In this second and final installment of our conversation with Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson, we cover his writing process for his books and columns, examine how “World War II” has earned that name, and preview his upcoming book, The End of Everything: How War Becomes Armageddon, which offers four cases studies of civilizations that collapsed. Additionally, Professor Hanson discusses why Silicon Valley may be the most powerful political force the world has ever seen, outlines the future of the Republican Party and the Conservative movement, and explains how Donald Trump has changed both institutions forever. Finally, Victor (as he insists we call him), looks at the 2024 presidential race as well as US immigration and makes some surprising observations about his own life and career.
To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:
Peter Robinson: For four decades, he has published on average one book every two years, while writing countless columns and numerous articles, and sitting for interviews on television and podcasts. Today we're with him where he does it. Back at the ranch with Victor Davis Hanson, Uncommon Knowledge, now. Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson. A fellow at the Hoover Institution, Victor Davis Hanson has published more than two dozen books, military histories, such as "A War Like No Other", his definitive account of the Peloponnesian Wars, "Carnage and Culture, Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power", and "The Second World Wars, How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won", but also reflections on contemporary life, such as "The Case for Trump", and "The Dying Citizen, How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization are Destroying the Idea of America." Dr. Hanson is also a commentator on Fox News, a blogger on his own site, "The Blade of Perseus", and the author of articles such as his contribution to the current issue of the New Criterion, a piece entitled "Silicon Valley's Moral Bankruptcy", "On the pestilence in Northern California." I don't think you're going to get invited to lunch at Facebook anytime soon. Victor Davis Hanson, thank you for permitting me to join you here at your ranch in the San Joaquin Valley, I should add. Victor, I began by citing your output over these last four decades at some length. I should add that while you were writing all of these books and producing all of this commentary, you raised three children, you devoted yourself for a number of years to running this ranch yourself, and you spent some 20 years teaching classics up the road at Fresno State. We've been friends for 20 years, and I've never really asked you this, but now I'm going to, how do you do it? How do you...? Truly take us through a typical day. How do you get so much writing done apart from anything else? How does your writing life work?
Victor Davis Hanson: Writing is like riding a bicycle. It's very hard when you start, but if you keep doing it, you just...
Peter Robinson: Get the flywheel going?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. So I typically do two things that allow me to do this. Number one, I have no social life. I mean that. So I'm out here, I don't go out to dinner. I don't have friends over, I don't go and visit people. I've noticed that when I go to speak in, say, Washington, or New York, or San Francisco, or LA, a lot of people in my business, either historians or journalists, they get eaten up. The more that they write, the more they get asked out to eat. You know what I mean? And
Peter Robinson: Oh, sure.
Victor Davis Hanson: It's an inverse ratio. So my attitude is I'm very polite to people, but I don't go anywhere. Maybe once a month. The other thing is, I don't sleep very well, so I typically get about six hours at most, and I wake up at 4:35, I read the news for an hour and a half, and I think of ideas for columns. So I write three columns a week for my website, and then I do a syndicated one for the Chicago Tribunes, and then I do one for American Greatness. And that's five days a week.
Peter Robinson: Wait a minute, that's five columns a week.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. And one of 'em is 2,000, so it's about 5,000 words a week. And then I...
Peter Robinson: And you're done with your column by 11:00 in the morning or?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, maybe 9:00. And then I have a wonderful assistant, Megan Ring, and she calls me and says, and I let her do everything. So.
Peter Robinson: She schedules you?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. So she says, "These people want podcasts, interviews, TV. I think you should do these."
Peter Robinson: Oh, she actually comes up... She doesn't just say, here are the requests, Megan,
Victor Davis Hanson: She knows.
Peter Robinson: Megan says, "Here's my recommendation."
Victor Davis Hanson: When I first hired her, I said, I gave her some guidelines. She quickly went beyond them. She'll say, "This person has a great audience," "This person was rude to you last time," "This person didn't follow through," "This person canceled." So she sets the day for me.
Peter Robinson: Mm hm.
Victor Davis Hanson: And then I usually do, say a podcast or two for other people. I do local, I try to help local radio, I do national radio. And then by, usually, 11:00, she calls back and says, "Here's your talking points. You're gonna be on this Fox show." I try to do three or four a week. I do it right here in the barn. And then usually about 11 o'clock I work on a book and I'm working on a book. I use a history book. This is the end of everything.
Peter Robinson: Wait a minute. Wait a minute, sorry. You just described a day that would leave most ordinary mortals in need of a nap by 11:00, including me, by the way.
Victor Davis Hanson: But if you do it, I mean, it'd be like me, it would be me like me saying, you're interviewing me. How do you do that? Why aren't you looking at the notes? Because you do it and you're good at it. So if you do it enough, I've written like 26 books. I know how to do it now, and I can do it. It's like Andrew Roberts' people. How does that guy pull not just all of those books, but those big good books?
Peter Robinson: Yes.
Victor Davis Hanson: And the answer is...
Peter Robinson: Our friend historian Andrew Roberts, right?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, yes. You know, Churchill, Napoleon, he has a methodology.
Peter Robinson: Andrew gets up at 4:30 in the morning too.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, yes. Right. And so Neil Ferguson, another colleague of ours, is the same way. So if you have a method, and so mine is an hour and a half, scour the news, write your column for that day or the next day, I'm usually a day ahead, go have the interviews and then work on the book. And then I'm also the new Criterion writer in residence. So I've got about 30,000 words for them a year. So then I work on a long article, and I try to do one or two scholarly articles, maybe a year. I try to do that. And then I used to speak every two weeks, I think, but I can't do that, 'cause I, you know, I'm getting older, so I don't speak as much. But you'd be surprised if you don't sleep eight hours, and you don't go out at night, and you don't travel a lot anymore, you have a lot more time. And then the other thing is, I took the farm and rented it. So I have a wonderful renter. It looks much better than when I farmed it. He takes care of it. And the year before, two years ago, I used to do all the yard work myself, pruning, and I hired a guy to do it. So now I've got a lot more time.
Peter Robinson: All right. You've established your method and I almost believe you. Well, I mean it still strikes me as miraculous. I still can't quite see how anybody, but, alright. Let me ask about a couple of specific projects. One is your 2017 book, "The Second World Wars". I love all your books, but when you told me you were working on a book on the second World War, I of course did not say this to you, but I thought, "Ugh, this is a reach. What can Victor find to say that's new and fresh about the second World War, seven decades later after tens of thousands of books and mono...?" And you did it. There's some new insight, some striking new facts on every page. So how did you find time to research that book? Or was this a kind of lifetime of reading?
Victor Davis Hanson: It's kind of a lifetime. I had been reading a lot, and there were two things that really helped me with that book. One was that I had studied and written books about antiquity, a book called "Carnage and Culture". I wrote about Western civilization over 2,500 years. I'd written a lot of scholarly articles on different periods and so I had comparative models I could use. And a lot of people in World War II are specialists. So if I was making a point, I could draw in what happened during the Crusades or the Pelopon...you know, that helped. And then the other thing was, I was trained actually as a very narrow philologist at... Stanford Classics at that time was Philology, Greek, Greek, Greek, Latin, Latin. But it had...
Peter Robinson: Philology is the study of the language itself.
Victor Davis Hanson: The language. And so if you were in a seminar on Greek history and Professor Raubitschek said, "Mr. Hanson, I want you to talk about the Battle of Chaeronea." And I would get up and I would say, "Well, Xenophon has," or I'd say, "Diodorus, or Plutarch, and Alexander was on the right," he'd stop. "What is the word for wing? How do you know that?" "It's karos." "Continue." And he would say, and then, "There was a push," "How do you know there was a push? Did you just imagine that?" I said, "No, the word was othismos, it's in the texts." So you had to ground everything. So when I was looking at World War II, I said, "Why do we call it World War II or the Second World War, when there were all these different wars?" There were nine wars, you know, they invaded, the Germans invaded Poland, but that was a Polish war. So, I started thinking, when did they call it World War II? It was always the great war, and then it was the Polish War, the Norwegian war, the French War. It was only really when they invaded the Soviet Union that people said, "Oh my God,"
Peter Robinson: "It's happened again."
Victor Davis Hanson: "This happened again." And now they started to use commonly the Second World War in Britain, and World War II. So I was trying to, and I tried to do that in all the chapters. I would try to ask, what was the word, what was the terminology? Why did it do that? And then that leads you to a different way of investigating. And then also I'm kind of a contrarian. So if I get to a point...
Peter Robinson: Kind of contrarian.
Victor Davis Hanson: Well when they say the Sherman tank was, the Sherman tank was inadequate because it was a Ronson lighter, and the tiger blew it up. And I say, "Well, why was it inadequate?" We had to take tanks 3000 miles over to Europe. They were right next to the battlefield. So we couldn't make them that big 'cause they had to put them on a crane. And they wouldn't, you know, 60 tons doesn't do it. 30 might. And we could mass fabricate them and for one hour of maintenance we could go 10 hours. They had one to one. And maybe you wouldn't see a Tiger very often 'cause we made 50,000 Shermans and they made 1600. So I was trying to think of things to put my mind in why people made decisions that are considered stupid, but maybe they weren't stupid, maybe there were other reasons at the time that we've forgotten about or that are logical. And actually the Sherman Tank was a very good tank given what its missions were and its reliability. And you know, every tank that was destroyed, three people of the five survived, 'cause they had very practical ways of storing ammunition. They had a trap door in the bottom and the later model. So I was always trying to, with a fresh idea, say to myself, "Why did Hitler go do something stupid and go into the Soviet Union when he really had the war won?" Well, maybe he didn't have a Navy to invade England or Britain. So you go back and you look at primary documents and he says, "Well, if I take the Soviet Union out, then Britain is isolated." And you think, "Well how stupid is that? I haven't heard of that since the Peloponnesian War that you go, you can't beat Sparta, so you attack another democracy in Sicily? Well maybe you can't take Britain so you attack your ally, the Soviet Union?" But there was a logic to it. It was a stupid logic, but you'll try to understand why people do things. So that was one thing that I really wanted to bring out in that book.
Peter Robinson: The book you're working on right now, called "The End of Everything, How War Becomes Armageddon", lovely, cheerful topic, Victor. So that book, you're working on it, what's the pub date?
Victor Davis Hanson: It's going to be in the spring. The rough draft is done.
Peter Robinson: In other words, a year from...
Victor Davis Hanson: No spring. About a year from now.
Peter Robinson: Spring of 2024.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I turned it in June, in 30 days.
Peter Robinson: Okay. So "The End of Everything", it's four civil
Victor Davis Hanson: Case studies.
Peter Robinson: Case studies of civilizations that collapsed is it?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. So I'm not talking about the Mycenaean ends that we don't know how they collapsed or the Minoan ones from the earthquake at Thera, or a plague, a natural disaster. And I'm not talking about say Hiroshima, that wipes out a city, but this, the culture endures. I'm not talking about Yugoslavia that recombines, or there's no longer Prussia, but there's still Prussians. I'm talking about when war goes haywire and an entire civilization is at the brink and the enemy has the ability, and the targeted, maybe they're naive, but they have got themselves in a situation where they're not really fully cognizant. If they lose, it's not gonna be, it's the end. And so I'd look at Alexander's destruction of the city of Thebes. And there's no more Thebans. He kills everybody or enslaves them. And that's it.
Peter Robinson: Thebes ends.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, I mean of course there's a place called Thebes and he will rebuild it. And in the third Punic war, the Carthaginians had 500,000 people. But at that point, that's the Carthaginians. You wipe them out, and Scipio Africanus did. That's it. There's still vestigial Punic spoken, you know, and there's still child sacrifice in the maghrib. But that is it. Constantinople, at that very moment when Constantine XI, 1453, he's in trouble because the vast Byzantine empire has collapsed to the suburbs of Constantinople and parts of the mainland of Greece. And that's it. A little bit about the Black Sea. And he has got an army of 80,000 and they want to destroy the Byzantine Hellenic Greek speaking Eastern Roman Empire. And they do. After that's over, they're sure there's some Greeks here and there, but there's no Byzantine empire, and today there's no concept that Anatolia, modern day Turkey, Constantinople was Greek, and Western forever until 1413.
Peter Robinson: Something ended.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. Same thing with the Aztecs. They...
Peter Robinson: That's your fourth case.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes, 1519, they had no idea that when they let Hernan Cortes in with 500 conquistadors, that he was an absolute military genius. And he understood that the Aztec empire was hated by all of its subject states, the Tlaxcalans and everybody. But more importantly, Montezuma was dealing with somebody who sailed 5,000 miles, and had that ability to do it. When they ran out of gunpowder, they manufactured their own indigenously, and he was dealing with some of the most deadly people in the history of civilization and the Castilian conquistador. They had been fighting Islam during the Reconquista for 200 years. They've been fighting on the north coast of Africa against Islam. And they were fighting as you know, Protestants. And these people grew up with Toledo steel and they had the finest metallurgy in the world. And when you unleashed them, and they had a fanatic, I mean, I'm not, that's not a derogatory term. You read Bernal Diaz, about how they looked at Catholicism, it was a living cohesive, holistic idea. And they really did believe that they were there for a God-given purpose to stop human sacrifice, cannibalism, sodomy. And they had to convert these people. And there were no two ways about it. And the Aztecs didn't look at war like that. It was: capture people, knock them out, tie them up, ritualistic, and sacrifice them, tear their hearts out while they were beating. I mean, people don't like to talk about that, but they did not have a western idea. You go and find the enemy and obliterate them, kill them, and then you have a strategic victory. So they were, and so when they didn't realize that when they went to war, they thought they had four million subjects, but they were dealing with somebody that comes along like Napoleon, or Alexander the Great, when you're in that situation as the Thebans learned, or Skipio, you're dead. And so in the epilogue, I try to say, is that still possible? Is Israel a one...? There's certain people in the world that have existential enemies. The Greeks, 12 million Greeks. Mr. Erdogan the other day said, "One day the Athenians would wake up and missiles would be dropping outta sky."
Peter Robinson: The Turkish Prime Minister.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And an Iranian parliamentarian the other day said, "Israel's still a one bomb bomb state." And we're just looking at Ukraine, and I counted now there's 19 incidents of a Russian high ranking official saying that they want to use nuclear weapons to end the rogue state of Ukraine. So what I'm getting at is that we think in the modern world, human nature has changed, our technology is, the defense is over the offense or something, I don't know. But there are situations in which we could have an extinction of a culture. It's still possible.
Peter Robinson: Alright, from history, history, big picture, something a little bit smaller, if I may, to go from history to your commentary. Your current article in the New Criterion, "Silicon Valley's Moral Bankruptcy". By the way, so you start with history, at what point in your career do you become a commentator on present day events? When did that happen?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I wrote some books that sold pretty well in the 90s, and there was a guy at the Wall Street Journal, Dave N. Osmond, do you know him?
Peter Robinson: Sure.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. And he would call me up and ask me to write op-eds for the Wall Street on military affairs. And Max Boot would do the same. And Max and I, even though we differ politically, and we didn't at that time.
Peter Robinson: Max is a military historian.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: And journalist, right?
Victor Davis Hanson: And he's a very good military historian.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: So he would ask me, so I would write for the Journal. And then the strangest thing happened. On 9/11, I was flying to Hillsdale to give a talk on George Patton. And I was in the air and they turned the flight around, and I was sitting at the Fresno Airport locked in, and Rich Lowry, who I didn't know anybody at the National Review, called.
Peter Robinson: Editor of National Review.
Victor Davis Hanson: And he said one of his writers had left, and it was Ann Coulter. And she'd written, I think, and I don't want to, I didn't know the details, but apparently she'd written something about nuking Mecca in the aftermath. And they thought that was... I don't know if she did, I think she did it tongue in cheek, but they couldn't use that. So she quit. So there was an opening immediately, they needed a column. So he asked me and said, now it might be just a day or two. So I wrote it and then I literally wrote two a week for 10 years, and one a week for 11. I never missed one for the next 21 years.
Peter Robinson: Alright, The New Criterion, "Silicon Valley," this is a very large claim. "Silicon Valley is now driving the National Democratic Party. And with it, the nation steadily leftward." Explain that.
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, let's take the 2020 election. Mark Zuckerberg infused not 50 million, not a hundred million, not 200 million, not 300, $419 million into pre-selected precincts. And if you look at how the money was spent, it was really to absorb the work of the registrars in order where to get out the vote of particular constituencies that were going to vote for Joe Biden. Molly Ball, in the February issue of Time in 2021, a very infamous article, she in her giddiness, her triumphalism about how they won, she used the word "cabal" and "conspiracy" repeatedly. And she talked about how...
Peter Robinson: And favorably in her case.
Victor Davis Hanson: Favorably. She was rubbing it in. She said, "You know what, we worked with Silicon Valley for the money. We worked with Facebook and Twitter to put a lid on" what they called "disinformation." And what that meant was that if Hunter's laptop appears right before the election and you have a repairman with a slip that says that he signed for it. And you've got Tony Bobulinski saying that some of the messages I wrote, because I can see them, and you know the history of Hunter, and he will not ever say it's not his on screen.
Peter Robinson: So there's no serious doubt that it's his laptop. Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: There's no serious doubt. So then...
Peter Robinson: But it's before the election in which his father...
Victor Davis Hanson: But then she talks about, she doesn't mention it, but she says the DNC, and so then you get Anthony Blinken to call up Mike Morell, interim, former interim, before Secretary of State, he was a high official on the foreign policy team. They organized 51 former and they swear they don't quite- they're very careful.
Peter Robinson: Former intelligence officer, right?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. It has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. And the whole purpose is to have Joe Biden be able to tell Donald Trump that 51 people say it's Russian disinformation
Peter Robinson: Which he does in the first debate.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, and the suggestion is Donald Trump is back to his collusionary days. So that was all trumped up. But then you have the FBI giving $3 million to hire Twitter people to suppress information. And then another word, another government agency, OGA that probably the CIA. And we don't know the whole story about Facebook yet. So my point is that Silicon Valley is knee deep in giving cash in a way that we've never seen before. 419. I mean that was more than the entire budgets of the 1990 campaigns. One person, and he's not alone. We have Sam Bankman-Fried's mother professor at Stanford, she's raising 60 million from Silicon Valley, in dark money. They don't call it dark if it's left, and pushing it into congressional races. And then we've got the FBI working with social media in Silicon Valley to suppress. We have the Hamilton project, we have all these quote "Silicon Valley projects" to find "disinformation" and "misinformation" and suppress it. And that can be from a Google search. So if you write conspiracy theory and you search it in Google, there's not gonna be any left wing. The first 200 searches are gonna be, you know, an algorithm is going to have them in a particular ideological bias. So they're knee deep, and they have a lot of power on the dissemination and the money involved. So $9 trillion in market capitalization between San Francisco and Sunnyvale. It's the greatest concentration of wealth in the history of civilization.
Peter Robinson: Right. We're sitting in your ranch house where you're the fifth generation rancher. So you know something about the history of California politics. Silicon Valley. Here's what occurred to me as I read your piece in The New Criterion: Silicon Valley begins in the old days with the development of semiconductors, fabricating actual objects. And, listen to some of the early figures. David Packard.
Victor Davis Hanson: Wonderful.
Peter Robinson: David Packard, patriotic,
Victor Davis Hanson: Wonderful,
Peter Robinson: I don't know what his voting record was, but a conservative in every incense that matters, serves as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Richard Nixon, his co-founder of Hewlett Packard, Bill Hewlett,
Victor Davis Hanson: Wonderful.
Peter Robinson: The man who is generally credited as inventing the venture capital industry is Bill Draper, William Draper.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Who ends the second World War.
Victor Davis Hanson: First gentleman at team at,
Peter Robinson: Right. And so, so how do-
Victor Davis Hanson: The Stanford Research Institute, they created Silicon Valley.
Peter Robinson: And how do you go from these figures who were patriotic, who had served in the Second World War, or who had in one way or another understood the importance of national defense, how do you go from, how do you go from David Packard to Mark Zuckerberg? What happened there?
Victor Davis Hanson: There weren't transitionary teams. So a guy like Steve Jobs,
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: Embodied elements of both. In other words, he was a hands-on person, and in the early days they did fabricate things in the United States, but as we globalized and they found out that that market was not an American market, but the goal of Silicon Valley was to have a smartphone in 6 million hands, 6 billion hands, or a laptop or a Google search. And then it evolved in, we're not even gonna make the stuff 'cause there's no profit. We're gonna send it to Southeast Asia or China, but we're going to have the intellectual property that runs it all. And that's where the...
Peter Robinson: So the packaging on the iPhone these days says designed in California.
Victor Davis Hanson: Exactly. So then you have, as I said, the amount of money was staggering. So you have these people, it's not just Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates, or the Google people, it's the mid-level manager that's making 10 million, 15 million, 20 million. And you've got thousands of them. And they have convinced themselves that in this global transformation, there were certain anointed people that were smarter, better educated, more imaginative, and morally superior, and that's why they're wealthy. And the proof of that is their success. And they have options that no one's ever had. So they were going to remake America according to the protocols of Atherton and Menlo Park with this pretty nice little place. And they started to use that ability in very insidious ways. And so, you know, if you control, if you can say who can post something and we will decide whether it's amoral, pornographic, disinformation, misinformation, only us and we're Google and we have 90%, 90%. These people make JP Morgan, or they make Rockefeller, or they make standard oil trusts, they look like Pikers, they're monopolies they have. Apple has 50% of the world cell phone market, just the phones. They have monopolies, and I think it was the Google person that bragged that he bought out 250 companies a year, and Zuckerberg, they own all these companies. And they don't either. They go to Silicon Valley and they convince all these startups, "We're here and if you got a great startup, we will buy it." And that's why they do it. So they can sell out and for the rest of their lives be set with a billion dollars. And then the ones that are not quite so good, they're not sure, they're not. So they buy them anyway and then they destroy them, and it's worth it. So they have complete market share. You get a democratic administration in and they say this money, wink a nod, goes to your candidates, and 94% of it, from what we know, goes to the left. And then you get a stupid.
Peter Robinson: And for contributions from Silicon Valley companies.
Victor Davis Hanson: And then you get a stupid Republican administration in.
Peter Robinson: Not hard to find.
Victor Davis Hanson: Not hard to find. And they say, "You know what, we embodied Robert. They weren't Robert Barrons, these were entrepreneurs. These guys made America in the 19th century, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Stanfords. We're just like them. And you guys believe in the free market, and we bring in foreign exchange and we're your guys." And that's a great con they do. And you can't get any Republican to say, "You know what, these are monopolies."
Peter Robinson: Okay, so let me talk about the opposition then. You're talking about Silicon Valley, this kind of transmission mechanism from Silicon Valley to the Democratic party, pulling the whole nation to the left. All right. We'll come to the Republican party proper in a moment, but first is there some kind of correction within Silicon Valley going on? And I mentioned Elon Musk.
Victor Davis Hanson: There is.
Peter Robinson: So he's bought Twitter at an enormous loss to himself. Staggering loss. He paid 44 billion according to his own accounting, the company's now worth less than half that. You're not gonna be allowed to incite violence, you're not gonna be allowed to engage in certain crude or hateful behavior. But if you have political speech, anything goes. Good guy?
Victor Davis Hanson: Good guy.
Peter Robinson: And is Elon Musk, as far as you can tell, so far a one-off? Or is he the beginning of a correction?
Victor Davis Hanson: No, there's people, I hear it all the time, I don't need to mention names, but there are people from very different directions that have had it. Some people, I talked to a silicon magnate and he said this to me, "I have an idea, my kids, it can be very minute," he says, "My kids did all everything they want. They worked very hard. They got straight A's, they got perfect essays. They didn't get into Stanford." Stanford is what they worship. Stanford fueled this, Stanford people are on those boards, and those people are on Stanford boards, and Stanford gives it the academic patina they all worship. And when Stanford turns around and says, "Because of racial quotas, we're only gonna let in 22% white students," you count 'em up and you know, if you look at the 22% of the incoming class, there's 3 or 400 and you count up all the administrators, all the people who pay the athletes, there's not very much room for 11% white males. So you're telling all of these Silicon Valley people that worship you and worship left and affirmative action that unfortunately they're gonna have to die on the altar of their beliefs. And that's one thing they don't want to do. The second thing is they start to see that people don't like them and they look around and they think, "Well we saw what happened with Budweiser. We saw what happened with Disney." And they understand that people don't trust them. Fake news is really a word for Silicon Valley content, electronic content, basically. And so they're starting to think it's wiser or maybe, and they go after people, they go after Elon Musk, you know, they go after people in that community, they turn on people, they say, you know, Tesla, Tesla, we don't, Tesla was, everybody wanted a Tesla. Suddenly nobody wanted a Tesla because Elon Musk was ostracized by this pack. And so they're not nice people is what I'm trying to say. And you have these people that, I mean the number, when I was writing this article about the trifecta of Stanford, San Francisco politics, and Silicon Valley, I couldn't keep up with the scandals. I would send in a graph, they'd say, "Victor, this former Stanford graduate now titan of Silicon, just got indicted." So it was right in the middle of it was the Bankman-Fried. So here they come and you know, he's in the crypto currency and he lives on the Stanford campus. And Carolyn Ellison is the CEO, she's a Stanford student and his parents are Stanford professors, and they have 16 million supposedly purportedly in real estate. And just when I'm doing that, then there was Theranos, I'm writing, there was Elizabeth Holmes, a Stanford dropout that was an 8 billion meltdown by a device that a courageous immunologist, John Ioannidis, I read the article, said this, cannot... He didn't say it didn't work. He said it couldn't work.
Peter Robinson: Could not work. In principle,.
Victor Davis Hanson: It's not possible. And people, very courageous, brilliant guy, they just swarmed without money because of the people and that group think. And then, you know, she did the whole, they do this, she wore the black get up just 'cause of like, Steve Jobs, Bankman-Fried wore the slob get up. But they have this affected idea that they're con artists, they're PT Barnum, a lot of these people. And that's just two of them. And they do it all the time.
Peter Robinson: So Vic, so what I want to, so there's some notion that the middle of the country has had enough.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: All right. So can we talk for a moment about the politics of this? It is odd in some sense that Silicon Valley, high degree of education, social mores that have little connection with much of the middle of the country, that they should be the champions of the Democratic party because, well, here, this is something you've written. "I grew up in the same house where I now live," and where we're talking right now, "and in a farming democratic household that worshiped Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy." And now the people who worshiped Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy are Republicans. You begin to get this with the so-called Reagan Democrats moving into the Republican party. And in "The Case for Trump,'' your book about Donald Trump, which was really the case for the people who voted for Trump.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: That's the way I took the book rather than the case for Trump himself.
Victor Davis Hanson: That was the title. How he won, "How Trump Won" was the original title.
Peter Robinson: I see. Oh, the publisher wanted something that, okay.
Victor Davis Hanson: Publisher. Sold a lot more books.
Peter Robinson: Well, the publisher knows...
Victor Davis Hanson: They know more than I knew.
Peter Robinson: They knew the business.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: So how did this happen? And if the Republican party is the inheritor of the hardworking, patriotic, ordinary American, the Harry Truman American, the Kennedy American, John Kennedy, by the time we get to Teddy, something's happened to the Democratic party. Is the Republican party, is Donald Trump doing a good job of representing those people?
Victor Davis Hanson: I don't know about that, but he caught on first about what you just described.
Peter Robinson: Donald Trump saw it.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. 2016 Was the most talented group of Republican candidates I'd seen. I mean, you had Marco Rubio.
Peter Robinson: Jeb Bush was a brilliant governor of Florida.
Victor Davis Hanson: He was.
Peter Robinson: An accomplishment.
Victor Davis Hanson: And Marco Rubio was coming into his own. Everybody said Scott Walker was perfect, he was the Ron DeSantis of 2016. And then you had...
Peter Robinson: Chris Christie was a very impressive governor.
Victor Davis Hanson: He was. Ted Cruz. Carly Fiorina was the executive from... They had everybody, but nobody saw that 5 to 8 million people had not voted for McCain and they had not voted for Romney, and they would never vote for those people because they felt that the Republican party was an aris, still an aristocratic golfing party, but more importantly had for their own elite corporate interest had allowed, the Democratic party had empowered it, it didn't oppose it. So the growth of big government, the growth of globalization, all of that was not negotiable. The Republicans agreed with all of it. And this Trump came along and he said, "China's cheating. We have to be symmetric. Why can't we have industry in Youngstown? The people are better, they have cheaper energy, natural gas, and oil is here, it is cheaper than Japan." So he asked questions that they didn't. And you know, when you, another thing, there were two or three things that flipped everything. Number one, the Democratic party was interested in class. Marxism had never worked in this country because people were upwardly mobile.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yesterday's oppress was tomorrow's...
Peter Robinson: There was no permanent proletariat.
Victor Davis Hanson: Exactly. So they came up with the idea that race was immutable, that was Barack Obama. He said that the real oppression is not class because it's too immutable. You know, we can't really count on them. These former blue collar people will turn on us. But if we say class doesn't matter, and we say it's not the old binary of black white, it's not going to be 12% African American, and it's not gonna be 88% white. It's going to be Asian, Hispanic, indigenous, black, mixed race. And that's 35, 30 to 35%. And they have a grievance against the white majority for all sorts of oppressions. So I'm gonna have a binary and that group will then be the constituency of the Democratic party. And unlike class, this is immutable because you may be able to construct your gender, but you cannot construct your class. Elizabeth Warren did...
Peter Robinson: Your race, right?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah. You’re your race, right. Elizabeth Warren can't do it. Roy Churchill can't do it. Okay. So suddenly if class doesn't matter, then Oprah's a victim, and Eric Holder's a victim, and LeBron is a victim. And all of these people are victims, and they're all gonna be permanent constituents for the Democratic party because you established they've been oppressed because this is a systemically racist. That's the first thing they did. And they got a huge group of young people on that basis. The second thing they did, they stopped, the wealthy people are bad. It used to be that they all played golf. Barack Obama's played golf as much as Donald Trump. Golf was good. You look at the zip codes, the highest income zip codes, all went left wing. Congressional districts by income, they all go left wing. I went through the Fortune 400 and I just looked at the names and the occupations. It's not construction, assembly, real estate, agriculture, mining, transportation, it's tech, insurance, media, global, it's these huge fortunes. And it's not, you know, 30 years ago there was about five billionaires. If you're worth 3 billion, you're not even on it. So we have staggering amounts of capital. And the Democratic Party felt that those people were going to be the movers and shakers because they had transcended any worry about schools or energy. They could do anything they wanted. So they were utopians. So they came out and said, "You know what, we're gonna have the Paris Climate Accords," or, "We're gonna bar about, we're gonna have an open border," or, "We're going to have Soros fund the DAs." All of these things were the problem
Peter Robinson: Because they were so rich they didn't have to worry about bad schools or crime in the streets.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah, it's John Kerry flying all over in a private jet and says, "He has to use it so he can help climate change." It was a complete divorce from any charge of hypocrisy. They were annoyed that they made money because they were better and smarter than the rest of them. These were the captains of the universe. And that was the Democratic party. It was wealthy, it was obsessed with race, and it said to all these people in the Midwest, in East Palestine, Pennsylvania, Ohio, excuse me, or Youngstown or Dayton, "You were losers. And you are drags, you're chumps, you're deplorables, you're irredeemables, and you're clingers. You're too religious, you're not cosmopolitan. You're not on the coast that looks at Europe. You're not on the coast that looks at Asia." We just wrote them off, and they're white and whites are shrinking. And the funny thing was, they had all of these titles, I think Lanny Davis, the Clinton lawyer, he had one, John Judas had one, James Carville, they all had a variation on the New Democratic Majority.
Peter Robinson: Oh right.
Victor Davis Hanson: Or they had the Emerging Democratic.
Peter Robinson: Right, right.
Victor Davis Hanson: Or even Demography is Destiny, remember that word? And it was open borders, immigration, race. And all of a sudden somebody like Tucker Carlson says, "This is what they're doing." They said, "You don't do that, you racist. You believe in the great replacement theory."
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: All Tucker was doing was using their own words. So that was what happened. The Democratic party became the party of the very wealthy and the subsidized poor. And people categorized that as race. And they just wrote off the middle of the country. And Donald Trump said to himself, "I can do what. They're still Reagan Democrats, they're still parole voters, they're still out there. And I'll bring them back into the fold."
Peter Robinson: So Victor, you wrote that book, "The Case for Trump" in 2019 as he was preparing to run for reelection. Now here we are, 2023, he's announced for 2024, he's going to do it again. May I read to you Ruth Weiss writing earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal. And the question is, what's the right and reasonable way to think about Donald J. Trump today? Here's Ruth Weiss" In 'The Case for Trump'," She quotes you, "In 'The Case for Trump' Victor Davis Hanson cites," and she quotes you, "'Massive deregulation stepped up, energy production, tax cuts, increased border enforcement'," all these things that the first three years or so of the Trump administration brought, "'as well as near record, low minority unemployment, a strong stock market and low inflation rates.'" Then she adds in her own view, "In foreign affairs, the Abraham Accords are enough by themselves to secure Trump's reputation." And here comes the but. "But the qualities of leadership that had made Mr. Trump electable, he himself abused more damagingly than his detractors had damaged him. It is now more urgent than ever to recover and restore the best of America, but also more difficult because the former president fails to embody the greatness of America that he seeks to restore. Sober Americans will therefore defend the Trump record without supporting his candidacy, and deny him reelection while defeating those who did not allow him to govern."
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I agree that we need an open primary. If that thesis is correct and there's a lot to recommend it, then there's gonna be a candidate, isn't there? That's going to embody that. And a face off with Trump will defeat him.
Peter Robinson: So that's your position right now. Let's have an open primary.
Victor Davis Hanson: Absolutely, and absolutely. And I wrote in "The Case for Trump," one of the themes, and I ended the book with the tragic hero, whether it was Sophoclean, or John Ford. And I said that we were in a crisis, we brought somebody in who admittedly by his own testimony was a flawed character, but he had skill sets that were not palatable to the consensus, bipartisan. So like Shane or Gary Cooper in "High Noon," or the searchers, John Wayne, Ethan Edwards, he did it. He really is what you said. But the methodology of how he did it, once it started to work, people had the luxury to say, "Well, I like all of that, but you don't really have to take a gun and shoot somebody." Or, "We don't want those guns in Jackson Hole anymore." As to quote Shane, basically. So then he rides off in the sunset. And I said he would do that. But right now, the issue, there's two issues. And I think the DeSantis people, their narrative is, as I understand it, is we...
Peter Robinson: Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. "We get even, we don't get mad." "We get even," in other words, we don't bring in an Omarosa, or Scaramucci or all those people we have, don't have that baggage. And while.
Peter Robinson: Sober, intelligent,
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: Discipline, same aims as Trump.
Victor Davis Hanson: Same aim,
Peter Robinson: But more competent.
Victor Davis Hanson: And for that to be a successful narrative, he has to say, "Donald Trump did this country a great favor by redefining the Republican party and took it out of the corporate boardroom and among the people. Nobody did that but him. But we're looking forward, not backward." And then the second point is, you can see what the Democrats are doing, they're doing what they did in 2016. Alvin Bragg hands off to the sexual suit, she's gonna have.
Peter Robinson: Alvin Bragg is the DA in Manhattan.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. And then he has been charged in the civil suit.
Peter Robinson: Right. The jury found him liable yesterday.
Victor Davis Hanson: And we're just about to have Letitia James step up and say, "He overvalued in New York." His- I mean, that seems to be what everybody everywhere does. But for some reason she thinks that Donald Trump is uniquely over evaluating an asset for a loan or something. And then we go to Ms. Willis in Georgia,
Peter Robinson: Georgia
Victor Davis Hanson: For the phone call. I don't know how many politicians haven't called the registrars and said, "You know what, there's votes out there." But nevertheless, and then when she takes the baton, then she's gonna hand it off to Jack Smith, the special prosecutor in Florida. And now we're 18 months out. So it's slash slash slash. And the idea is that we're so ganging up on Trump and we're finding such an, we're applying such an asymmetrical standard vis-a-vis the Bidens or anybody else. And we're doing that intentionally because we want all of you Republicans to have empathy, and his polls went up. And then you're going to nominate him, and then as soon as he is nominated, we're going to keep him with gag orders, writs, court appearances. And you know what'll happen? Even a lot, not maybe the base, but a lot of the supporters who will vote for him, they're gonna go into a fetal position and they're gonna go, "I can't take this anymore. What did he do? He's like a swimmer who cuts his arm and the shark comes. If he didn't cut his arm, the shark wouldn't have come. So why did he do this?" So for that gives, I think you'll see DeSantis come in and say, "I don't have time for the melodrama and psychodramas and I will get good people and I'll do what I did in Florida for the whole country." That's gonna be his narrative. And for Trump to, Trump is going to have to say, "I am sort of a magnet. I bring out the real left. I am a sacrificial lamb for you people. I go through hell, I gave up my money, but what Bragg is doing to me, what James is doing that shows you, I was the one that showed you what they're capable of: Russian collusion. I showed you that they doctored Faisal, I showed you what Comey, I showed you that McCabe lied four times. I showed you that Brendan lied under oath. I showed you Clapper lied under oath. I showed you Kleinsmith doctored a thing. I showed you the disinformation, and I'm bringing this in some, I don't know, existential cataclysm. I have that ability to do that." And that's a catharsis. That's his argument. I assume. But what I would like to see is an open debate and people bring those arguments out and I just don't think that anybody deserves, you know, I mean, when Donald Trump says that it's disloyal, that somebody's gonna run, he's not president, there's an interim.
Peter Robinson: So the argument you don't buy is the moment Donald Trump declared everybody else should have said it's him. We'll let him take the nomination.
Victor Davis Hanson: No, it's better for Donald Trump. Because if people believe that he's excessive and he tweets things that are crude and mean, then maybe he will find out in a close race that he can't do that and he'll have to adjust. And the same thing about DeSantis. If he runs and people say, "Well, he's a cardboard, he doesn't have Trump's charisma." How do we know? Maybe he does, maybe he can get out in front of a crowd and do pretty well. But if you look at, that's what the primaries are designed for.
Peter Robinson: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina.
Victor Davis Hanson: And I think it'll make them much stronger. And the problem is not on the Republican side, it's on the Democratic side, because they have in their identity politics, have pre-selected a vice presidential candidate whose performance has, it's not as impressive as her one delegate candidacy.
Peter Robinson: Kamala Harris.
Victor Davis Hanson: Kamala Harris.
Peter Robinson: For president herself.
Victor Davis Hanson: Her grammar, her syntax, her vocabulary, you know, it's wash, rent, spin again and again and again. And that's not, people don't have confidence in her. And Joe Biden is declining at a geometric rate, not arithmetic. He's not the same person he was last month. Last month. He wasn't the same. So what are they gonna do? And the country isn't going to hell. It's every single issue, energy, border, crime, foreign policy, economy, inflation, interest rates do not merit 50% approval.
Peter Robinson: Victor, from the present day politics to a larger view. You've just published a column about the fall of Byzantium in 1453. You make the point that Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire lasted a thousand years longer than Rome did. Rome falls in the fifth century. Constantinople holds on until 1453. "Yet this jewel of the ancient world" I'm quoting you, "that was once home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell. There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a Turkish army of more than 150,000." What had gone wrong?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I mean, in the thousand years it's pretty good. We were only on 247. So we'll see if we make it a thousand, I'm very dubious that we are. But what happened was that first of all, Islam was uniting, and there was the great schism and the Western.
Peter Robinson: In the West.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. In the 11th century. But they could not unite. And the Byzantines were a garrison state. So they felt betrayed by Catholicism, and the Christendom had the resources to stop. Christendom had the resources to stop the Ottoman assault. But they never, I mean, 7,000 people on the walls held out for seven weeks. And if one Italian mercenary leader hadn't been wounded, they probably would've held out. So they could have brought 20,000, 40,000. That was one thing. Second is why were they so flexible and why were they so adoptive? And they weren't the 15, one of the things is they had been destroyed almost by the Francs and the fourth crusade.
Peter Robinson: Right.
Victor Davis Hanson: That hurt them. And then following that Constantinople by its location as a nexus into the Black Sea and between Europe and Asia, it was a Petri dish. So in under Justinian, they lost half the population to the plague. And they lost a half again in the fourth century, it was a very congested city. People came all over the world to trade. It was the view of, it had a mirror on the east. The third thing that happened was in the early 15th century, before Columbus, I mean they, it falls in 1453. Columbus goes in 1492. But the Portuguese and the British, and the Dutch, and the French were all thinking that this Ottoman takeover of Anatolia is an impediment to trading with the overland silk routes. And so the Portuguese had already gone to the Canary Islands and halfway down to the coast of
Peter Robinson: Africa?
Victor Davis Hanson: Of, yes, of Cape of Good Hope. And they were starting to explore. And they were already working on methodologies to have trans-Atlantic galleons. The galley was in an evolutionary dead end, the Eastern Mediterranean, which was the wealthiest dynamic part of the empire, it was where you got the wealth from China and India. It was stagnating, and the Ottomans further stagnated. So they didn't have an Atlantic port. Anybody in Europe that did not have an Atlantic port was dead. The Venetians were dead. The Florentines were dead. The Dalmatians were dead. And the Ottomans as the Byzantines before them and the last, they were going to lose dynamism. So there weren't people... What I'm saying is there wasn't going to be a Magellan, or Columbus coming out of there. And then finally, they became kind of like us in the sense that here we are with China nakedly now blatantly saying that they want to be the world hegemon and they are more productive, they say, and they have a better military, they've said. And we have this Russian war, and what are we doing? And we have the border problem. So you would think that in the United States, there would be a Teddy Roosevelt, a Lincoln, an FDR, a JFK, or a Reagan would say, "You know what everybody, just cool the transgendered stuff for a while. Just cool the diversity, equity, inclusion for a while. We are 33 trillion in debt. We owe 130% of GDP. Our military is not recruiting people on the basis of military efficacy. It's a woke industry. The universities are not turning out anymore competitive. It's a quality of result. We're destroying meritocracy. And this standard of living is not guaranteed. If you can't get the best nuclear plant operator, the best pilot, the best neurosurgeon, but you're selecting people on criteria other than that, the Chinese don't do that. And the Russians maybe don't even do that. And the Europeans, who knows. But we are in a deathly competition with China. And so let's open our horizons and concentrate not on canceling somebody on Twitter, or not on a Russian disinformation laptop, or not whether Declan, whatever his name is on the Bud Light commercials or Disney." We're just chasing our tails while we're on the verge of a war, an existential war or an existential rivalry. And that was what the Byzantines did. They were arguing all the time about the nomenclature of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. They were talking about whether the Pope should or should not have papal authority. They were going through and they had the iconic classic movement earlier about statues. And they didn't realize that these Ottomans wanted to destroy them. And they kept thinking, the new Sultan is young and we can buy him off or we're Constantinople, we have the greatest church in the world at Hagia Sophia. It's been this way for a thousand years. Nobody can be, it's the epicenter of Christendom. No it's not. It's the west that fell, came back. And it's the dynamic. Florence is dynamic, Venice is dynamic. Genoa is dynamic, not you. But they had this idea that they were so traditionally bound, they were so assumed that they had privileges that they inherited and a place in the world. And they didn't realize the people around them wanted to destroy them. And I feel like...
Peter Robinson: That's the way it is with us.
Victor Davis Hanson: Joe Biden said the other day, "Well, I'm getting a lot of cooperation from President Obrador." No he's not. He's sending in six and a half trillion, six and a half million illegals have entered. There's 10,000 people he's sending in here. He could stop it tomorrow. He wants your 60 billion in remittances. He wants you to vote Democratic. He said so. Why is he a friend of the United States? He's an existential enemy. We killed a hundred thousand people with fentanyl. It was all produced in Mexico. Does any politician stand up and say, "I'm not racist, I'm not protectionist, but this government in Mexico hates our guts. It's sending fentanyl. The cartels are making $10 billion a year. We're losing a hundred thousand lives. We're sending 60 billion and it's still not enough." They're sending all of their poor in the most heartless, cynical fashion. They're exporting human capital and they're even printing comic books, how to instruct an illegal alien to evade US law. If we did that to Mexico, it would be considered an act of war. But I see what I'm getting at is we have these existential problems, life and death. And we're worried about... We all get notices you do from Stanford administrators, and they have at the bottom his, their, they, them. What does that mean? That's like, you know, how many, you know, how many pronouns should we refer to this saint and Byzantium to? It's just crazy. And we're just spending so much energy and time and effort and these problems are solvable. You go into San Francisco, it's solvable. You don't have to go to a medieval status. You can't say, "Well you have to defecate, you have to urinate, you have to fornicate, you have to inject. We can't judge you." No, you can't. You don't have to do that. That was solved about 1100, that problem was solved about 1200 years ago. And so, I don't know. That's what worries me. We don't have these leaders or we don't have the population or we're addicted to our cell phone. I don't know what it is. But we're not galvanized.
Peter Robinson: A couple of last questions.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yeah.
Peter Robinson: We've been talking about you, how you do it. A book every couple of years for four decades, a new book underway right now, travel speaking engagements, you're a grandfather, you're a little closer to 70 than you are to 60.
Victor Davis Hanson: 69. I'm gonna be 70 in September.
Peter Robinson: You are?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. I can feel it.
Peter Robinson: Well, happy birthday. I'll buy you a cigar in September.
Victor Davis Hanson: My wife reminds me. I've had nine lives and I've had a ruptured appendix in Libya. I have a torn ureter in Greece. Catastrophic bike accident. I had long COVID, so I'm feeling it. Don't worry about that.
Peter Robinson: So did the Greeks believe in retirement? Do you? Do you have any plans to slow down?
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. I have to. I don't have the energy that I used to. I word search sometimes. I look at my family. My father died at 75, my mother died at 66, and I have two surviving children I wanna be much closer to, I'm very close, we get along. I wanna see them a lot more. They don't live in this area. I have a lot of friends that I really like, I have a lot of friends that have been so nice to me, and I like to spend more time with that. I had wonderful parents. My mother and father were so sacrificed, you know, and they were just the opposites. They just balanced each other perfectly. I got a great childhood, so I feel really blessed. I think that I have made some mistakes in doing what you're talking about. Writing, writing, writing all the time, and not enjoying life. And I did have a lot of responsibilities on the farm and with my grandparents, and I helped my parents in some ways, I helped my children, but it's no excuse. You should stop and look around.
Peter Robinson: Okay. Last question, last question. Big picture. George Kennan.
Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.
Peter Robinson: This is George Kennan writing in 1953, the Cold War is underway, the first Cold War. "The thoughtful observer will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to Providence, which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear." Well, he writes that in 1953, you can think of a couple of times when Americans did pull themselves together. One was, as he was writing. Korea, we figured out how to stand up to communist China and the Soviets in a limited war. It didn't go nuclear. Inventing NATO, the Marshall Plan, all of that, tremendously creative and courageous periods in American foreign policy. And then again, during the 80s, this period of restoration, renewal. We go from 1979 and the national humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. Just one decade later, 1989, we have victory in the Cold War, so total that the Berlin Wall falls. Okay, can we do it again? Is this country capable of pulling itself together again?
Victor Davis Hanson: I hope so. But there are certain things that worry me. Now, by the way, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a book about the same thing, about we're too divided and we have to unite. And Matthew Ridgway, the man who saved the Korean War, brilliant four star general, they once asked him, "Aren't we spending too much money on defense?" And he said, "Well, the dividend is that we don't spend as much on social programs. And that's good because we just concentrate on how dangerous the world is, and it unites us." Same thing. But those eras, we did have a civic education program so people were aware of the general reference that bind us together. And in the last 10 years, it's really accelerated. But if you look at the curriculum of these schools and you ask people, "What is the 4th of July? What was Shiloh? What was he?" they have no idea. They don't even know who JFK was. You go on the street and ask people who, Harry Truman, they have no idea. So, and then as I mentioned, immigration. Immigration, in the early 20th century, we had about 12% of the population that was not native born. We now have, it's getting over 13. We're up to about 50 million. But the problem is not the numbers, it's the, as I said earlier, the attitude of the host. We don't believe that if you integrate and assimilate, and intermarry an immigrant population, we have a lot of people who think that's intruding. And you don't wanna Americanize people. And we're balkanizing in a way that I haven't seen before, where people's first loyalties are to their ethnic tribe. And that's very worrisome. And I've never seen such racial animosity. I don't remember it like this. I don't remember. That's new. The general level of civic ignorance is new. And the other thing is the margin of error is so far, is so much more dangerous. I know we're in a nuclear age and everything, but we have an array of enemies. It's not just radical Islamic terrorists. We have a country of 1.4 billion people, and they have expropriated all of our technology, they've copied our educational system, and I have a feeling that they're going to have the Western disease later on as they get affluent and leisure, they'll have people sitting, you know, on basements, video gaming, like it's going on in Japan, but they're not there yet. And they don't like us. They really don't. And we have no idea the threat that they pose or their capabilities. We have kind of paternalistic, well, they're just China or they don't have free speech. Well, you know, a lot of people have won the world without free speech. And I don't think we're aware of the dangers that the Chinese pose. And we have so many wonderful allies. The Japanese, the South Koreans, the Taiwanese, the Australians, the Vietnamese, they're all worried, like we. All they're asking of us is, "Are you gonna lead? We don't want to cut a deal with China. We don't wanna make the necessary adjustments. They claim they're the rising power and you're in decline, but show us that you're not, and we'll partner with you." So there's a lot of opportunity. I'm optimistic that if we get good leadership, we can do it. The technology, I don't think finding that we have fully assessed the pernicious effect of cell phones, the internet. It's been wonderful. But it was sold to us that we would be out farming, and one day we'd have an idea about, "Hmm, when did Machiavelli live? Oh, I'm irrigating, I'll just check right here. And it's at my finger tips. I don't need a library." That was what was promised. But it wasn't promised that, you know, you take 15 selfies of yourself and you post them, and then you talk about the Kardashians all day, or your video game, and you spend hours, you see people walking just like this. I find myself doing it. And so I think it's kind of a narcotic, a fentanyl of the mind, or electronic fentanyl. It's very dangerous. And the culture that it encourages and spawns is dangerous. I'm worried about that. It's changing the very behaviors of us. So there's a lot of challenges. And we need some type of great leader who thinks that, you know, he's gotta have a Lincolnesque idea, a tragic idea that he's not gonna be popular. He is not gonna live a long time, but he's gonna solve the problem. And he's just gonna say, "This is what we gotta do. And we've gotta close the border. We've gotta be very liberal with legal immigration. We've gotta assimilate immigrants. We've got to go back to deterring crime. We're energy self-sufficient, we can transition to alternate fuels, but we're not gonna beg the Saudis, or the Venezuelans, or the Iranians for one drop of oil, and we're gonna solve this financial problem. We're going to get to a balance." But we can do it. That's so sad because all these problems are self-inflicted. It's not a plague, it's not an earthquake, it's not a lack of resources. We have everything, but we're just, we're sort of like Lotus eaters, you know, in the Odyssey. We're just, we're not, we're just too complacent.
Peter Robinson: But we can do it.
Victor Davis Hanson: We can do it.
Peter Robinson: Thank you, Victor. At the ranch that has been in your family for five generations, Victor Davis Hanson, thank you.
Victor Davis Hanson: Thank you for coming.
Peter Robinson: For Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution, and Fox Nation, I'm Peter Robinson.
