The Ricochet Podcast - Staving Off Annihilation with VDH

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Victor Davis Hanson is back! He joins Rob and Steve Hayward to discuss his latest must-read book, The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Aside from the cheery discussion on civilization obliteration, the trio finds their way into digressions spanning the cameos of great men in the Old Testament to the spectacular blunders of the modern era. Is there any hope to be found in this eleventh hour? Listen in to find out. - Audio from this week's podcast: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says clips of a deteriorating Joe Biden are “cheap fake videos.”

They say you can't hurry love, but if you don't get to your post office by March 23rd, you'll miss your chance to save €2.50 on a book of 10 heart-shaped love stamps. Now, just €14. Down from €16.50. Perfect for all kinds of love messages like, We're getting hitched. You're still my favourite. Or,

Growl McCree. If you've a couple of fuckle, buy yours now at your local post office or at onpust.com. Send joy. Show growl. Send love. Onpust. For your world. T's and C's apply or at OnPost.com. Send joy. Show grow. Send love. OnPost. For your world.

Decencies apply. See OnPost.com. I'm normally like, yeah, whatever, man. But now I have to do it. Okay. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. It's number

697. I'm Rob Long. Peter Robinson and James Lavix are off this week. I am joined by the great Steve Award, and we are going to have a long, interesting, stem-winding conversation with the great Victor Davis Hanson. Stay tuned. They are cheap fakes video. They are done in bad faith. And I think that it tells you everything that we need to know about how how desperate how desperate Republicans are here. I thank the introduction for sharing your family story. You know, I've often said anyway, not a joke, not a joke. Hello and welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. It is Friday, June 21st. It's the longest day of the year. Doesn't feel like it, but I guess it's going to be.

I am Rob Long, coming to you from New York City, joined by Steve Hayward. Steve, where are you, by the way? I'm actually in Marin County, behind enemy lines, believe it or not. Exactly right. Well, did you see that the Bay Area now is advertising itself to the rest of Central California, which is really hot, by saying it's misty here or it's cool here?

It's beyond misty. It is freezing cold here. We're all wearing puffy jackets. It's unbelievable. It's 100 degrees here. Well, James Lilacs, who's usually here, is off today, and Peter Robinson, who's usually here, is off today. So, Steve's just you and

me uh so a monday at a celebration of the 12th anniversary of the dreamers act remember that one president biden announced a new immigration order to provide a pathway to citizenship for people who entered illegally but have since married citizens uh and they have to have been here for 10 years. So that's about half a million immigrants apparently will qualify for that. I thought the move was going to be just get tough on immigration between now and November 6th or whatever. And then loosen the strings. But I guess that isn't what he's doing yeah i mean

there's uh three things occur to me quickly one is is he trying to lose the election i mean surely they know the polls that immigration has become you know the number one or two issue with people and people are because they don't like what's happening uh second thing is it does look like a purely cynical political play to try and attract Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. Okay, I guess I get that, but it may cost them more than it gains them. But then third, one of the more revealing things Biden said in another issue, but it relates to this one, was two, three weeks ago or maybe more, he said, Ah, the Supreme Court said I couldn't forgive student loans, but I didn't let that stop me. Oh, so, you know, a whole branch of government says what you're doing is illegal,

and, you know, what's this about the rule? Nobody's above the law, right? It's amazing. I didn't let a thing called the law stop me. Exactly. And, you know, DACA from, what, 10, 12 years ago, that's always been under legal clout, and I think still is. And I think this new move is also vulnerable to a challenge.

By the way, the deep cynic says maybe they would like a federal court to do an injunction. See, those mean Trump judges are stopping us from being compassionate, and that's why you have to vote for me. I'm not persuaded, certainly, but that could be their crazy thinking. And it does seem like a bigger mousetrap that he's building to try to catch a mouse that he could easily catch by simply saying, we're going to enforce the border, right? I mean, that is such an obvious thing. It's hard hard to argue even if you're in favor of immigration reform and amnesty and all those other things that that wouldn't be if that's not a component to it um i i just just talk about politics for a minute i mean i you know there's always that moment where

you think am i just missing something and they have a secret plan that I can't imagine what that secret plan is, but why aren't they running around with their hair on fire? I mean, I would be doing that if I was an incumbent president and an incumbent presidential staff and campaign operation, looking at this, I think it just doesn't seem like it's like that. You know,

you're poker, you were playing poker and the guy is sitting there and he's got this smug look on his face. You think, is he bluffing or does he really have the cards? And I cannot imagine that anyone in Biden world thinks they have the cards. You know, our mutual friend, John Podharts, has been saying for a while that this campaign of Biden's reminds him of the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1992. And of course, John was there for that. He worked in that Bush fight. The wheels came off of everything. Nothing they did worked. They kept being confident. Well, things will turn around for us without having a theory why. They're totally out of touch with reality. And he thinks

the same exact thing is happening to Biden. I mean, a couple of little things that I'm sure, you know, from your show business perspective, you'd appreciate is you have all these dreadful videos showing Biden barely functioning and wandering off. And they're pushing back on it in a way that simply calls more attention to it, right? You had Green Jean-Pierre out saying, these are cheap, fake videos. And that just gives the, right, it just gives the story another whole two or three news cycles. And I'm guessing somebody, maybe Biden, maybe Dr. Jill, maybe their political strategist say, you've got to go out and push back on this. It looks just as pathetic to me as when Donald Trump on the second day in office made Sean Spicer go out and defend the claim that it was the biggest inaugural crap right it was sort of ludicrous and all it did was call attention to you know one of the obvious defects that trump has which is grandiosity um so same thing's

happening here and i don't everybody seems to have lost their grip on political reality and maybe both parties it's at all you know there's a little british comedy called black adder and there was this one guy on black adder the sort of the sad little character he'd always say i have a cunning plan. And then he would tell you what the plan was, and you'd think, oh my God, we're all going to die. I think that's what I'd play. Oh my God, we're all going to die.

It does feel like their attitude is, you know, we just have to hold our breath and let Trump be Trump. That their solution and their strategy is, and I think this is one of the biggest problems, I think, with American politics and American leadership in general, is the idea that I don't have to do anything. The other guy is so horrible

and is going to make his own mistakes. I can just stand there and he's going to make his own mistakes. Yeah. And I'm going to, the smart play here is for me to try to win this election by one vote. Yeah. And we're so smart, the smart play here is for me to try to win this election by one vote. Yeah.

And we're so smart, we can slice up the electorate and we can slice up all of the precincts. We could figure out which household, all that stuff, all that crap that they do. And they do it in show business too, right? And the irony is that if you, once you start thinking that way, you will only win by one vote. Once you start thinking, I'm going to be a smart, I'm going to, I'm going to be strategic, then you could only win by one vote once you start thinking i'm going to be a smart i'm gonna i'm going to be strategic then you could only be strategic that way the whole operation becomes about how do i just win one vote just i mean one more vote in pennsylvania and yeah and that is like the the i mean that is just the, lowest form of leadership I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, you know who else had that theory?

It was Jimmy Carter in 1980. They thought and said all the way through, well, Reagan is so unacceptable that people have to come around. And even though he's a little ahead of us in the polls, we may be able to play an inside straight in the electoral college. And they lost by 10 points, lost 44 states. I think there's something similar with Trump. I think the left is either doesn't perceive, but the smart ones do, or they're just in denial about the fact that he has a similar appeal, that he runs ahead of his polls. And so they may be in for a very rude shock. And so, you know, right now, I think I've said this before. I right now think Trump's going to win comfortably. That could change, may very well change because, you know, you have Trump working for the other side. Right. But, you know, right now, you know out to lunch but i don't understand why nobody else in his world gets it so i mean maybe it's just too complicated and speaking of

complicated well oh sorry i was gonna add one thought of that it which is uh on the other hand the recent history especially of obama's re-election campaign in 2012 remember something about obama he was the first president ever re-elected with a lower vote total than his initial election most re-elected presidents get more votes yeah but what they did brilliantly uh and very scientifically was find every marginal vote that was sort of weekly for obama and get that person to the polls in the key states like ohio and i gotta think that democratic machine still exists and i think the b Biden people may be counting on that. And they might be right to have some confidence in that drill. Yeah, but, you know, the Obama thing was interesting because he started with such a cushion.

I mean, his win in 2008 was the smashing popular vote victory and a smashing electoral college victory. And so he could afford to, like like leak support for four years which he did he could afford to like turn off people who have won this moderate guy a chance by being too far left they could just kind of do that and he's i'm still gonna win that's how i mean he's like one of those billionaires who loses a hundred million dollars yeah i don't even know it's silver chains man i can i can still do it but all of this stuff is so they they've made it so complicated and they they they've um this is arrogance of the marketer and you think by now they would know um you think by now they would know uh things are complicated for instance you steve have you ever

heard of senolytics yet no i have not It's a class of ingredients discovered less than 10 years ago when they're being called the biggest discovery of our time for promoting healthy aging and enhancing your physical prime. Your life goals in your career and beyond require productivity. But let's be honest, the aging process is not our friend when it comes to endless energy and productivity. That's why I use Qualia Senolytic. If someone would have told me that there are science-backed ingredients

that could help me feel 15 years younger in a matter of months, I wouldn't have believed it. Then I tried Qualia Senolytic. As we age, everything accumulates. Senescent cells in their body. Everyone accumulates senescent cells in their body. Everyone. Not we all do, but everyone does. Also known, these are cells that are also known.

This is complicated, as you know, Steve. This is like science, so I'm going to, you know. It's also known as zombie cells. That's is a complicated as you know steve this is like science so i'm gonna you know uh it's also known as zombie cells that's what we call zombie cells and they're old and they're worn out and they're not serving a useful function for our health anymore and they are taking up space and nutrients from our healthy cells so like pruning the yellowing and dead leaves off a plant qualia senolytic removes those worn out senescent cells to allow for the rest of them to thrive in the body. I got them. I gotta be honest.

They send you free. When you do these things, they send you free samples. And so I tried it. And you don't have to take it every day. It's like you take it like for three days in a row or something. And then, and then you don't do it for another month.

And it was fantastic. It's, I mean, this is really kind of a strange kind of endorsement, but they were so good that I went and bought them. So now I'm a customer as well as, you know, I got the first one free, as they say, and the rest of them I paid for and happily paid for it.

Because I want to resist, because I would like to resist aging at the cellular level. So if you would like to as well, try Qualia Centilitic, go to qualialife.com slash ricochet. That's Q-U-A-L-I-A-L-I-F-E, life.com, all one word, slash ricochet for 50% off. Use the code ricochet at checkout for an additional 15% off. That's qualialife slash ricochet, Q-U-A-L-I-A, life life.com for an extra 15% off your purchase, and we thank Qualia for sponsoring today's episode

and for making an amazing product. The good thing, Steve, for you and me is that we don't have to be smart today. We can be dumb. Because we are joined by one of the smartest guys around, Victor Davis Hanson. Victor does not need an introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway, because it's good podcast hygiene. You know him. he is the senior fellow in classics and military

history at the hoover institution he's authored a bajillion i think the actual numbers of bajillion books including the um the cry in the wilderness called mexifornia which came out uh many years ago and is absolutely pinpoint relevant today. Unfortunately, it should be a book that we look on and see it in the past, but we haven't solved the problem yet. And his latest book is The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Victor, welcome. Thank you for having me, you guys.

So I have a couple questions because I want a little bit of a history perspective. Yeah. I'm doing, as you may not know, but I'm sort of going off to seminary next fall. I'm going to become, yeah. So I'm doing a lot of reading and I'm doing a lot of like New Testament, Old Testament, Hebrew Bible reading. Yes. And there's a point at which it just feels very Bronze Age. And then there's a point when suddenly it's Greek and Alexander and Roman.

And they have been fighting. These empires have been fighting in that land forever, it seems like. Yes. Well, it becomes part of the Holy Land, so to speak, what is now Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, becomes part of the so-called West in about 331, when Alexander wins the Battle of Isis, and then he absorbs what was the

decaying Persian Empire, and in that empire is Judea and the Jews. And he pretty much, he and his successors, the Seleucids, leave them alone, and then that empire is absorbed by Rome. Part of it, the Adelids give it to Rome in the second century AD, but by the first century BC, that comes under Roman domination. Right. And then you have Herod the Great, who's a client king. And everything seems to be working well until the Romans decide that they can't give any more exemptions to the Jews who won't honor the emperor, because now they've transitioned as a deity. So then we have the Vespasian and Titus destroy Jerusalem, and that starts the beginning of the diaspora. But there'll be a number of revolts after that as well.

That's when Greek and Latin start to become part of the exegesis of not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament. I mean, the New Testament will be written somewhere around 45 to 90 AD. And there are two moments in the Hebrew Bible, I guess, or the Tanakh, I guess they always have a new name for it, the Tanakh, that are kind of chilling. One is Alexander zips through Judea on his way to Gaza.

And there's no mention of like any I think it's Herodotus, there's no mention of the Jews. They don't show up. They're not. But to read it and to see these names. Yeah, I know.

They're Persian subjects. And they're not. They've been given certain exemptions under the Persian Empire. And they're not sure what his siege of Gaza... They don't know what's going to... When he besieges Tyre and Gaza, he doesn't know who's going to win. And he's only 23 at this point. So a lot of people, not just the Jews, but a lot of people are just waiting to see

if he's really going to destroy the Persian Empire. And then they'll cut a deal with him but they don't want to go out on a limb and join him uh and then find out he's going to lose well wise and there's another kind of creepy or or um i shouldn't a creepy moment but like thrilling moment really in the movie where you know how it ends and it's i think it's in second maccabees or something and they are uh it's a part of the sort of political assessment and they're saying look everybody's so crappy to us here the persians and the greeks there's a new empire over there a little farther west in rome let's why don't we

why don't we see if they'll come and help us get independent and And when you're reading it, it's like you're in a movie and you want to say, no, no, no, no, no, that's not going to be good either. That's not a solution either. But it does, it's both thrilling and depressing

to think that people have been arguing over this 11 mile wide, in some places, piece of land for thousands of years and we thought like we thought we had a solution i mean it's very ironic yeah it is i mean you're it's ironic when i walk across the stanford campus and hear all of these people saying from the river to the sea and their settlers and their interlopers about the jews and we got to remember that the jews were they they began to spread after the destruction of the

second temple and the city of jerusalem but there was still a large population of jews and we had the maccabee revolutions etc but when the when the empire fell in the West, that became part of the Byzantine Empire, and the Byzantines allowed the Jews to stay there. And they had pretty good relations until the mid-600s when Islam came in and took the Holy Land. So, we're talking about, I think you could argue that there's evidence of Jewish civilization with a written language as early as 13 or 1400 BC, some evidence. So then you're talking about 2,000 years before Islam even came to the Holy Land. And who was there? It was the Jews that were there. And there were Jewish settlements,

not a lot, but that were continuous all the time. People, families that lived there all the way up until modern time. But it's a very strange thing about radical Islam is that once radical Islam goes into an area,

they claim it as its ancestral homeland. They do that with Spain. That was one of the big talking points of Osama bin Laden. El Andalus, this was ours. No, it wasn't. You came in in the 7th century and tried to steal it, and then you occupied it for 400, 500 years, but you were always at war with Iberians. And the same thing is true of the Holy Land, the same thing is true of North Africa. It was Punic, actually it was indigenous Berbers, and then the Punic under the Carthaginians came in the 8th century, and then they were wiped out by the Romans, and then the Romans from essentially 146 all the way into the 450s, and then the

Byzantines recaptured it and the Vandals took it, and then they recaptured it from the Vandals and held it for almost 150 years, and then the Islam was the last, those were the last arrivals on the scene. And yet when you talk to people, I've been to all of those Middle East countries in North Africa, and yet when you talk to people, they think been to all of those Middle East countries in North Africa, and yet when you talk to people, they think it's been Islamic from the beginning of time. And it's really weird. It's a very weird mindset when you talk to people like that.

I know Steve wants to jump in. I was in Tunis a few years ago and hiking around Carthage. First of all, it's amazing to think that all we're looking at is about 10 of what's there that there's more underneath all those neighborhoods and houses that have been built over the years and then they show you the the carthage carthaginian sort of naval yard yes this is a big circle big round thing and it's it's kind of like i mean i this this is wrong. This is absolutely the wrong interpretation. But my interpretation was like, this?

This is kind of small. Like, the Romans were afraid of these guys? Like, this looked like, I mean, like a local dock, you know? It's not that big. Well, part of the problem was that the city actually reached its highest population right before it was destroyed, about 550,000, 600,000 people. And Scipio, the philosopher, supposedly, with Polybius at his side, destroyed that city. I mean, we have a description in Appian, very graphic. They destroyed it block by block.

They didn't sow salt in the ground. That was a medieval add-on. But they leveled it, and then they prohibited anybody from settling it. And then the Gracchi tried to bring in some left-wing people and make kind of a utopian veteran's communal city, and that just failed. And then for 100 years years it was just desolate and then when caesar came he created something called carthago nova and that was the new city of carthage and it was not quite on the same side of the rubble it was near it and that harbor you're seeing is the roman rebuilding of what was wiped out as the carthage of the caraginians. So there's almost none of the old Carthaginian Punic city, but the remains today are the Roman city. And the Roman city,

my gosh, it was, I think by the first century AD, it was the fourth largest city in the empire after Rome and Constantinople and Antioch. Victor, it's Steve Hayward. Hi, Steve. Well, first of all, I think Rob did this too quickly. You know things are bad when Rob Long is going off to seminary. He's like Augustine going to Pippi O'Reggis as the vandals are outside the city. You figured it out. Exactly right. See you, fellas. hit the oregos as the vandals are outside the city ah you figured it out yeah exactly right

see you fellas yeah and the irony is is i'm today in san francisco believe it or not speaking at a panel on climate change and it's freezing cold here it's you know so it couldn't be any more perfect right it's colder than even is usually here uh but look uh rob going off the seminary i saw the title of your new book the The End of Everything, How Wars Descend Into Annihilation, and I thought, ah, Victor's taken a cheerful turn for a change. Look, there's great history here, but I think there's also parable, which I think is your intention, or at least that's what I've taken away from it. The subtext, and it's not very much sub, is that America is not immune from the peril of thinking that things can happen quickly, that we are led by gullible and ignorant leaders. And, you know, I think back to Lincoln's Lyceum Address, which, you know, I know you know, he said, look, we have these two big moats around America. This is 1838, right? And so nobody can really invade us and take us down. It's too hard.

If we're going to fall, it will be the authors of our own destruction. And I still think there's a lot that that's true. And maybe it connects to what you're after here. But you point out that a lot of people have made a similar mistake over the years in thinking either they're immune, that allies will come rescue them. I've done a whole bullet point list of some of your observations. Give us a scenario or two. This goes beyond the four corners of your book a little bit, this question, but give us a scenario or two of what you think are our largest vulnerabilities that our leaders are oblivious to or not taking seriously. Well, in the book, all of these societies had had long pedigrees. They all had very impressive fortifications.

They had large empires. They all thought they were invulnerable, and they had no idea of the temperament of an Alexander the Great or Scipio or Mehmet, especially Hernán Cortés. And they all thought, as you said and I pointed out, that the allies would save them or they could negotiate. And they all knew that complete annihilation was very rare in World War I. But when I looked at the present world and I looked at all the people who have been leveling existential threats, I mean existential by saying, we want to wipe you off the face of the earth.

That's Kim Jong-un. I was surprised that Erdogan, he has threatened to send missiles into Athens. He's threatened to send them into Nicosia. He said about Nagorno, the corridor that they just ethnically cleanse, 150,000 Armenians. He said this was the solution our grandfathers used and we'll use it again he's threatened to wipe out the kurds we've had putin i think i counted 17 news accounts of russian media putin saying they were they would use nuclear weapons if they felt it was necessary in ukraine and then china issued a video remember about, about having to wipe out Japan if it intervened

in Taiwan. And then I looked at the reaction. Everybody said, this is crazy. They never do this. This isn't even Iran when Mr. Ruff and Johnny said 20 years ago that Israel was a one-bomb state. So, there's a pattern here. And when I look at the United States, it kind of unfortunately falls into the pattern. One of them is financial insolvency. All of these cities did not have the wherewithal that they thought they had. So, we look at the United States, we are borrowing a trillion every 90 days. And what's funny about that is there's no one on either side that has a plan. I mean, I thought at some point somebody would say, well, Alan Simpson and Bowles had a plan, a very simplified tax code, which had we adopted when

Obama formed the commission in 2009, we would be balanced budget and we would have half the debt paid off. But no one's talking about that. And yet, the interest on the debt, as Neil Ferguson pointed out not too long ago in an article, is larger than our defense budget. And the interest rate is 5%, 5.5%. So, it's about 13% or 14% of the entire budget. So, that is hampering us. When Trump says he's going to rebuild the military and up it back to 4% or 5% GDP, you want to know where he's going to get the money. And the only way he can get the money is to cut.

The second thing is the borders have collapsed. All these societies could not enforce their borders for a variety of reasons, but our border is not porous. It doesn't exist. They don't believe in borders. They feel that they're constructs constructs and this globalized mindset, everybody has a natural right to go wherever he wants. That's the charitable view. The uncharitable is that this is what they call the new democratic majority or demography is destiny to quote some of

the books that they write. But we don't know what 10 million people are doing in this country. And we'll never, I don't, I think it will take 20 years if you had conservative administrations to fix this. And by fixing, I mean, find out all the 10 million people are here, give them background checks, deport the bad people, give some process to get a green card. It's a total mess, and it was by intent and then of course something is deadly wrong with our military and that that's something that happened uh in these case studies that i i showed um we have 45 000 people who did not recruit they were not recruited then pentagon says well it's because the job market is tight, or people are obese, or they're in gangs, or they're not.

But they've lowered the standards, and they still can't get them. But when you actually don't listen to the Pentagon, but you go online and very carefully, it's very hard to do, but a couple of us have looked at it. They do have demographies of the people who are not joining. Latinos are joining, blacks are joining, women are joining, everybody but you know who, white males. White males are not joining the military. And when you look at the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, they died at roughly 75 and 74 percent, twice their numbers in the demography. So, basically, the military, when Milley went on congressional testimony with Austin and Gilgad, or whatever

his name was, Chief of Naval Operations in 21, and they said that they were going to hunt out white rage, they were going to read Professor Kendi's book, and then they bounced out 8,500 people who had, most of them had natural immunity, and they said they weren't vaxxed. They sent a message that these people were not wanted, or that if they wanted to be promoted or retained, there were going to be DEI standards. And they just said, fine, I don't want to do it, especially after Afghanistan, that humiliation. And so, now we don't have the people that we send that volunteer to go to god-awful places like Helmand Province or Fallujah.

The condition of the military, the morale is bad, I hear from people, is giving me flashbacks, and I'm not sure whether to invoke the old Santa Ana, people who don't remember the past are doomed to repeat it, or Marx's line that history repeats first as tragedy and then as farce. But I'm having flashbacks to the Carter years, when you had a lot of the same thing happening. Very low morale, inflation had put so many soldiers below the poverty line, things didn't work, desert won. And I thought it was not possible to exceed the gullibility and ignorance of the Carter administration. But right now, I would take Zbigniew Brzezinski and Cy Vance back in a heartbeat compared to our current leadership, which seems to me an order of magnitude worse than the Carter

people were. I'm glad you brought that up. I wrote an article, but I didn't realize, and you're the Reagan historian, I didn't realize when I went back and spent about four or five days reviewing that campaign how close that race was in June, right about now. I mean, I think the polls were slanted, but Reagan was either a point back or three points up or he went back and forth and he really didn't break that open until, wasn't there a poll, Stephen, like 10 days before by Gallup that had Carter even ahead? Yes. I think. That's right.

Yes. And I think it's very similar because we hear that Trump is ahead with, he's making historic inroads with youth, with Latinos, blacks, even Asians are coming back. But when you look at the national polls, Fox had Biden ahead. So either that inroad is only in these swing states, and then the California population and New York makes up for it on the national level, or they're not accurate. And it reminds me so much of Reagan and what they said about Trump and Reagan were eerie. That Reagan had no federal, he had never been a federally elected official. That he was going to blow up the world.

George W. Bush had called him voodoo economics. And he was too old. And Carter was going to slice him up in the debate. It was very reminiscent. So that gave me a little bit of hope that this election, if they keep doing what they're doing, and Carter was pandering in the same way. I mean, Biden, when he sells out Israel for a few thousand votes in Michigan, or he drains the strategic petroleum, or this latest amnesty,

or the tariffs, or working with Obidor petroleum, or this latest amnesty, or the tariffs, or working with Obrador now to send people away from the border, or the student loan forgiveness. He thinks that he can patch up all of these little slivers of, you know, pandering, and they're going to make a majority. I don't think it's going to work. I don't think people like what he's doing. So, I think it could be broken open. I think if Trump is careful and gets, you know, I don't know, that's a broken record. But if he doesn't go after and call people, you know. He said about Paul Ryan the other day, I started laughing. He said, get that dog off of the clock.

I mean, if he hadn't said the word dog, it might have been more effective. Right, right. But he could blow this thing apart. He really could. It does feel like a change election, right? It does feel like that's what it is. I think it does. A big, fat change election.

I do. Because there's just so much, it just feels like there's so much powder in the keg here, it's just going to have to go. I would imagine within two to three weeks, Israel will feel that it's pretty much decimated Hamas. And then when we get into late July or August, it's going to do something about Hezbollah. And that's going to be a big, nasty war. And that's going to be a big, nasty war. And that's going to put a lot of pressure. Part of the subtext of what Netanyahu's video was about is that they're not giving them

the actual JDAM adapter, all of that stuff that's necessary to stock up for Hezbollah. And that's going to be right during the election. And I think if Biden comes out, I mean, Hezbollah doesn't get the kind of romance that the palestinians do it's some yeah but it's very hard for a young stupid useful idiot on say berkeley campus to start waving hezbollah flags it's easier with hamas and if they so i think that if he if he sells israel down the road and they get into an existential war with Hezbollah and you get major damage to Haifa and stuff, it's going to really hurt him. I think, by the way, quick prediction, Victor. I think that if that comes to pass, and I think it will, I think the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian left is going to aim to shut down as many American campuses as they can.

And I think they will succeed. It's hard to know. Did you see today that the Stanford outgoing president, Richard Salyer, whom I know, he was a classicist, and I didn't think he was particularly muscular, giving all these second, third chances, but they are going to prosecute the so-called journalistic claim that she just happened to be be there right and so i think they understand that if they they all know deep down inside that if any it's sort of like the french you know whiff of grape shot or they right they hung admiral bing voltaire to encourage the others, that type of, from Voltaire, that famous thing about what the British do. If they just had one strong, muscular president that just put these

kids in jail for vandalism, burglary, violence, assault, felony charges, it would all dissipate. Yeah. So what you're looking for is one act of courage in academia, Victor? No, one- I thought you were a historian. One S.I. Hayakawa, kawa honey jump up in a car and right can we zoom out for a minute yeah just talk about big sweeping things for a second it it margaret thatcher the the uh the serendipity of having thatcher in uh on downing street and reagan in the white house um it was a huge an unexpected thing to happen really yeah um but now it looks like if you look at the rest of western europe right now there is a inchoate and probably in progress and in formation a kind of

center-right maybe collection of coalitions that are happening all over the place in places that you never expected in france for instance or in holland or in germany or places where this feels new and it's almost like we're america's out of step a little bit it is i just got back from france i took 160 people for the 80th anniversary of d-day and traveled around all over the country and talked to people and you know what's funny is that we all thought the europeans were crazy that they were these crazy socialists and one world government and naive and they all there was a lot of truth to that but compared to what where biden has taken us they are we're way beyond that they they don't there's certain issues that they you talk to them and they don't believe and they

don't allow this sexual transformation of 12 year olds with dangerous surgeries and hormonal they're beyond that they don't believe anymore in open borders. They really don't. Especially the Swedes, you know. And they understand, they're much more open about radical Islam than we are, is two. And that's new. They're also very, if you went into Versailles, or you went into verdun at the osiery or you went into any of these monuments about d-day that the french have and you went and desecrated them like they did the lafayette statue the french would go basilistic i think they would i think they put you in jail so that i think we all have to realize that we're in a jacob this isn't even a democratic

party this is a jacobin revolutionary party and i think their attitude is we're going to run up so much debt yeah that when you take over you're going to have to raise taxes and that'll be our legacy that you had to become more redistributed redistributive we're going to let in so many people you're going to have a whole generation to do what undo what we did We're going to let in so many people, you're going to have a whole generation to undo what we did. We're going to so redefine the Middle East and tilt, as Obama did, to the Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, Lebanon access that you're going to have big trouble. It's going to be there. I think that's what they're after, to just cause so much mayhem that it will be lasting and it will make the Republicans and the conservatives have to do things they don't want to do. Like they'll have to, I don't know, raise taxes or cut entitlements or do something,

and then the left is going to say, well, maybe… Yep. Look at that. Yeah. Yeah, and that's good. Maybe you'll have to raise taxes and help the poor so so that's what they're doing there's a lot i guess what i'm trying to say is there's a logic to their madness well it's always been the issue that um economic conservatives have always thought well we can't we clearly can't run up this debt that's crazy but economic liberals are like, no, of course we can. We have access to 100% of the GDP if we want.

We just pass a law and tax it. Modern monetary theory. Exactly. We could do whatever we want. And they're kind of right. I mean, that absolutely is, in fact, true. But as Margaret Thatcher said, pretty soon you run out of other people's money. How many of these empires that you've studied the big sweeping in and out across the land certainly even across the holy land

how many of them fell because they just went broke i think all of them did and the byzantine the byzantines did the byzantines were completely broke. The Romans were broke. And, you know, in the first century, Juvenal wrote that famous satire about bread and circuses, and there was a million people at Rome, and probably half of them didn't have any source of employment. So, you can tell, I mean, they had a word in Athens called redheads, and that meant that the silver tetradrachma, which was the coin of the realm in the Athenian Empire, was veneered. So, that raised head of a person's profile, you know, of Athena, for example, the thin veneer wore off very quickly, and then they had red hair because the copper showed and aristophanes has a take on that but it was they you know if you look at the classical city state um athens paid people to go to the theater in the fifth century and by the fourth century

they were paying people to vote and they had 20 000 people working for the government in various bureaucracies they didn't have the money anymore and they were and uh so that'll never happen here that's no i don't we're we're in california steven knows so well we're he we we had a 76 we had a $98 billion surplus just 18 months ago. Then we had $77 billion. Now we're down to $45 billion, we're told. And I don't see any hope at all. This state is a model of where the United States is going. And it's completely dysfunctional.

Where I live, everything is dysfunctional nothing works and uh it's very scary the book is called the end of everything how wars descend into annihilation but the epilogue is titled how the unimaginable becomes inevitable. So, I'm giving you a chance here, Victor, to not destroy everybody's weekend. This is your opportunity.

It's not inevitable, right? I mean, we're Americans. No, it's not. It's not inevitable. We can change it if we decide to. The only thing, you know, and my hope here is I live in a town that's 95% Mexican-American, and my brothers were married to Mexican-American over 40 male who's self-employed, and there's a lot of them, who is not voting for Trump. They all are. I know their kids aren't, and maybe their wives are, but I think you're going to see 45 or 50 percent of the Latino vote in California get close to Trump. And if that happens really if that happens then a lot of the bad

things that are happening will start to I mean the whole tribalism chauvinism white this you know Marxist oppressor oppressor victim victimizer when you start seeing minorities get close to 50-50 then that all disappears. Then the left, of course, would shut the border in two seconds. But that's my hope. And economic, Trump has been very, it's such an irony for someone who was so uncouth and called a racist and all of these blasphemiesies but yet he has appealed to working class people including minorities far more than mccain or romney or the ocean yeah i think that the the two rules of american politics right one is um the obverse of the traditional rule which is they say

you know you uh you you vote for the guy you want to have a beer with. And I actually think it's sort of the obverse or the converse or something, which is that you vote for the guy you think would have a beer with you. Yes. Now I know Trump doesn't drink beer, but I think most people look at him and think, I bet you this guy would be fine sitting in on my sofa. And you know, you know, you know, in that in 2000, you know, 16, you know that she did not want to be in your house. And I think the other one is that the other rule is that the winner of the race is the politician or the candidate who can behave like a normal person for 10 seconds.

Yes. Because it's very hard for people in politics or even in on, on camera to behave like a normal person for 10 seconds. So this guy who, I mean, I full disclosure, I'm not a fan, but I see him running around this guy who like lives in a tower and has a gold toilet and is the weirdest person I've ever could think of.

He is somehow more normal than any, like I was, it was just, you know, you're musing with people. What's going to happen? Why, why, why wouldn't they just replace Biden? They just replaced Biden. And then the question is, with whom? There, who, there's nobody whom? There's nobody normal. There's nobody normal, not party. There's nobody normal. And that is like the essence of the problem.

Yeah, it is. Trump, he feels at home with the working class. He does. So I have an axiom I teach to students when I teach the presidency, which is the trick of the presidency, and it means the candidates, is this. Americans want to look up to our president. We want to put them on a pedestal, but we want to gaze at them at eye level. That's our democratic sensibility. That's a paradox, of course. The people who can figure that out are the ones who win landslides. Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, right? George W. Bush, to a certain extent. And the Democrats' problem is they keep throwing up these obvious elitists who look down on us, like Al Gore and John Kerry and Hillary. Obama's a sort of special case, but... And then Biden is just an old hack who they settled on

because they were terrified of Bernie Sanders. I think there are some plausible Democrats out there, but you don't hear much about them. Like the Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania, actually. And even Jared Polis of Colorado, I think, is a creditable guy. But nobody's talking about them. They're all talking about the identity candidates. Yeah, and they have no future, because if they were to be reasonable on the border, or climate change, or electric vehicles,

their base would cannibalize them. And the party is really a Jacobin party. It's been hijacked. It's funny. And they always project. So, of course, they say that the Republican Party has been MAGA. But I was looking the other day at a whole list of Republican issues, and you look at the MAGA issues, except on tariffs and entitlements, maybe budget, there's not that much difference between a traditional Republican. If Trump gets in there, he will get conservative judges, he'll close the border, he will up the defense budget, he will be reasonable about energy. He will try to be energy independent. He will try to be no better friend and no worse enemy to our ally. He won't try to destroy all of what they say.

It'll be pretty much one thing he won't do is have an optional military engagement in the Middle East on the ground. Yeah, but I suspect that that is in keeping with a vast majority of americans yeah i think that is ultimately the word the word the most the deepest worry which i think is probably unfounded but who knows is uh american boots on the ground in gaza and some kind of peacekeeping force after the it's turned into a pile of rubble or uh ukraine or something and that is i think in 2024 is unacceptable to americans he's on the right of almost every issue with maybe the exception abortion and that's complicated trump is on the side of the american people on the border on foreign policy on deterrence on the defense budget on woke on dei on energy on inflation every single one of them

he's on the right side and that's very hard for biden for all the institutional academic support he has academic corporation entertainment uh the media it's still going to be very hard for people to vote uh against their their perceived interests on these issues. I know you got to go, and I don't want to keep you, I just have one more question about this. We were just talking before you joined us, and we're talking now, it looks to me, it looks like it doesn't look that complicated for the Democratic Party to pull this out. You just get rid of this old guy and the numbskull he's got as his vice president and find somebody with some gravity. Don't make this big mistake. Like, it's such an obvious mistake you're yeah i mean if you're reading that if

this is if you're reading the history of this election it's like why did you guys not see the train coming uh uh down the other other end of the tunnel i know they've done before i mean roosevelt understood he was going to probably die or they told him he was going to die in 45. So they got rid of Henry Wallace. And they were unceremoniously about how they got rid of him. They just said, you're done for. He was not a bad guy. I mean, he was a farmer. But he turned out right wing right before he died, actually. But my point is that they could easily open up the convention, release the delegates, and then I think either Josh Shapiro or maybe Gavin Newsom would win, and they'd say to Kamala, you know, you're welcome to run. We hope you can win the nomination. But you didn't get enough votes.

Open it up. And I think that's actually why we have this historic, I think everybody's pointed that out, to run we hope you can win the nomination but you didn't get enough votes open it up and i think that's actually why we have this historic i think everybody's pointed that out this june debate we've never had it before either one of the candidates was nominated it is a stress test for joe and if he can take the adderall or whatever he's rumored to take like he did in the state of the union or the first debate he may be able to do that. I think he'll be fine, and they'll keep with him. Not fine, but I mean he'll be fine that night. But, if he has

declined geometrically, not arithmetically, and I think he has, and he stumbles, I think they will get him off the ticket right after. Looking at it from history, right, I have a controlling theory of our current or the past

25 years which is that it's sort of the age of blunder very smart people making very big mistakes in every realm in the public health realm with covid in the financial realm with the financial collapse in the trying to nation build a realm in iraq in invading ukraine from very smart canny leader vladimir putin who didn't realize just how hollow his armed force all these like big mistakes um what is the what is the closest moment in your historical sort of uh sweeping understanding where you're reading the history and you're shouting at the page, don't do this stupid thing. You still have a shot at not doing this. I mean, is it Napoleon going to Moscow?

What is the moment where it's sort of like this, where you're reading and you're thinking, why were these people driven to suicide? Ian Kershaw wrote a really good book called Faithful Choices, and he went through 10 things in World War II that were all preventable, as you said, going in the Soviet Union. Why didn't the Japanese just sidestep Singapore, Pearl Harbor, and take the Dutch East Indies and Indochina? They had all the oil they needed, and there had to be no war. And a lot of it is perceptions. I think people, they get caught up in the mood of exhilaration, hysteria, and they don't step back and look at the actual Mussolini.

Why would he invade Greece and go into France right at the end of the France? And when you look at what he had, he was told, you have no army, you have no names. Don't do it. You have 10% of the GDP of Britain. Don't do it. But they get caught up, and I think that happens. And the other thing is that I do think in a lot of these places, their institutional training of these leaders, it creates a predictable orthodoxy, and they get all of these titles, or they go to law school, or they get their BA, or they go to the Ivy League, or the surrounding, and these brands supposedly guarantee competence. But when you look at history, most of the people who were pretty good were mavericks, or if they did go through that chain of command or the curses of norm, they didn't like it or they had trouble. George Patton was a brilliant, I mean, he really was a military genius. And he

was dyslexic, they hated his guts, he yelled. And there's something to Trump about that. His first term, I thought, was so much more successful, if you looked at just what he did, than other Republican presidents. And partly it was that he was not part of that consensus. And I think that's really important. I know that when I look at my field and I said, who was Schliemann who connected a historical event with the Homeric poems, or who was Michael Ventress who deciphered Linear B, or who was Millman Perry who proved that the Homeric corpus was composed orally? They were all either amateurs. Vent ventris was a worked on codes he was an architect they they were outside the the world of classics and when i look at i've been

reading about fauci the last week that guy is just typical of just getting award after award, and he knew nothing. He knew nothing of biology, immunology, anything. And he had $50 billion to disperse to loyal psychophants. And so, I think that's a lot of it. In the modern state or any state, you've got to be very careful of bureaucracies, administrative groups, institutions that tell us that this person is very competent and because he got this grant, this brand, or this degree, or he went to this particular school, and I just don't think they have a record of... I think one good thing about all this campus disruption is there's a lot of parents that are not sending their kids to these schools. I agree, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of under- are not sending their kids at these schools yeah i have a lot of under enrollment here i yeah i get a call every week from some stanford alumnus and said hey victor

i'm not sending my two kids to stanford i know they're going to bring the sat back and my kids got a great sat but i don't want him anywhere near that campus yeah because i won't he said and one guy just called me and said i won't recognize him at christmas if he goes there wow that's a c-change right so i go that'll be good yeah we can do and if trump can cut tax their endowments and uh put some strings on federal money maybe and get rid of the student loan program and let the universities back their own loans they could have real change anyway well that's well that it does feel like a change um a cycle of change we're entering um and i hope since we start to see it in europe and maybe it's coming here so once again i'm just gonna say just for people um how many books have you written a million no 20 my wife says 26

you really should know by the way victor you really should well she says that because she asked me how long they take and i said between two and three thousand hours and then she's just said these are the amount of times that i we never see you you're you're in you're slumped over some book on the plane once you you get a life, you're done. So I think my – I got a bad case of COVID right now, and I'm getting over it. I had long COVID for a year, and then I got over it, and I felt great after beat. They say you can't beat long COVID. I got over it.

I took 160 people to Normandy. I had a long flight home, and she and I got COVID, and I'm having trouble with that long COVID again. But my point is that she just told me, why don't you enjoy life? No more out-of-state speaking. It's sort of like your decision to go to the seminary. Yeah. I think my seminary will be, yeah. I'm going to stay out here on the farm. Well, speaking as a loyal and incredibly um uh i don't know what we wrapped

reader i have to say of all your books i have to i i hope you continue to not have a life and you continue to not enjoy your life so that you can keep writing the most recent book is the end of everything how war has descended into annihilation and i ask you one last question absolutely what there's something wrong with the new york uh bestseller list they don't they that's not based on actual because the reason i asked that is i wrote a book the dying citizen yeah and it was number one on amazon for yeah three weeks it sold well over 230 000 it was only on there for one week. This book, I know, has not sold as much.

It's been on the New York Times for five weeks, and there's no reason. Amazon's numbers don't correlate. What do they do? What do they use? Is it bookstores, a certain bookstore, or bulk orders? I think it's certain bookstores. Isn't it in in New York Times? The Economist magazine recently did a very deep dive study on this.

They published it two, three weeks ago. And what they found was, and it is the Economist, they're pretty mainstream, but they found that the New York Times bestseller list is definitely statistically significantly biased against conservative titles. Yeah. Are you serious? That's crazy. I'm serious. They've got a whole bunch i know right that makes sense that makes sense because the trump book the case for trump and the dying citizen and even the world war ii have outsold this book this book's not political but this book has been on there for five weeks. And I, because I was sick with COVID for two and I was gone for two.

I haven't done any publicity until this week. So, I don't understand why. And it hasn't been reviewed. That was got a nice review in the Wall Street Journal, a few others. But I don't understand their calculus because they're not, that book has not sold enough books to be the top 20 you know what i mean it doesn't make sense and i don't know why that is it slipped through the uh ideological screen probably yeah they have an ai that reads your book and decides whether it's successful or maybe there's some judge who got sick of woke and said i'm going to irritate people

by putting this book on i don't know yeah don't don't don't put any money on that one okay well i'm thrilled that it's doing so well because it certainly deserves to hey victor thanks for joining us good luck for both of you and feel uh feel better yeah but not too much because we want another book see you soon okay bye you know think about victor i always feel like when he i always feel a little bit like I'm asking him questions like I don't want to pay him to be in his class. If I just have him here, I can ask him, like, you know, I was reading this thing the other day.

Could you explain that? And I'm just hoping anyone else is interested in it. But when you have Victor, you kind of want to ask him questions about the sweep of human history from 2000 B.C. to 2024. Yeah, I mean, you always realize right away that he's got eight or ten levels of depth of knowledge in these matters and and of course there's a gravitas about him too right i mean you almost feel like um um you know he'll say as i was saying to alcibiades right before the Syracuse. Right. I mean, the point, I don't mean that as a joke entirely, is that the point is that he is one of those rare persons who can actually bring to life in a vivid and direct way and relevant way.

Something that you thought is just of remote interest and, you know, pain-loving antiquarianism. It's not that at all. There's not a hint of pain-loving antiquarianism. It's not that at all. There's not a hint of pain-loving antiquarianism about him. Somehow he's managed to be kind of cheerful, even though, what are you saying? What did you just say? We're all doomed? Like, oh, probably. Anyway,

it was a lot of fun. I always love having Victor around and I'm sort of now thrilled that James and Peter weren't here because they tend to hog the chit-chat and we had a nice chit-chat. And we had a nice chit-chat with him. If you are listening to this and you are a member of Ricochet,

we thank you. And if you are not, we would like you to join. Go to Ricochet.com. If you'd like to meet your fellow Ricochet members, there are meetups scheduled throughout the summer and in the autumn. Just go to Ricochet.com and look for meetups and show up. We'd love to see you there. This podcast was brought to you by qualia so you can support us by supporting them it's a great product uh and if you have a

minute i know everyone always says this and people don't do it for some reason but if you go to apple podcast leave us a five-star review it actually does work their magic algorithm will resurface our podcast and more people will hear it. New listeners will discover us. And that's how we keep the show going. Steve, any big summer plans? No, I mean, classes are over, so I'm going to try and rest and relax and catch up on some leisure reading. Oh, that's all right. Well, I'm just going to I'm going to hang out and drink beer and smoke a cigar. That's my July plan. Well, thanks for joining me.

And thank you, of course, again to Victor. And we'll see you next week. Ricochet. Join the conversation.