation is simply not reproducing.

And you could put it, the greatest generation, what do they do? The men drove a tank across Germany at 19, came home, married their high school sweetheart at 21, got a job, and produced four kids. The boomer generation went to college, had a draft affirmative, hung out on the ashram for a while, eventually went to Wall Street, made some money, and finally had some kids.

The kids generation is ten, 15 years of self-discovery, and around age 35, one in four of them will get around to maybe thinking about marrying and having kids. It's a very big difference in the basics of life, so that's for reflections on boomers.

>> H.R. McMaster: John, just a quick recommendation, you mentioned 1968, maybe Victor can comment on this.

There's a great book by Luke Nichter called The Year That Broke Politics about 1968, he's a great historian, by the way, too.

>> John Cochrane: Yeah.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yes. Is really given so many of us historians access to the White House tapes and the Nixon tapes in particular, but, Victor, any comments on that John's observation?

>> John Cochrane: No, I wanted to just emphasize what you said, the norms before 68 kinda hated each other, but the norms were in it together, you respect each other. And the demonization of the other side, which certainly you saw in 68, starting with Nixon, and with their own, they ate their own, demonizing Johnson.

And then demonizing Nixon, that was a big change in the norms of American politics, and it's not Trump that started in 68 sorry Victor, please.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I would just add that subsequent to the baby generations, the problem, I think a lot of it, is that there's been a greater and greater distance from the so-called greater generation that John mentioned, got married, they fought a war.

And I'm teaching a class on World War II at Zoom to Pepperdine graduate students this semester, and it's just, they're very smart kids, but they are so distant. Each generation we get, they have no personal knowledge of anybody who fought in that generation, that's their great-grandfathers or their dads, and so the.

The further you get away and each generation. I mean, Horace the poet and his ode said, we, a bad generation, are about to produce a generation worse than ours, that's going to produce one worst of all. There's a term in Latin for laudator temporis acti, you're just as praiser of the past age all the time, and so you have to be careful about that.

But each generation, we're getting less grounded and when you have a 1.6 fertility rate collapsed the last 25 years from 2.1. I mean, I understand abortion, but it's really not reproductive rights, it's deproductive rights. Because they've almost made it into a national religion where abortions are up over a million per year now, and yet the fertility rates' going down to 1.6.

>> H.R. McMaster: Wait, I gotta stop at this, this is not people getting pregnant and getting abortions, this is choosing not to get pregnant until you're 35 or 36, and then, then you discover it's hard. So this is-

>> Bill Whalen: But, John, it also ties to no different. John, you talked about people coming back from the war, getting married when they're in their early 20s, but people wait a lot longer now to get married, and wait a lot longer to have children now, which ties down to fertility.

>> John Cochrane: Right.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, a quick exit question, gentlemen, let's go into lightning round. And that is, as you look at younger generations, those who came after the boomers, do you see any traits in the younger generations that you wish we boomers possessed?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, this new generation is facing hardships that the boomers and the next generation x or whatever didn't.

In other words, it's getting very, very hard to justify going in debt for 100 or $200,000 with student loans and then coming out with a major, not in four years, but the average is six and a half years to finish college. And then not being guaranteed a job, not being able to buy a house, not being able to have their 1.6 children in their 20s.

So they're facing burdens that the prior to post baby mentors didn't face. And the United States, I think if we look at its cities, San Francisco, Portland, Minneapolis, it's just a different world that we have bequeathed to them these last, subsequent generation. And oddly enough, when you talk to these kids, you're starting to see that hardship, or that you're just beginning to see the beginning of it. I think that that collapse in American culture at least.

I mean, we still have the Internet, we have all these gizmos and pertinences. But the actual fundamentals of life, buying good food at an affordable price, buying a car at affordable price, buying fuel at an affordable price, buying a house. Being able to have three children at affordable, affordable price, having one parent, as our parents were, for the most part, home, or at least home a lot, that's out of reach.

And oddly enough, I think they're starting to get back to basics a little bit. I've met a lot of kids that are 18, 19, and they're very hard working, and they're starting to reject some of the values that they have absorbed from the last two or three generations.

So these are cyclical, and usually hardship creates good people, affluence creates bad people. Okay, HR, John, anything you wanna add?

>> John Cochrane: Yeah.

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, I'm inspired by the younger generation, of course, there's a lot of continuity, maybe between generations in the military. Because there's certain people who want to serve, who wanna be part of a mission bigger than themselves, who are committed to kind of the sense of honor associated with the military and the willingness to sacrifice for one another and the mission and everything else.

But I'll tell you, I get to interact with cadets at West Point, they're fantastic, just like the junior officers that I knew in our army of the younger generation. But now also with the students that I interact with, mainly at Stanford and Arizona State University, I see a real desire to serve, and then also a real desire to be better connected to one another.

Of course, this is a generation that is better connected to one another than ever, electronically, but quite distant from one another at times psychologically and socially. So I think that there's a real desire, whether it's on sports teams or serving in an organization where they can make a difference, like in the military, that there is this desire to serve.

So, I mean, maybe it's a self selecting group that I get to interact with in my classes and interactions, but I'll tell you, I really am impressed by them. I know they're much pilloried, but as Victor said, Victor, I think that it's going to be the students who provide the corrective to this kind of curriculum of self loathing.

And the orthodoxy that they're being fed associated with organizing the world into oppressor and oppressed, and the valorization of victimhood, all this nonsense. I don't say to my students directly, hey, this is nonsense, I just say, hey, it's your job as a student to question any orthodoxy, to read a broad range of views and come to your own decisions.

And so I think that resonates with them and I think I'm inspired by them and I've got a great hope for the next generation. Because we've screwed a lot of things up in our generation and they're gonna have to deal with it, Bill. So we better hope that they're on their game.

>> John Cochrane: Mike, I get the last word, Niall isn't anymore.

>> H.R. McMaster: Exactly.

>> H.R. McMaster: Economist rule.

>> John Cochrane: I agree that this generation faces an extraordinary challenge, it's not an economic challenge, though. Right now the US economy is doing fantastic. And even if you're from reduced circumstances, if you finish high school, get married, get a job, keep the job, you're gonna do great.

And it is not an economic hardship, especially compared to lots of the rest of the world. Europe is 40% poorer than the US and not growing, they've got way worse problems. But it is a social, political, economic and government challenge. Every historical analogy to end of empire out of losing faith in who you are and your basic systems, America is just screening all of them.

So do you wanna keep your constitution? Do you wanna keep your freedom of speech? Do you wanna keep a justice system that isn't in there selecting your political candidates for you? Do you not wanna live under regulators who go to sex parties and tell you that you can't take your kids out to the park and stay six feet apart?

Are we going to lose, save our republic is the crucial, this is crucial. And abroad, are we gonna be just, is it always retreat, take whatever you want, and we're for the ceasefire and the status quo, just eat it slowly. So a great challenge of are we going to revitalize this country?

Yes, economics could be way better. Politically, the institutions, instructions of American democracy are gonna let the whole thing fall apart, that's this generation challenge. And it will turn into economic very soon, even though it isn't now. So they got a great challenge. But I like the young people that I've met, granted a selective sample.

They can tell that what they've been fed is so extreme, such nonsense. They know they're being lied to, they understand it's bullshit and they are looking for better ideas, and it's not hard to find them if you look hard. So at least many, many young people are turning away from the craziness, understanding that the structures that sustain our life have been destroyed around them and want to fix them.

So I also, I gotta echo the HR's optimism to quote it up, although it's going to be a very hard challenge to put together the mess that our generation has left behind.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, we'll leave it there, and it's on to the lightning round.

>> George Carlin: Lightning round.

>> Bill Whalen: We have two questions for you today, one serious, one not so serious, and John Cochrane.

The serious question goes directly to you, and it comes from John in Ohio rights. In a recent show, John Cochrane said that there are no economic models that show a link between the level of interest rates and the rate of inflation. An article in the current issue of the Economist argues that the Fed's interest rate hikes over the past two years is the main reason why inflation in the US has cooled.

Can you help me understand the different views?

>> John Cochrane: God, you want a lightning round?

>> Bill Whalen: 30 seconds or less?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: The Guido Sarducci version, if anybody remembers that.

>> H.R. McMaster: Exactly.

>> John Cochrane: I'll just say there's an interesting disconnect between what every modern economic model does and the sort of standard doctrine expounded by the Feds.

Kind of interesting, what seems normal but higher interest rates would reduce the economy and that would bring down inflation. That just doesn't exist in current economic models, so they're doing what any sensible person does, they're kind of winging it. But let's just, I have a lot of expertise in monetary policy.

I've been studying for 40 years, and what I can tell you with great certainty, nobody knows how it works. And if they tell you they know how it works, I don't know how it works, but I know they don't know how it works either. So, what this just requires is a little bit of humility, keep it simple, stop trying to spin enormous Rube Goldberg contraptions that you think you know how to control.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, and now the not so serious question, a statue of Johnny Cash, the man in black, has been unveiled in the US Capitol. Questions for the group, what other entertainers should have statues in the US Capitol? Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Ken Rock, Taylor Swift, Barbra Streisand, HR, who'd you go with?

And I think I know you're gonna guess, it's gonna be some funk guy, right?

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, I'll tell you why not? Why not George Clinton from parliament Funkadelic who basically told us, hey, if you don't like the effect, don't produce the cause. In many ways, I think he's a modern day stoic philosopher.

>> Bill Whalen: John, I don't know what your musical tastes are as opposed to the general, you wanna give us some thought, what?

>> John Cochrane: I live in an unfortunate Iowa boomer from 1972, and my life reflects the line from the wonderful Tom Lehrer song, which went, we may have won all the battles, but they had all the good songs.

That was about the war against Franco. And that certainly reflects the music of 1972, which I still listen to, and I ignore their politics.

>> Bill Whalen: Victor?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I think the person who made the greatest effect on music and popular culture probably in the last 50 years was Bob Dylan.

And he's a very strange guy, right when there was that scene where the Harvard professor was locked out of his Cambridge apartment and he said he was a victim of police brutality cuz he asked, the police didn't know who he was. About the same time Bob Dylan was giving a concert and he was walking around without any ID and he looked like a bum.

And he was gonna be on stage in a few minutes, and the police picked him up and they took him to the police station and they said, who are you? They didn't know they weren't baby boomers. And he said, I'm Bob Dylan, I'm a guy named Bob Dylan, and I've got to go to a concert.

And then they said, well, you have no idea and you're a vagrant, same kind of thing. But rather than saying that he wanted the police ties put in the Smithsonian Museum, he said, I don't blame these guys. One person recognized him, drove him very fast, so he got on stage just in time.

And they wanted him to say that he was a victim of police brutality. And he basically said, if I saw a guy that looked like me and I was a police person, I was walking down the street, I don't blame them for doing what they did. So he was kind of an off the wall guy, and he was not easy to pigeonhole politically.

And he went through a lot of metamorphoses, both musical, politically, culturally, so. And he just won the Nobel Prize, so I think he deserves a little bit more recognition.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, as further evidence, you cannot trust boomers with anything. I've been told that actually we have time for one more lightning round question.

And here it is, it's from Mark in Indianapolis, who writes, I'm about to enter retirement. I would like the Goodfellas to each recommend three books that will provide me with a better understanding of their fields of study, even better if it's one of their works. You don't have to do three, you could do just one if you want to HR, what do you want to point them to, battlegrounds?

>> H.R. McMaster: Well, y no, I would say if so, military history, American military history is kind of my field. I would say three great books to read, you've got to understand the revolution and the colonial wars. And I would say Don Higginbotham's book, the War of American Independence is fantastic.

I would say that then you've gotta obviously understand the civil war. And McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom is the best one volume work there. And then the world wars and World War II in particular. So I would say Victor's book on World War II, or for a global perspective, Gerhard Weinberg's world at arms.

So I would say if you're starting in military history now, you can't go wrong with those three one volume fantastic histories.

>> Bill Whalen: John, one, two or three books?

>> John Cochrane: Well, I'll give you three authors. Start with Tom Sowell, and certainly he has a great economics textbook, any of his stuff on race is just spectacular.

And I annually tell the Nobel committee that, get to it, cuz this is just one of the most spectacular things written. His knowledge and decisions is a masterpiece of economics expressed in easy words. Milton Friedman, you wanna read it? Learn a little bit about economics, start with the easy one, free to choose.

And Friedrich Hayek, it is now the anniversary, I forget what anniversary is. It must be 80th of the publication of Road to Serfdom, which was not just a great book, but also intellectual touchstone. Let's not forget everyone was a communist back in the 1930s, including the Roosevelt administration.

And that really, everyone assumed that planning was good, and that really was a watershed in the late 1940s of waking us up and a key to why we had such good growth. So those are my three choices.

>> Bill Whalen: Too humble to add your own book?

>> John Cochrane: Not yet.

>> Bill Whalen: Okay, Victor, you go last, do you wanna do three VDH books, do you wanna do three outside of VDH?

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I'll talk about just three, I think, that are classics of military history. And one is EB Sledge "With The Old Breed". It's a personal memoir. I wrote the introduction to one of the paperback versions, and it's about the 1930s generation that stayed in the Marine Corps, and then they taught the new draftees and what they did on Okinawa.

It's the most frightening memoir you could possibly read, but it's ultimately a paean to American soldiers.

>> Bill Whalen: It's also the basis for the Tom Hank series of "Pacific".

>> Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, it's a very beautifully written book. He was an etymologist, of all people at the University of Alabama. Another one is, we all read Grant's memoirs, but the best memoirs on the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman's 2 volume.

He was not just a tactician or strategist, but he was really a cultural geostrategist. And he talked about how to defeat the South in a very holistic way that was way ahead of his time. He had an enormous influence on Liddell Hart and others. And he wrote in a very, he has a very strange prose style, it's not like Grant's tactician, but it's beautiful in its own, right?

It's a very easy read. And then more contemporary, I've always been a fan, I knew him very well and I liked him. He was a wonderful man, John Keegan, and he wrote a book called "The Face of Battle". And his argument was that in just this 100-mile radius, history had radically changed.

And he looked at the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of the Somme. But he did it unusually, from the point of view of what it would been like to fight there and the dirt and the grime and the wounds and how horrific these experiences were.

And he's also just happened to be a master pro-stylist, so it's a classic book and it's often underappreciated as well. But it's a great read. Yeah.

>> H.R. McMaster: It is. What battles have in common is human. He talks about how battles are aimed at the disintegration of human groups.

And it's the struggle of men, and of course, women now struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them. And it's fantastic in terms of understanding what it takes to steel, s-t-e-e-l, organizations against disintegration and battle, and how important it is to build up confidence and competence in small units.

Because, of course, the book is organized into infantry, cavalry, artillery and technological change. But what's most striking is what he finds is the major continuity in battle, which is human, and I think you see that playing out today even.

>> Victor Davis Hanson: I just finished by saying he was a wonderful guy.

I was an obscure farmer who was teaching at Fresno State and wrote a book called "The Western Way of War: Infantry", about how battle was like for the common hoplite in the ancient world. And he called me in Selma, California, from his house in Kensington, London, and said, I saw an advance copy from Alfred Knopp.

I love your book and would you let me write the introduction? So it was an obscure book and his introduction made it a near bestseller, and I've been in his debt ever since. And he was just a wonderful person and a beautiful writer, and he was just a nice guy.

Struggled with post-polio syndrome, so he was quite courageous as well.

>> Bill Whalen: Gentlemen, I'm going to leave it there. Great conversation, thanks for coming on, Victor. It's been too long, hope to have you back again soon. Our viewer's note our next episode of GoodFellows will be in the second half of October, It's going to be a recording of a live show we're doing at Hoover's fall retreat.

John, H.R., and Sir Niall Ferguson will be attending, if that's not enough nobility for you, our guest is going to be the Lord Andrew Roberts, we're going to do a counterfactual show, which will be great fun. By the way, we really enjoy getting your letters, so if you do wanna send in questions to John and HR and Niall, go to hoover.org/askgoodfellows and pose a question to GoodFellows.

And we'll do our best to try to get it on the air. On behalf of my colleagues, John Cochrane, H.R. McMaster, the absent Truett, Niall Ferguson and our very special guest, Victor Davis Hanson. We hope you enjoyed the show, we look forward to see you again soon. Until then, take care, thanks for watching.

>> Presenter: If you enjoyed this show and are interested in listening to more content featuring H.R. McMaster, subscribe to Battlegrounds. Also available at hoover.org/battlegrounds.