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Peter Robinson: Victor Davis Hanson, a classical scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Dr. Hansen has published more than two dozen books including "A War Like No Other", the definitive account of the Peloponnesian Wars, and, The Case for Trump, the paperback edition of which has just been published. Victor, welcome, and welcome everyone to Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson.
Peter Robinson: Victor.
Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you.
Peter Robinson: Let's start with your own experience. You live among farmers and ranchers, you yourself own 40 acres, what has the shutdown meant to the San Joaquin Valley?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it's funny, because we're the richest in terms of actual value of crops sold about 40 different varieties in the United States, in fact, per density than the world, and we're feeding right now, we meaning not me, but the people of this county and right below me, Peter--
Peter Robinson: Fresno County.
Victor Davis Hanson: There's a main thoroughfare from two rural towns, Dinuba and Caruthers. There's a lot of chicken processing, almond processing, chicken, beef, the Harris Beef lot is right over here, and citrus and it's just booming, I mean, it's people, I'm looking out the window right now, and there's two people out in my almond orchard working. So it hasn't stopped a bit because it's outdoor activity, and we're told that 97% of the transmissions of the virus are within doors, and then people feel they do really feel a need, they have to keep working because the truckers, and the processors, and the packing houses and the farmers they feel they're needed, but if I go on to these little local towns that are--
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: The one-two miles behind me has a per capita income of $13,000, Selma. It looks like, you remember the neutron bomb of our college days?
Peter Robinson: Sure, right!
Victor Davis Hanson: We dropped the bomb and the radiation destroyed everything without impairing the infrastructure, that's what it looks like.
Peter Robinson: No
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, so the people at the barbershops, the restaurant, all of them have been wiped out. I will say that among a lot of the immigrant community, many of them here illegally, I admire their entrepreneurship because up and down this rural road, there are illegal daycare centers, barbershops, canteens, my neighbor right over here, must have 30 cars a day. I shouldn't say that because I don't want him to be turned in, but he's cutting hair all day long.
Peter Robinson Oh, really?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, and so a lot of people--
Peter Robinson He may have another customer before this is over?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, I know! If I had hair, I'd be his customer, but I think you have Newsom, at some point, I don't think what Newsom, or Cuomo, or Trump says will be the ultimate arbiter of whether we get back or not. It's where people feel confident enough to go out, and book a flight, go to a restaurant, invite people over for dinner, et cetera, et cetera. Until that confidence is restored with--
Peter Robinson Victor, California itself, you've written in the last couple of weeks, you've written a couple of times on the Golden State, let me quote you, "On the eve of the epidemic, California seemed "especially vulnerable, given the large influx "of visitors from China." Yet California, you went on to note, has so far suffered a relatively low death rate even a relatively low infection rate as these antibody tests begin to come in by comparison with other large states, the only large state with a lower death rate per unit of population is Texas, California is much better off than New York, for example, what's going on, do we know yet?
Victor Davis Hanson: I don't think we do, and I wrote a controversial article, I didn't come down necessarily on any one exegesis. I just said, here were the parameters of the debate. People had said, well, maybe California's notorious bureaucracy is pretty bad. Anybody's gone to a California DMV, the testing was late, or was inaccurate, or maybe there is some credence to this theory that warmer weather, it's gonna be 91 here today. Or maybe it could be that Gavin Newsom on March 19 was the first to order a lockdown, but I mean people three days later in New York and two days later and other states followed suit, or it could be, and this is what got me into trouble, is that I might suggest that the January 21st official day of anybody in the United States getting the virus and I think it was March 10, I questioned that, and I said, when you had 15 to 20,000 people coming from China, and of that number people had estimated, 3,000 a day to Los Angeles, but maybe 6,000 at San Diego, San Jose, SFO and LAX on direct flights, including more than 25 flights from Wuhan, in November, December and January, before the cut off, and then after the cut off on directed flights from Europe for two weeks, it would be very naive to think out of that huge pool of anywhere from 700 to a million people, there wasn't somebody that was positive, and that we would have, well, I didn't say we'd had herd immunity, 50 to 70%, I thought that the number of people that were infected was much higher than we thought, and what I meant by that was, we were doing even better than the statistics, because we were running as we are now, about three out of 100, according to those who have tested positive in the denominator, versus the fatalities in the numerator, but when you look at the USC study, and the Stanford researcher study, they suggest it could in fact be, if you do the math, not three out of 100, but one or two per thousand.
Peter Robinson Right!
Victor Davis Hanson: And that's pretty a stack, and that suggests to me that there is, I'm not gonna say it's 15 or 20%. 15 was found in New York today. 15 in Germany, but let's see what--
Peter Robinson That have been infected, 15%.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I think there's more people that had it, and we're finding out that it's not quite as lethal. And California is not quite, it's a 10th most dense state in the union, so it's not scattered like Wyoming, but we're not like New York, people don't use the subway as much, and we have, I think, there's a lot of studies that suggest warmer weather, it's not gonna kill the virus, but if you had a choice, you'd rather have the virus in a warmer climate because when it's out of the body, on the surface, or in the air, it's not gonna live as long. So all of those, I think, incrementally help explain what's going on, but we're surely not gonna get his March 19th letter, you remember, to Donald Trump, and CDC, et cetera, that we were gonna have 25 million cases, and we were gonna have at the--
Peter Robinson Gavin Newsom said that?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, and at the lethality rate of 3%, at the time, that would have given us almost 800 to a million deaths. You said that would be in eight weeks, we're only three weeks away from a million deaths, and we're having about 1500, 1400 deaths.
Peter Robinson Right, right. Again, to quote a column that you wrote recently, moving from California to the nation now, "Throwing some 20 million people out of work," since you wrote that the numbers gone up to 22, I believe, "22 million people out of work, "destroying trillions in liquidity, sending the GDP "into Depression-like descendance, "and shutting up over 100 million people in their homes "is having health consequences that could ripple out "far more so than from the virus itself." Explain that Victor.
Victor Davis Hanson I don't think we've even scratched the surface Peter because I just went to a doctor this morning, a cardiologist, and they don't have any patients there, and then he referred me to as many referrals as he could cram in because they don't have any patients. And what I'm getting at is, there are hundreds of thousands of Californians who need scans, they need procedures, they need diagnostic tests, they need "optional surgeries" in cardiology, oncology diseases, chronic conditions; lupus, arthritis, all of that, and they're not getting it. We know from the 2008 meltdown, that the suicide rate went way up, as unemployment way went up. We know that spousal and familial abuse increases when people are locked within, we know anxieties, and when you add six or $7 trillion of destroyed liquidity, and GDP, that, that's gonna have an effect on people's lives. So, and we're--
Peter Robinson So Victor, do--
Victor Davis Hanson Go ahead!
Peter Robinson Are you satisfied? You've dipped in to the White House briefings that have been taking place, the president speaks, and then he takes questions, but then there are other officials, Dr. B-R-I-X, B-R-I-X, Dr. Birx, I'm not sure how to pronounce it.
Victor Davis Hanson Dr. Birx, yes!
Peter Robinson Dr. Fauci, other public health officials have spoken, I myself keep waiting,... Public policy, forming public policy, you learn this in any Kennedy School, any School of Public Policy, it's all about trade-offs. The fundamental form of analysis, is cost-benefit analysis, and I have not heard them once refer to the costs that you just outlined, that's to say--
Victor Davis Hanson Well, they can't Peter!
Peter Robinson Why not?
Victor Davis Hanson Because the left, the progressive left, has prepped the battlefield, and given the narrative to Trump, that if it's worth to save one life, and you can't, he thinks in a political sense, he's not gonna be able to get the country back, if we get a hotspot and then the New York Times has this picture, this picture, this picture, with a cap-like, Trump did, Trump..., and so he's erring, but you're quite right. What he shouldn't be doing is, at every one of these press conferences, he should have Mnuchin, he should have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he should have some type of Federal Reserve Officer, and then, he should have Fauci, and Birx, and they should say, these are the medical opinions, this is these national security threats because after all, China and Iran are doing all sorts of strange things right now, and this is the economic. And I've gotta take all of these freedoms of input, and synthesize them, and give you an answer, that's what you should be doing. But the medical community has established this premise that unlike any other contagion in our history, that we have certain rules now, that we've never had before. When we have the flu, like 2017, 60 million people were estimated, but we didn't just say, well, the denominator to determine the lethality will only be determined by the number of those who test positive for the flu. You go to your doctor, that would be a quarter million, and then we know that somewhere around 61,000 died, so, therefore, "wow, one of 10 people died of the flu, let's shut down the country. But we're doing that with this virus because it's a corona, not an influenza strain, we know that it came from China, we know it's an election year, we know Donald Trump is widely hated by his opponents, and it turned out to be a perfect storm. It was just too many straws on the camel's back to bear, and we ended up with this utter hysteria and panic.
Peter Robinson Well, okay, let me see if I can tease you into getting yourself into trouble again. Do you oppose the shutdown as it has taken place so far?
Victor Davis Hanson I oppose the lockdown after pretty much next week.
Peter Robinson Got it!
Victor Davis Hanson Because, and then I do support based on what you see, with, say the Swedish model or the Japanese model, I have--
Peter Robinson Explain that for a moment, the Swedish, but in both of those cases they have the Swedish model, people are social distancing, older people, people with underlying conditions, are being told to stay home and self-isolate, but the economy, schooling, restaurants remain open. Like what Japan is, a little bit different, but essentially, Japan also has not shut down its entire economy.
Victor Davis Hanson Yes, and they tend to be doing, probably, not quite as good as Germany, but nobody ever does as good as Germany in most things, and then not as well, I mean, better than places that are completely shut down like France, or Spain, or Italy, or the UK. And then, the second thing that the Stanford researchers, and the USC researchers have also pointed out, that for people who are not my age, I'm 66, but under 60, and don't have a chronic health condition, it's likely that about 99.9% of them, one out of 1000, will die, but the other 99.9 will live, and therefore, they could be going out into the general population and acquiring herd immunity, and then that would actually protect the people that are shut in because when they go out after this lockdown is over, people that were younger have weather disease, with either mild or no symptoms, and then they're not gonna infect the vulnerable people. But what we're doing now is, we're putting generations within the same house, when people do go out the shop, and we're making people more vulnerable because it's easier to transmit the virus within close quarters, and we're not developing the level of immunity that will be necessary to get us to the vaccination match, promised land.
Peter Robinson: Victor, you have, I hope once all this is over, in my own mind, I've been saving this for late summer when the campaign is beginning to get underway and earnest. I want to do a whole show devoted on your new paperback edition of The Case for Trump, to which you've added new material, but let me just ask right now, Donald Trump's comportment as national leader in this crisis, strengthens or weakens, the Case for Trump?
Victor Davis Hanson Well, I think it strengthens the book's theme, I don't know, because the case for Trump wasn't, Trump has done fallible, but this is why people voted for him.
Peter Robinson It was really the case for the people who voted for Trump,
Victor Davis Hanson Yes, or are trying to explain to other people who didn't know why he won, and why he has not imploded, or why he wasn't a left-winger, or why he wasn't a nutty right-winger, or why he wasn't incompetent because what two things are happening, he did, and that's typical Trump, what Trump says and what Trump does are two different things.
Peter Robinson Right.
Victor Davis Hanson So if you look at right now, the travel ban was supposedly called xenophobic and racist by everybody from CNN, to the Chinese Communist Party, to Joe Biden. Everybody, now, who said that is not willing to have the intellectual integrity to say, I was right, and you've gotta lift that ban right now. They're welcome to try it, but they don't say a word. So they agree with it, and then we know that after that, three weeks in the case of Nancy Pelosi, she said, "Come to Chinatown, and hug people!" We know that Bill de Blasio and Cuomo did something analogous. So that was a brilliant move, and that stopped 15 to 20,000 people coming in. We also know that nobody is saying, I wish we had open borders with Mexico, and we had more caravans like last summer. Nobody's saying that, so that was good. They're also saying, we like the idea that the President has the ability to stop travel from any country that cannot guarantee passport control, that was good. We liked the idea the president said, I'm not, if you wanna have an off-label use, and he did that in 2018, with end of life desperation drugs, so to speak, off-label uses, so that was a precursor for hydroxychloroquine. So all of that's been very good, and he got all of those executives in, and we're gonna have ventilators coming out of our ears pretty soon. We're probably gonna supply the world with ventilators, because of World-War-Two-like ramping up.
Peter Robinson Yes.
Victor Davis Hanson But where he, I think, and I've said this in the book, as sort of a tragic hero is, that he gets to these press conferences, and it's basically, the New York, Washington, East Coast corridor media, trying to get him, and bait him, and this is a guy who was Apprentice star for 11 years, so he loves a repartee, and he goes back and forth, and he beats them and he scores these tactical victories but strategically, it explains why his ratings have gone down a little bit because what happens, they take a snippet here and a snippet here, and they run it on network news, CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, and that, they take it out of context and he looks like he's petty, and he's narcissistic. So I think he would be much better, and you hinted at it, to come out and say, this is all that we've done, here's Fauci, here's Birx, here's Mnuchin, here are the military people. Go to it, and cut the whole thing down from two hours or an hour to 25 minutes.
Peter Robinson All right, plague in the ancient world, Victor, you wrote recently, I'm going to quote you, "The unknown plague at Athens killed "one-quarter of the Athenian population "during the Peloponnesian War, "wrecking the social structure of the city." "In 542 AD, during a virulent bubonic plague epidemic, "millions perished throughout the Byzantine Empire." We could add the Black Death of the 14th century, that killed between 30 and 60% of the population of Europe. Incidentally, as I understand, it is now believed that Black Death originated in Central Asia. Who knows? Wuhan, of the Wuhan of the day, so the point here is that, that you make plagues, pandemics. These have represented an expected feature of human life, as recently as a century ago, when we had the Influenza of 1918, should we have seen this one coming?
Victor Davis Hanson We, meaning the human species, should have we kinda gotten the idea that, on like, I don't know what the Athenian plague is, there's a good case for typhus or even typhoid, maybe smallpox, I doubt smallpox, and we know that the Constantinople, Byzantine plague was Black plague as was--
Peter Robinson We know that.
Victor Davis Hanson 14th-century bubonic plague, that really wiped out Italy, and a lot of the Mediterranean. So we had the idea that these were all biblical plagues, and they were dangerous. They were Typhoid Mary in Chicago, or yellow fever with General Washington, but they were the results of poor sanitation, poor drinking water, sewage disposal, and pre-vaccination, pre-antibiotic, pre-viral and that we have transcended that.
Peter Robinson Right!
Victor Davis Hanson And nobody ever said, humans and animals are in a constant challenge in response technique, and human nature being what it is, the more knowledge you gain, that can help you defeat natural phenomenon, the more dangerous somebody's going to use it, or be lax about it. Putting a viral level-four laboratory in the hands of the Chinese, is like giving a firecracker to a five-year-old, because they had not had the institutional checks and balance, the 70, to 80-100-year history of two steps forward, one step back in viral research. So, all we have done is substituted the 19th century problems of sewage, and drinking water for the 21st postmodern problems of viral safety, and an antiseptic environment.
Peter Robinson So you have argued before, to me, and in many of your books, that war is a permanent part of the human condition, and it is simply modern hubris to suppose, that so many people seem to suppose in the 20s, that the League of Nations would stop war, or that, the First World War would be the war to end all wars, war was a permanent aspect of human life. So, if we learn anything deep from this virus, is that that the virus is another affront to modern-day hubris. This is part of the human condition.
Victor Davis Hanson Think it is I think, especially in the Obama years, we had this idea of there's a trajectory of the arc of history, remember the moral arc of--
Peter Robinson Yes, yes, yes!
Victor Davis HansonIt's bending and the more, and that it was a pre-determinist we got that a little bit with Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, we got it with Francis Fukuyama, End of History. There was this idea that as we'd become more free, and democratic, and more technologically adept, and we have more, Facebook, Google, Apple, and Bill Gates working for us and all that, we're getting morally, and economically, and financially at a higher plane, and we're all going up here. And there's no evidence necessarily to say that, history always goes in a linear progression, is cyclical. Maybe the cycles get better as we go, but I'm not sure, I think, if I lost a $5 bill in my hometown today, I would have a less likely opportunity of getting that back than 50 years ago, or 200 years ago, when at first, America was first founded. So I'm not sure that with material progress, you don't get moral regress, and the other thing is that, I think it's very important, that we don't worship science on this altar. If you and I had talked about ulcers 30 years ago, we would say, wow, there's is all this new study that stress does it and aspirin, and if we did it 20 years ago, we'd say wow, there's this new thing called H. pylori and Advil will add to it. We don't know what the next exegesis will be. I was looking at two drugs that my dad thought were wonder drugs, he's passed away 20 years ago, one was Flomax and the other was Zantac, and I just saw the other day that both of them, now, have serious side effects, and they're even talking about phasing both of them out. And what I'm getting at is not that they weren't good drugs, 'cause they really helped him, but there's not gonna ever be something that's a magic bullet, that science is an evolutionary process that has a bad, and a worst choice, but we want immediate and instant perfection. So if you tell somebody today, especially in the coastal corridors, the elite global communities, that if you're not 60, and you're in pretty good health, you got an 99.9 chance of not dying from this virus, they're gonna tell you, I can't take the risk, cause one in a thousand is not good enough for me, because I made blank, blank, blank, I'm a financier, I'm a college administrator, I'm this, I'm a media elite, and the world is so perfect, I'm not gonna risk it. And more importantly, they're shielded, and this is the central truth of this entire epidemic. Who are the heroes of this epidemic? I haven't called my financial planner, I really haven't, I am not helped at all, by the Stanford, Vice Provost of diversity inclusion, it doesn't matter. I don't think that Rachel Maddow is gonna save the United States, you know who is? Hilario Lopez's right now out there working in the almonds, or Joe Smith, with a gut driving all night to Costco to get toilet paper there by 6AM. Or the guy that you call when you're freezer blows up and you need food, and he shows up from Home Depot, and he doesn't have a mask on and you say, Oh my god, he doesn't have a mask on! Because he's breathing hard, and he's trying to get you a new freezer. So I think that's been good, it really tells us that the essentials of life never changed, they're food, fuel, health, housing, and if you can't get food, you can't go to a food market, and you can't go to Home Depot to fix something, and you can't get fuel for your heating, and you're not gonna let it live. You can deal without the other stuff, but there are people in the shadows, that we neglected. We thought they were global losers, or they didn't make it, but I was thinking the other day I was reading Richard the Third, just for the heck of it again, and I thought, this must be a financial planner when his circuit breaker goes out, or his baffle on his toilet doesn't work, he'll say, "handyman, handyman, my kingdom is for a handyman," because he's helpless, most of them.
Peter Robinson: Right, right, Victor--
Victor Davis HansonI'm not trying to pick on financial planners, I like them, they're very brilliant people, but right now I'd rather have a guy who's a handyman!
Peter Robinson: Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal, earlier this week, This is China. Holman Jenkins, "On January 7, President Xi," we now know this, "President Xi gave a secret speech on the Wuhan "outbreak, China's government issued no public warning." "The Wuhan city government permitted a gargantuan banquet "for 40,000 families on January 18, "Wuhan bigger than any American city "at 11 million inhabitants, was a major rail hub "inside China, and through its international airport, "exported thousands of travelers a day to the world." "Xi Jinping bears unique responsibility "for a global pandemic that will end up killing millions." Victor?
Victor Davis Hanson Well, I would add to his list, the key one for me is January 23, when he locked down all travel to and from Wuhan to every Chinese city in his country, and he was perfectly willing for people he thought were infected, or could be infected, that posed a danger to Chinese, he was perfectly willing to have them get on a direct flight to San Francisco, or LAX, or Berlin, or Paris. And he was also perfectly willing to unleash the Chinese military propaganda and Communist Party megaphones, who said that it was racist and homophobic to have a travel ban seven days after he did, and we were the beneficiaries of another 150,000 visitors from ground zero of the plague. And so I thought to myself when I heard all this, I said, well, that's the most racist thing in the world, to say that my people who are Chinese, have to be protected, but all those other people in the world, that's their problem. And then to say that you're racist, for not allowing people from my country to come and possibly infect you, in a way that I wouldn't let them ever go to infect each other, and so, that was effective. And so, I think what happened is, I'm not a conspiracy theorist who think that the virus was necessarily engineered, I don't think it was deliberate, I think it's more likely that they were way over their head in the level of complexity they were researching, versus the level of security that they could master. The virus got out, they've tried to stop it, they tried to hide it because they thought it would hurt their global brand, and at some point, and those are the dates that you recited, somebody said to Xi, you know what, this thing is out, we can't stop it, you can't put the cork in the bottle, and it's gonna hurt us, so let's just let the whole thing go to hell." In other words, if we're gonna get hurt, let's not let a crisis go to waste. I say that because almost immediately, they didn't warn us, their megaphone at the World Health Organization, mouthed their platitudes and fooled people and people died. But more importantly, what has China been doing? They had a propaganda campaign to blame us, even though we help pay for that damn laboratory. And then they went right out to the Spratly Islands, South China Sea, and started renaming Islands, so people during the panic would know that they're there's, then there were reports that they started to resume, low-yield or no yield nuclear testing, which was outlawed. And then they started cracking down on Hong Kong, and then there were stories that they were gonna ignore international outcry about the reeducation camps, and maybe use Uyghurs to go out and do manual labor. So what they've shown empirically is that they're taking advantage of the crisis, and they feel... And they haven't told us how many people have died, or how many cases they've had. I think it's been the last four weeks, and we're stupid enough, we, the Western world, that when we look at John Hopkins or Worldometers, we list China there with this frozen figure, and then we go over and we look at deaths per million, or deaths per cases, fatality per cases, and then these idiots get on cable news and say, we're not doing as well as China, China, how could they be doing... And it's like saying, wow, in 1939, Hitler's done a lot better job with the people who have mental problems, or they have cerebral palsy because the hospitals are empty of them." Well, he killed them all.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson And, I'm not saying they killed people with the virus, although they may have, but my God, they understand our mind better than we do. They're the most brilliant propagandist I've ever seen, in their dealings with the Western liberal mindset.
Peter Robinson: Victor, is it too late to talk about managing the relationship with China, has a new Cold War begun?
Victor Davis Hanson I think John Kerry said just that, didn't he?
Peter Robinson: Yeah, that's right!
Victor Davis Hanson We have to manage the relationship with China. Well, I think there was a cold war going on, and I'm hoping that we'll stay at a cold war, where they're going to... What's gonna be interesting is, China, if you look at their strategy in the Communist Party congresses, it was to brag and humiliate us in a tactical sense, but strategically, not to get in a war with us. After all, we got 6,000 nuclear weapons, and we have a sophisticated missile defense system, and their only military threat to us, is when we get close to them, or cyber, all of their technology is appropriated from us. They may master us in 10 or 12 years, but they're not quite there, and they have some real problems with a sophisticated Japan, on its borders, a sophisticated South Korea on its borders, a sophisticated Australia on it's borders, a huge India that has border disputes, it doesn't like them, and who knows about Russia? So what I'm getting at is, they were not in a--
Peter Robinson: Taiwan and Hong Kong are a problem.
Victor Davis Hanson Taiwan and Hong Kong, Hong Kong has done very well, and so I think what they're thinking is, oh, oh this virus preempted what we wanted to do, but it made us sort of... It's sort of like Hitler saying, well, the generals telling Hitler, you might have won Poland, but we were three years away when we wanted this war, it was too early. Or the Japanese telling Yamamoto, I wish you hadn't held off for two years. So I think that China would have preferred what this estrangement, another decade from now, because they're not ready for it.
Peter Robinson: So in a strange way, here's the parallel that comes to my mind, well, maybe it's a parallel. Let me just put it in the form of a question. Reagan takes office after a decade, a dozen years of dataunt, and the public opinion polls show that the American people have warmed to the Soviet Union during that period, of course, they did. There was Richard Nixon kissing Brezhnev on both cheeks when Brezhnev visited, and then the Soviets shot down Korean airliner, double O, seven, and the polling changed overnight. Nothing that Reagan did, although, of course, we know Reagan was in favor, as he ran a campaign on standing up to the Soviets. But the Soviets show, there was a moment when everyone could see what kind of regime it really was. And it feels to me as though that kind of inflection point in public, I don't even wanna call it public opinion, but in actual realistic perception, on the part of ordinary Americans about what China really is, may now have happened with this virus. Am I being melodramatic here?
Victor Davis Hanson No, I don't think you are. I think we ourselves are evolving, and people are starting to blame the Chinese. But remember, the difference is that this media, which the liberal, Shorenstein Media Center at Harvard said, was 93%, negative to the presidency has been basically regurgitating Chinese talking points, and that they've said to us, blue in the face that China is being blamed by Trump to deflect from his own culpability. That's what they're professing, so we're not getting through our media a dispassionate, disinterested view of what the threat from China... I don't think that's gonna be sustainable, you know why I don't? Because the modern left worships at the altar of the European Union, and they feel that we wanna be where the EU is in tenure, and the EU is sick of China, not just Italy, and Spain as you would, but even Germany, there was a German editorial blame, I mean, far more accusatory of China, than anything I've seen in the American press, because they have a much thinner margin of error in terms of fuel, supplies, GDP, unemployment, and they're very angry, and so are the former Commonwealth countries, like Canada, or Australia, and even countries like Mexico are furious. And so China is gonna be roundly condemned the worldwide, India's attacking at the Belt and Road, client countries are saying, we're not gonna pay you back. Africa especially, and so I don't see that propaganda that it's going to work indefinitely, and the other thing is, the left wasn't too worried about China's military domination, or economic, they were, to a degree, they were worried, they weren't compromising, they'd focused on human rights violations. And they've got a whole potpourri of these when you have a science researcher who just disappears, or data that's destroyed, or people that were deliberately exposed, that makes the left a little bit more sensitive to calling that out, but everybody has their pet Chinese complaint, military, economic, financial. And what I'm worried most about Peter, is not that we're gonna decouple, because I think we are, but there's two things that really worry me, One is the process of decoupling.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: It's sort of like a divorce. You read about that, they're all happy after it's over. They get along, but during the process, both sides lie and connive, and we're not lying and conniving, I think the Chinese are not going to freeze up, I mean, allow frozen bank accounts to be unfrozen. I think they're not gonna compensate companies for their factories, or their investments, or any of the money, that's stuck over there in China. And the second thing is, yes, we gotta have pharmaceuticals, yes, we have to have railroads, we have military technology, yes, medical supplies, but we have spent a large portion, percentage of our K-12, and our undergraduate experience, and our professional schools and what the Chinese would call fluff.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis HansonSocial science, dash studies courses, and we're not churning out the STEM students, or the math and engineering people that we need to get a grip on these key, and they still are--
Peter Robinson Gender studies instead of calculus?
Victor Davis HansonYeah, and it's really tragic because the top minds of these disciplines that create the new research, and the new breakthroughs are all American, but then the middle level who absorb it, and take it back to China, there's far more of them than American students studying that stuff.
Peter Robinson: Right!
Victor Davis Hanson I guess if I wanted to be really cruel, I would say and get back on a vice provost of inclusion, that might sound very well, in theory, but for every Provost of diversity inclusion, we could probably hire three professors of electrical engineering, and endow them, and then we could prepare us, I don't think we're prepared yet, to be autonomous in the areas we need to be, and we're gonna have to be very careful, because China has a hold over those supply chains and we have to find a way out. And that's why Trump gets so much criticism--
Peter Robinson: Victor, let me just name three ways in which China differs from the Soviet Union to China's advantage. Three ways to complicate any effort to draw lines between us and them? And one, of course, is the supply chains.
Victor Davis Hanson Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Take your grocery cart down, aisle after aisle at Walmart, that stuff's made in China,
Victor Davis Hanson Yeah.
Peter Robinson: Get it? If we're talking about a virus, but get a respiratory tract, infection, get a bacterial infection, and take Z-Pak, the antibiotics come from China. They make stuff on which we have come to rely, one, two, they have something that Soviets never had, cash, and lots of it. And as you well know, up and down the valley where I'm seated, you're in a different Valley, you're in the Central Valley, I'm in Silicon Valley. The Chinese have investments in company, after company, after company, I just don't know how you unwind those. And then the third point, you mentioned this in a column just the other day. I'm quoting you, "Is it smart to have some 360,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. colleges. There were never anything like that, in numbers from the Soviet Union, a token physicist would study for six months at MIT, and then go back to Moscow State. Let's posit, that we're awake to the danger, right now, in a way that we never have before. How on earth do we untangle all of this?
Victor Davis Hanson It's gonna be a very difficult, and I'd add a fourth too, or that even frightens me more and that is, people had no problem demonizing Russia. They were called the alt right, the Orthodox crazies, the Rasputin-like country, white. And what China has done is, they have grafted their monolithic, racist, xenophobic society that systematically puts people in reeducation camps for the religion, or doesn't allow Africans to go into a McDonald's in Beijing, and they've transmogrified themselves as part of the affirmative action, identity politics, other in the United States, and it's insidious of, I write an article to the effect that I'm worried about that 360,000 student body, because even if one or 2% were operatives of the Chinese Communist Party, that's a large number 3,000, and then I'm also worried, why are we gouging that group for pay, 10% above real cost, to subsidize these universities at a time when Americans have $1.6 trillion in collective student debt. So I write this, immediately Slate comes out and attacks me. Here's how insidious it is, she says, "That was racist for mentioning the Chinese students." But get this, Slate itself, her own magazine, she didn't even know it, six months earlier had written an article calling this sinister, because they had done some research and said that most of the 360,000 Chinese students, were not representative of the 1.4 billion Chinese, but the word that they used were the princelings. They were the princelings of crooked provincial officials and Chinese communist elite, that were sending their kids over here to master American culture on the premise that, we in our arrogance and hubris would think, Oh, wow, they came over here, they saw rap music, they wore jeans, they had the liberal atmosphere of the college landscape, they love us, we've corrupted them. And, no, they did develop contempt for us, mastered our lingo, notice how that they use that word conspiracy theory even better than they left us. And so, they have become immune from criticism by playing a traditional postmodern American victim and you dare criticize them, and you're called, racist and xenophobia, and there's no accident that Joe Biden and the Central Communist Party, used the exact same adjectives of the travel ban, racist and xenophobia.
Peter Robinson: Victor, some last questions here. Before the Coronavirus, the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump's reelection campaign was that he would have two claims, two big claims. One was a roaring economy, lowest unemployment, in some cases, lowest on African American unemployment since records began to be kept, lost unemployment. And the other was that the Democrats have moved so far to the left that they were all but socialist. Term it any way you want to, but big government to the Nth degree. And now here we sit just weeks later, the economy is dead. I saw an estimate from one of the analysts in New York that GDP would be down at an annual rate this quarter of 25%, and as you noted, more than 20 million people are out of work. Alright, so that big claim is gone. It's just not true anymore, it may or may not be his fault, you and I would certainly argue it isn't his fault, but that he can't make that argument anymore. And then every Republican in the Senate fought to free $2.2 trillion bailout package. And you know, those are numbers, that are in the range of what Bernie Sanders was talking about for healthcare, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was talking about we, as a down payment on the Green New Deal. So suddenly, Republicans are signing up to vast expansions of government spending. He can't accuse the democrats of socialism in the same way that he was able to. So the question is, what does he run on? Here's the way Walter Russell Mead argued, in the Wall Street Journal, this is a couple of days ago this week, "With the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging "the country making the election a referendum on China "is perhaps Mr. Trump's only chance "to extend his White House tenure." Victor?
Victor Davis Hanson Well, he has two chances, but you're absolutely right because whether it was fair, or whether it was moral or ethical, we knew given this present status of the Progressive Party, that this crisis was going to be interpreted as being able to do something that Robert Mueller, and Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler, could not, and that is, destroy the Trump presidency at least, and everything is weaponized. So they've created as you say, this lose-lose paradox, if Trump on May 1, unlocks the economy, we go back to a partial normality, then if something breaks out in Louisiana, and we have a hotspot, then Trump put money over lives, and he killed us, and he's got blood on his hands. If on the other hand, nothing happens, things will happen, but more or less it was wise thing to follow the Swedish model, that economy, it's gonna be a real question, whether it's gonna recover. And so it's going to be the Democrats are running against Herbert Hoover, who ruined the economy and put you out of work, so he's gonna lose either way. So how does he get reelected? There's only two chances, as I see it. One is, he's gonna have to change the narrative and get clips, and say to people, I warned you about Chinese perfidy, I warned you about their mercantile system, I warned you they couldn't be trusted, I warned you that they were causing trouble all over the world, and this is it. I had a travel ban early on you, could, and that's Walter Russell needs right, but there's another issue that he didn't mention, Donald Trump is not running on a popularity contest, It is true that the Democrats are gonna try to have on the ballot, Donald Trump versus the disaster of the Coronavirus
Peter Robinson: Right!
Victor Davis Hanson Now, they're running the Coronavirus against him, but that's not gonna be viable. They're running Joe Biden against him. So Joe Biden was worn out after a year of campaigning, so the democratic narrative was, we're gonna go put good old Joe from Scranton, in a comfortable fireside environment, and he's gonna do fireside chats like FDR. Every day he's going to voice some words of wisdom, unite us, let's have the War Production Board, let's do this, and it's gonna be a great situation. Meanwhile, he's promised us a diversity Vice President, and people would be traipsing in, and he would be interviewing people of color, and all, and this would be wonderful, and what happened? No sooner that that narrative start, than, and I'm trying to be as nice as I can, because we're all Gonna be 77, but hopefully, not quite 77 in the way that Joe Biden is, I'd rather be 77 the way that Bernie Sanders has been, in the sense that he's much more hail, but the point is, he thought he could be extemporaneous, it didn't work, so then they said, use the teleprompter. It didn't work, and then they said us both, neither work, and then they said don't even get on TV. And it was almost as if, like, whatever is ailing him, is not progressing in our arithmetic rate, it's geometric, and the more rest and the more relaxation he gets, the worse he performs. So what we've had now, is this really Orwellian situation, where it's like the 1944 election, when everybody knew that FDR would not be able to perform, and whoever the vice president was, and it was Henry Wallace, a socialist, was going to be president, and so what happened is, they thought, oh my gosh, we gotta get this guy off the ticket, and they did at the convention, and put on Harry Truman, and of course, that happened to be, he was dead, I'm not saying suggesting that Joe Biden is dead, but what we're witnessing now is, if we just take away the veil, there is an audition for the next, what they think, will be president of United States. And so everybody is trying to say, Joe Biden is not capable of running an effective campaign, he will not be an effective president, so we'll appoint our cabinet in advance, have them spread out and do the campaigning. And then we have to get a vice president that we can all agree on, could do the job, but yet he's already boxed himself in. they seem for some reason, to be enamored with Andrew Cuomo although he's reigning over a state that has the worst fatality to caseload, and almost in the world, and yet they want him on that ticket, and yet they can't put him on the ticket because he didn't campaign, and he's not a woman, or a minority, or both, and so they got a lot of problems. And I think that's Trump's greatest asset right now.
Peter Robinson: If she would take the post, would Michelle Obama transform Joe Biden's chance, would she reassemble, the Obama coalition and just defeat Trump in a landslide?
Victor Davis Hanson Uh, well, she would be... There's two things that we don't know, her argument would be that, even though you may be sexist voter, I don't really care, because, wink and nod, Barack's coming back for 16, he'll have a 16-year term, that's what the subtext would be. But the other thing is, why does everybody like Michelle Obama? Why is she polled so high, why does her memoir? It's because she's not Michelle Obama? The real Michelle Obama appeared in 2008 the way she always was, and what did she do? She came out and said, she had never been proud of this country, she said, this a darn right mean country. She said they always raise the bar on people. This is a woman who was making a third of the million dollars plain offer, and then they said, Michelle, you're not running for everything, you're not a community organizer anymore. You're not the point man for the, just shut the blank up, and smile, and be a first lady like Nancy Reagan, and have a pet project, nutrition, fine nutrition. And she did, and she turned out to be brilliant at it, and everybody loved Michelle. So she's gonna go back now on the campaign trail, and she's going to be Michelle Obama in 2008, and she's gonna have to campaign and go into a big-time wrestling repartee with Donald Trump. I don't think that's gonna be the same Michelle that we have such fond memories of, I really don't! So there's some problems there, and I think we'll see what happens, but it all hinges on, right now, Peter, two issues, and that is if the economy is snapped back in May, will it be in the ascendance in October? That is, after losing 10% GDP, will the third quarter come out and say, it was either zero or it was on the way up and then people will say, you know what, Trump didn't cause that, it's restored. And are we going to see Joe Biden not be able to pronounce words, not know where he is, and people are gonna say, I like good old Joe, but I'd rather have Trump, at least, I'd rather have accomplishments with Trump than Biden, and we don't know the answer to that yet. And remember when, you remember from your own political career when George HW Bush in 1988 left the Republican Convention, Mike Dukakis was 17 points ahead of--
Peter Robinson: 17 points, I remember that very well!
Victor Davis Hanson And you remember that Ronald Reagan at one point was nine points behind Jimmy Carter, then the economy took off and they had a 12 month, 7% GDP increase, and blew Carter out of the run. So anything can happen now, and we know one thing with Donald Trump is, you cannot trust the polls, because people feel that if they say to an anonymous caller that they're for Trump, or anonymous texter, that information will be aggregated in some nefarious way against them, so they're not gonna say, but he's right around now and the reality of politics, he goes between 45 and 47, he won at 46%, before the 2016--
Peter Robinson: Victor, last question! Three figures from the classical world, this is an exam, get ready. Three figures from the classical world, Augustus, after the assassination of Julius Caesar, the Civil War of the triumvirate, Augustus restores order, Rome goes on to new heights, the Augustan Age lasts over a century. Constantine, he moves the capital from Rome to Constantinople, the Roman Empire continues, but it's not the same, it's just not the same. It never achieves anything like its former morale and splendor. And Augustine, who from his vantage point in Hippo, in North Africa, watches the sack of Rome, and the definitive fall, Rome continues but in some form, but he sees a definitive fall of the civilization that he loved, something basic was over. Augustus who rebuilds, and Rome goes on to new heights, Constantine who holds it together, but it's never the same, and Augustine who watches it fall. Which of those three figures best represents our present moment?
Victor Davis Hanson Well, that's a revealing question, 'cause it requires me to answer it, either what I would like to be true or what I think is true.">
Peter Robinson: You go ahead and give us both, you being you, I'll take as much of your mind as I can get.
Victor Davis Hanson I'm gonna reason out and give you a third alternative, and that's the Emperor Justinian after things had collapsed, 'cause I think a lot of ways America has collapsed. If I look at a lot of indications for, as far as school test scores, or harmony between people, or red-state, blue-state divides, or infrastructure, etc. But something like that had happened, and everybody thought Rome was over with, and it was, in a way, so and then this nut, who spoke Latin, became Emperor Justinian. And first of all--
Peter Robinson Give me the year, roughly?
Victor Davis Hanson It's right around 530, 535, 540s AD. So then what did he do? He said, we've gotta have all of Roman law over the last thousand years, aggregated. He created the Justinian code, which is the basis for modern European law. And then he said, we've gotta restore the East, the Empire. So he sent out a brilliant guy named Bellasaurus, and they did reconstruct the Eastern Empire. And then he said, we've gotta restore the West. And he almost did, he had all of North Africa, He had all of the Balkans, he had most of Italy, he had parts of Spain, of course, the bubonic plague that we talked about earlier, wiped out 500,000. But my point is, then he said, we need a majestic testament to Christianity. And he built Hagia Sophia, Santa Sophia, Saint Sophia Cathedral, it was the largest dome in the world until the St. Peter's, at the Vatican. What I'm getting at, that lasted 1000 years, and it saved the Balkans, and it saved Mediterranean culture and it saved classical thought, because in the West, during the collapse, we wouldn't have had these manuscripts of vicissitudes or a lot of Aristotle, or Plato was saved, not as the politically correct decision says in the Arabic where only 2% were, most of it was saved by Byzantine scholars, that was written, they knew Greek, people in the West have forgotten them. What I'm getting at is that, I think, what we're trying to do right now is say, go back to basics and say, You don't have a postmodern, sophisticated, cool society as Hollywood depicts, or our TVs depict, popular music does, or Snapchat or Twitter, because that's not a good indication of how healthy you are. Every society has to go back to the existential foundations, do we have fuel? I was really worried when we had to deal with corrupt Middle East regimes. Somebody, brilliant people figured out how to horizontally drill, and frack, and convinced us to do it, and we have less carbon emissions than we've ever had, and we're the world's largest producer of natural gas and oil, somebody, and I'm looking out the window, and I know a lot of these people said, you know what, just let us go, we can take an almond orchard 30 years ago, that produced 1000 pounds, and we can produce 3200 pounds with one-tenth of the number of pesticides, and one-fifth the amount of labor. And then somebody said, our universities are sick, the undergraduate curriculums are sick, but don't let us contaminate science, and math, and engineering. And so, I look at the ratings of universities in the world, the top 20, 17 are in the United States, Caltech, MIT, Stanford, and it's not because of their ethnic studies, women's studies, leisure studies, Peace Studies programs, it's what counts. They're good at it, they're better, they're not just good at it, they're better than anybody in the world. I'm not a big fan of the people who run Silicon Valley, but I have enormous admiration for creating an American industry better than anything. And when I look at a lot of people in this country, about half the country are patriotic, and they're competent. And what they've done is, in the last 20 years, they've made the United States the biggest, and safest food producer, the biggest and safest energy producer, the biggest, and best professional education producer, and we have this still, even though it's been under assault, we have the best constitution in the world. And we're not, even for all of the tragic abortions, and the childlessness, and living in your basement till your 30, the fertility rate is still higher than most of postmodern societies, including China, and South Korea, and Japan. So I just look at, and I say, "throughout history, over 2500 years, food, fuel, education, children, all of these things are important, and we're doing pretty well in them. And we could be poised with the right leadership after this thing is over, to be in a much stronger position. The countries that are really hurting right now, I think, are North Korea, Iran, China, Russia. Russia's being wiped out with this energy war and falling prices, and for all of our self-criticism, and bickering, and he did that, no, you did that, we're in a much better position if we'll just be calm, and remember, we can say to ourselves, let's call this the corona project. We did the Manhattan Project, we did the B-29 project, we did the space race part, project man on the moon project, and let's just get a little bit more upbeat, and we can do it rather than, oh my gosh, there's one out of 1000 chance I'm gonna die, I can't go on. and I think we can make it.
Peter Robinson Victor Davis Hanson, the author of one book after another, most recently, The Case for Trump, speaking to us today from his ranch, in the San Joaquin Valley of California, thank you.
Victor Davis Hanson Thank you for having me, Peter.
Peter Robinson For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox nation, I'm Peter Robinson
