Staving Off Annihilation with VDH

I'm normally like, hey, whatever, man, but now I have to do it. Okay, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. Mister Garba Schaff Tear down this wall. It's a Rickchet Podcast's number six hundred ninety seven. I'm Rob Long, Peter Robinson and James Lovelas are off this week. I am joined by the Great Steve Dyward and We're going to have a long, interesting, stem winding conversation with the Great Victor Davis Hanton. Stay tuned. Are they are

cheap fakes video? They are done in bad day, and I think that it tells you everything that we need to know about how desperate, how desperate Republicans are here Hotter, thank you for introduction, for sharing your family story. You know I've often said anyway, not a joke, Not a joke. Hello and welcome to the Ricochet Podcast. It is Friday, June twenty first. It's the longest day of the year. Doesn't feel like but I guess it's going to be. I am Rob Long, coming from New York

City, joined by Steve Hayward. Steve, where are you? By the way, I'm actually in Marin County behind enemy lines, believe it or not. Exactly right, Well, did you see that, Like the Bay Area now is advertising itself to the rest of central California, which is really hot, by saying it's misty here or it's cool here. It's beyond misty. It is freezing cold here, and we're all wearing puffy jackets. It's unbelievable.

That's one hundred degrees here. So well, James Lylacks, who's usually here, is off today, and Peter Robinson's usually here is off today. So Steve is just you and me. So a Monday, at a celebration of the twelfth anniversary of the Dreamers Act, I remember that one President Biden announced a new immigration order to provide a pathway to citizenship for people who entered illegally but have since married citizens. And they have to have been here for

ten years. So that's about half a million immigrants. Apparently we'll qualify for that. You know, I thought the move was going to be just get tough on immigration between now and you know, November was six or whatever, and then loosen the strings. But I guess that isn't That isn't what he's doing. Yeah, I mean There's three things occurred to me quickly. One

is, is he trying to lose the election? I mean, surely they know the polls that immigration has become, you know, the number one or two issue with people, and people are because they don't like what's happening. Second thing is it does look like a purely cynical political play to try and attract Hispanic voters in Arizona and Nevada. Okay, I guess I get that,

but it may cost them more than it gains them. But then, third, you know, one of the more revealing things Biden said in another issue, but it relates to this one, was two three weeks ago or maybe more, he said, oh, the Supreme Court said I couldn't forgive student loans, but I didn't let that stop me. Oh so, you know, a whole branch of government says what you're doing is illegal, and you know, what's this about the rules? Nobody's above the law, right,

I didn't let them think all the law stop exactly. And you know DACA from what ten twelve years ago, that's always been under legal cloud and I think still is. And I think this new move is also vulnerable to a challenge by the way the Deep Senate says, maybe they would like a federal court to do an injunction. See those mean Trump judges are stopping us

from being compassionate, and that's why you have to vote for me. I'm not persuaded, certainly, but that could be their crazy thinking and does seem like a bigger mouse trap that he's building to try to catch a mouse that he could easily catch by simply saying we're going to enforce the border, right. I mean, that is such an obvious thing. It's hard to argue, even if you're in favor of immigration reform and am seeing all those other

things that that wouldn't be if that's not a component to it. I just just talk about politics for a minute. I mean, I you know, there's always that moment where you think, am I just missing something and they have a secret plan that I can't imagine what that secret plan is? But

why aren't they running around with a hair on fire? I mean, I would be doing that if I was an incumbent president and an incumbent presidential staff and campaign operation looking at this, I think it just doesn't seem like it's like that. You know, you're a poker. You were playing poker and the guy is sitting there and he's got this smug look on his face. You think, is he bluffing or does he really have the cards? And

I cannot imagine that anyone in Biden world thinks they have the cards. You know, our mutual friend John pot Harts has been saying for a while that this campaign of Biden's reminds him of the George hw Bush campaign in nineteen ninety two, And of course John was there for that. He worked in that bush By and the wheels came off of everything. Nothing they did worked. They kept being confident, well, things will turn around for us, without

having a theory why. They're totally out of touch with reality. And he thinks the same exact things happening to Biden. I mean a couple of little things. And I'm sure you know from your show business perspective you'd appreciate is you have always dreadful videos showing Biden barely functioning, wandering off, and and they're pushing back on it in a way that simply calls more attention to it.

Right. You had greeen John Pierre out saying these are cheap fake videos and that just gives the right, It just gives the story another whole two or three news cycles. And I'm guessing somebody, maybe Biden, maybe doctor Jill, maybe their political strategists, say you've got to go out and push

back on this. It looks just as pathetic to me as when Donald Trump, on the second day in office, made Sean Spicer go out and defend the claim that it was the biggest to knock to the peast ever, right right, remember, so ludicrous And all it did was call attention to you know, one of the obvious defects that Trump has, which is grandiosity. So the same thing's happening here. I don't everybody seems to have lost their

grip on political reality, and maybe both parties it's an all. You know the little British comedy called Blackadder, and there was just one guy on black Adder, the sort of the sad little character. He'd always say, I have a cunning plan, and then he would tell you what the plan was, and you think, oh my god, we're all going to die. I think that's what that light was. Oh my god, we're all gonna

Dutch. It does feel like their their attitude is, you know, we just have to let we just have to hold our breath and let Trump be Trump. That their solution and their strategy is. And I think this is a bigger This is one of the biggest problems I think with with with with American politics and American leadership in general, is the idea that I don't have to do anything. The other guy is so horrible and he's gonna make his own mistakes. I can just stand there and he's gonna make his own mistakes.

Yeah, and I'm gonna The smart play here is for me to try to win this election by one vote. Yeah, and we're so smart. We can slice up the electorate, and we can slice up all of the precincts so we can figure out which household, all that stuff, all that crap that they do, and they do it in show business too, right. And the irony is that if you're once you start thinking that way,

you will only win by one vote. Once you start thinking I'm gonna be as smart and I'm gonna I'm gonna be strategic, then you could only be strategic that way. The whole operation It becomes about how do I just win one vote to and he won more vote in Pennsylvania and yeah, and that is like the I mean, that is just the worst lowest form of leadership I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, you know who else had that

theory was Jimmy Carter in nineteen eighty. They thought and said all the way through O Reagan is so unacceptable that people have to come around and even though he's little ahead of us in the polls, we may be able to play an inside straight in the electro college. And they lost by ten points,

lost forty four states. I think there's something similar with Trump. I think there the left is either doesn't perceive but the smart ones do, or they're just in denial about the fact that he has a similar appeal, that he runs ahead of his polls, and so they may be in for a very rude shock. And so you know, right now, I think I've said

this before, I right now think Trump's going to win comfortably. That could change, may very well change, because you know, if you have Trump working for the other side, right But you know, right now, you know, I don't see Biden getting any better for him. Yeah, I just it's it's a strange thing. You're like, well, I understand why Biden doesn't get it because he's you know, out to lunch. But I don't understand why nobody else in his world gets it. So I mean,

maybe it's just too complicated. And speaking of complicated, well sorry, I'm gonna have one thought of that, which is On the other hand, the recent history, especially of Obama's reelection campaign in twenty twelve, remember something about Obama. He was the first president ever re elected with a lower vote total

than his initial election. Most re elected presidents get more votes. But what they did, brilliantly and very scientifically was fined every marginal vote that was sort of weakly for Obama and get that person of the polls in the key states like Ohio. And I got to think that democratic machine still exists, and I think the Biden people may be counting on that, and they might be right to have some confidence in that drill. Yeah, but you know,

the Obama thing was interesting because he started with such a cushion. I mean, his win in two thousand and eight was the smashing popular of a victory and a smashing electoral college victory, and so he could afford to like leak support for four years, which he did. He could afford to like turn off people who have wanted this moderate guy a chance by being too far left. Hey, just kind of do that, and he's I'm still gonna win.

That's how I mean. He was like one of those billionaires who loses one hundred million dollars, like, yeah, no, I don't even know it's self a change man, can I can still do it? But all of this stuff is so they've made it so complicated, and they've this arrogance of the marketer. And you think by now they would know. You think by now they would know things are complicated. For instance, you Steve,

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Victor does not need any introduction. We're gonna do it anyway because it's good podcast hygiene. You know him. He is the Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History, the Hoover Institution. He's authored a bajillion I think the actual numbers of bajillion books, including the The Cry in the Wilderness called Mexophornia, which came out many years ago and is absolutely pinpoint relevant today. Unfortunately, it should be a book that we look on and see in the past,

but we haven't solved the problem yet. And his latest book is The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation. Victor. Welcome, Thank you for having me. You guys, So, I have a couple of questions because I want a little bit of a history perspective. Yeah, I I'm doing as you. I mean, you may not know, but this I'm sort of going off to seminary next fall. I'm going to come.

Yeah. So I'm doing a lot of reading, and I'm doing a lot of like New test Old Testament, Hebrew Bible reading, yes, and kind of and like. And there's a point at which, you know, there's the there's a point which it just feels very bronze age, and then there's a point when suddenly it's Greek and Alexander and Roman and they have been fighting,

these empires have been fighting in that land for ever. It seems like, yes, well, it becomes part of the Holy Land, so to speak, what is now Jordan. The West Bank Gaza in Israel becomes part of the so called West in about three point thirty one when Alexander wins a battle of Isis, and then he absorbs what was the the cane Persian Empire, and in that empire is Judea and the Jews, and he pretty much he and his successors the Seleucids and leave them alone. And then that empire

is absorbed by Rome. Part of it. The Adelids give it to Rome in the second century AD, but by the first century BC, excuse me, the first century BC, that comes under Roman domination, and then you have Herod the Great, who's a client king, and everything seems to be working well until the Romans decide that they can't give any more exemptions to the Jews, who won't honor the emperor because now they've transition as a deity.

So then we have the Vespasian and Titus destroy Jerusalem, and that starts the beginning of the diaspora. But there'll be a number of revolts after that as well. That's when Greek and Latin start to become part of the Exus Jesus

of not only the Old Testament, but the New Testament. Is I mean the New Testament will be will be written somewhere around forty five to ninety a d. And there's some There are two moments in the Hebrew Bible, I guess, or the Tanok they I guess they always happen a new name for the Tanak. They're kind of chilling. One is Alexander zips through Judea on his way to Gaza and they eat. There's no there's no mention of like any I think it's herodous. There's no mention of the Jews. They don't,

they don't show up. They're not. But to to read it and to see these names, yeah, I know they're they're Persian subjects and they're they don't they're not. They've been they've been given certain exemptions under the Persian Empire. And they're not sure what his siege of God. They don't know what's gonna When he's besieges Tire and Gaza, he nobody, he doesn't know who's going to win. And he's only twenty one twenty three at this point.

So a lot of people not just the Jews, but a lot of people are just waiting to see if he's really going to destroy the Persian Empire and then they'll make cut a deal with him. But they don't want to go out on a limb and join him and then find out he's going to

lose. Well why And there's another kind of creepy or mentioned in the creepy moment, but like thrilling moment really in the movie where you know how it ends, and it's I think it's in Second Maccabees or something, and they are it's a part of the sort of political assessment, and they're saying, look, everybody's so crappy to us here, the Persians and the Greeks.

There's a new empire over there a little farther west in Rome. Let's why don't we Why don't we see if they'll come and help us get independent? And when you're reading it, it's like you're in a movie and you want to say no, no, no, no, no, that's not going to be good either. That's not a solution either, no, But it does. It's both. It's really and depressing to think that people have been arguing over this eleven mile wide in some places, peace of land for thousands

of years, and we thought, we thought we had a solution. I mean, ir yeah, it is. I mean, you're it's ironic when I walk across the Stanford campus and hear all of these people saying from the river to the sea and their settlers and their interlopers about the Jews. And we've got to remember that the Jews were they began to spread after the destruction of the Second Temple and the City of Jerusalem. But there was still a large population of Jews, and we had the Maccabee re evolutions, et cetera.

But when the Empire fell in the West, that became part of the Byzantine Empire, and the Byzantines allowed the Jews to stay there and they had pretty good relations until the mid six hundreds when Islam came in and took and took the Holy Land. So we're talking about I think you could argue that there's evidence of Jewish civilization with a written language as early as thirteen or fourteen

hundred pc some evidence. So then you're talking about two thousand years before Islam even came to the Holy Land. And who was there was the Jews that were there, and there were Jewish settlements, not a lot, but that were continuous all the time, people families that lived there all the way up until modern time. But it's a very strange thing about radical Islam is that once Radical Islam goes into an area, they claim it as its ancestral homeland.

They do that with Spain. That was one of the biggest talking points of Osama bin laden LuSE. This was ours, No, it wasn't. You came in in the seventh century and tried to steal it, and then you occupied it for four hundred five hundred years, but you were always at war with Iberians. And the same thing is true of the Holy Land. The same thing is true of North Africa. It was it was punique.

Actually it was indigenous Berbers, and then the Punic under the Carthaginians came in the eighth century, and then they were wiped out by the Romans, and then the Romans from essentially one forty six all the way into the four fifties, and then the Byzantines recaptured it and the Vandals took it, and then they recaptured it from the Vandals and held it for almost one hundred and fifty years and then the Islam was the last those were the last arrivals on the

scene. And yet when you talk to people, I've been to all of those Middle East countries in North Africa, and yet you talk to people, they think it's been Islamic from the beginning of time. And it's really weird. It's a very rare, weird mindset when you talk to people like that.

I was just gonna see what's to jump in. I was in Tunis a few years ago, and you know, hiking around Carthage, and it's, first of all, it's amazing to think that all we're looking at is about ten percent of what's there, that there's more underneath all those neighborhoods and houses have been built over the years. And then they show you the Carthaginian sort of naval yard. This is a big circle, big round thing, and it's it's kind of like, I mean, this is wrong, this

is absolutely the wrong interpretation. But were like this, this is kind of small, like the Romans were afraid of these guys like this looked like I mean, like at locals, like it's a local doc. You know, it's not that big. Well, part of the problem was that the city actually reached its highest population right before it was destroyed, about five hundred and fifty six hundred thousand people. And Scipio the philosopher, supposedly with Polybius at

his side, destroyed that city. I mean, we have a description an Appian, very graphic. They destroyed it blocked by block. They didn't so salt in the ground that was a medieval add on, but they leveled it. And then they prohibited anybody from settling it. And then the Grocca I tried to bring in some left wing people and make kind of a utopian veterans

communal city, and that just failed. And then for one hundred years it was this desolate and then when Caesar came, he created something called Carthago Nova, and that was a new city of Carthage, and it was not quite on the same side of the rubble, it was near it. And that harbor you're seen is the Roman rebuilding of what was wiped out as the Carthaginians. So there's almost none of the old Ginian Punic city, but the remains today are the Roman city. When the Roman city, my gosh, it

was at I think by the first century AD. It was the fourth largest city in the Empire, after Rome and Constantinople and Antioch. Victor at Steve Hayward out in I'm well, First of all, I think Rob did this too quickly. You know things are bad when Rob Long is going off the seminary and he's like, he's like Augustine going to hit the oregas as the vandals are outside the city. God, you figured it out exactly like Fellas.

Yeah. And the irony is is I'm today in San Francisco, believe it or not, speaking at a panel on climate change, and it's freezing cold here. It's you know, any more perfect, right, It's colder than even it is usually here. But look, Rob went off the seminary. I saw the title of your new book, The End of Everything, How Wars descend into Annihilation, And I thought, ah, Victor's taking a

cheerful turn for a change. Look there, there's great history here. But I think there's also parable, which I think is your intention, or at least that's what I've taken away from it. The subtext, and it's not very much sub is that America is not immune from the peril of thinking. It's that things can happen quickly that we are led by gullible and ignorant leaders.

And you know, I think back to Lincoln's Lycem address, which you know, I know, you know, he said, look, we have these two big moats around America. This is eighteen thirty eight, right, and so nobody can really invade us and take us down. It's too hard. If we're going to fall, it will be the authors of our own destruction. And I still think there's a lot that that's true, and maybe

it connects to what you're after here. But you point out that a lot of people have made a similar mistake over the years and thinking either they're immune that allies will come rescue them. I've done the whole bullet point list of some of your observations. Give us a scenario to this goes beyond the four corners of your book a little bit this question, But give us a scenario or two of what you think are our largest vulnerabilities that our leaders are oblivious

to or not taking seriously. Well. In the book, all of these societies had had long pedigrees, They all had very impressive fortifications, they had large empires. They all thought they were invulnerable, and they had no idea of the temperament of an Alexander the Great, or Scipio or Memet, especially Hernan Cortes. And they all thought as you said, and I pointed out that the Allies would save them, or they could negotiate, and they all

knew that complete annihilation was very rare and roarer. But when I looked at the present world, and I looked at all the people who have been leveling existential threats, I mean existential by saying we want to wipe you off the face of the earth. That's Kim Jong Own. I was surprised that early he is threatened to send missiles into Athens. He's threatened to send them into

an Ecosia. He said about Nagorno, the corridor that they just ethnically cleanse one hundred and fifty thousand Armenians. He said, this was the solution our grandfathers used, and we'll use it again. He's threatened to wipe out the Kurds. We've had Putin. I think I counted seventeen news accounts of Russian media Putin saying they would use nuclear weapons if they felt it was necessary in Ukraine. And then China issued a video remember about having to wipe out Japan

if it intervened in Taiwan. And then I looked at the reaction. Everybody said, this is crazy. They never do this. This isn't even Iran. Mister Ruff and Johnny said twenty years ago that Israel was a one bomb state. So there's a pattern here, and when I look at the United States, it kind of unfortunately falls into the pattern. One of them is financial insolvency. All of these cities did not have the wherewithal that they thought they had. So we look at the United States, we are borrowing a

trillion every ninety days. And what's funny about that is there's no one on either side has a plan. I mean, I thought at some point somebody would say, well, Alan, Simpson and Bowles had a plan, a very simplified tax code, which had we adopted when Obama formed the Commission in two thousand and nine, we would be balanced budget and we would have half

the death paid off. But no one's talking about that. And yet the interest on the dead is, Neil Ferguson pointed out not too long ago in an article, is larger than our defense budget, and the interest rate is five five and a half percent, so it's about thirteen or fourteen percent of

the entire budget. So that is hampering us. When Trump says he's going to rebuild the military and up it back to four or five percent GDP, you want to know where he's going to get the money, and that the only way you get the money is to cut The second thing is the borders have collapsed. All these societies could not enforce their borders for a variety of reasons. But our border is not for us. It doesn't exist. They

don't believe in borders. They feel that they're constructs, and in this globalized mindset, everybody has an inbreak natural right to go wherever he wants. That's a charitable view that the uncharitable is that this is what they call the new democratic majority or demography is destiny, to quote some of the books that they write. But we don't know what ten million people are doing in this country, and we'll never I think it will take twenty years if you had conservative

administrations to fix this. And by fixing, I mean find out all the ten million people are here, give them background checks to port the bad people, give some process to get a green cart. It's a control mess. And it was by intent, and then of course something is deadly wrong with their military. And that's something that happened in these case studies that I showed. We have forty five thousand people who did not they were not recruited.

The Pentagon says, well, it's because the job market is tied, or people are obese, or they're in gangs, or they're not. But they've lowered the standards and they still can't get them. But when you actually don't listen to the Pentagon, but you go online and very carefully, it's very hard to do. But a couple of us have looked at it. They do have demographies of the people who are not joining. Latinos are joining, Blacks are joining, women are joining everybody, but you know who, white

males. White males are not joining the military. And when you look at the fatality rates in Afghanistan and Iraq, they died at roughly seventy five and seventy four percent wwise. They're numbers and the demography, so basically the military.

When Mill went on congressional testimony with Austin and Gilgad or whatever his name was, Chief of Naval Operations in twenty one and They said that they were going to hunt out white rage, they were going to read Professor Kenny's book, and then they bounced out eighty five hundred people who had most of them had natural immunity, and they said they went vacks. They sent a message that these people were not wanted or that they wanted to be promoted or retained.

They were going to be DEI standards. And they just said, fine, I don't want to do it, especially after Afghanistan, that humiliation, and so now we don't have the people that we send that volunteer to go to god awful places like Helman Province or Fallujah. The condition of the military, the morales bad I hear from people is giving me flashbacks. And I'm not sure whether to invoke the old Santa Ana people who don't remember the pastor

doing to repeat it, or the or Marxist line. The history repeats FIRSTUS tresiting then as farse. But I'm having flashed the Carter years when you had a lot of the same thing happening. Very low morale inflation had put some of these soldiers below the poverty line. Things didn't work Desert one, and I thought it was not possible to exceed the gullibility and ignorance of the Carter

administration. But right now, I would take ze big new Berzinski and cy vance back in a heartbeat compared to our current leadership, which seems to me an order of magnitude worse than the Carter people were. Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. I've wrote an article, but I didn't realize, and you're the Reagan historian. I didn't realize when I went back and spent about four or five days reviewing that campaign how close that race was. Yes,

in June and right about now. I mean, I think the polls were slanting, but Reagan was either a point back or three points up, and went back and forth, and he really didn't break that open until wasn't there a poll Stephen like ten days before by Gallop that had Carter even ahead. Yes, I think that's right. Yes, And so I think it's very similar because we hear that Trump is ahead with he's making historic inroads with youth, with Latinos, Blacks, even Asians are coming back. But when

you look at the national polls, Fox had Biden ahead. So either that that in road is only in these swing states. And then the California population of New York makes up for it on the national level or there they're not accurate. And it reminds me so much of Reagan, and what they said about Trump and Reagan were eerie. That Reagan had no federal he had never been, had never been a federally elected official, that he was going to

blow up the world. George W. Bush had called him voodoo economics, and uh, he was too old, and Carter was going to slice him up in the debate. It was. It was very reminiscent. So that gave me a little bit of hope that this election, if they keep doing

what they're doing, and Carter was pandering in the same way. I mean Biden when he sells out Israel for a few thousand votes in Michigan, or he drains the strategic petroleum or this latest amnesty or the tariffs are working with Obador now to send people away from the border, or the student loan forgiveness. He thinks that he can patch up all of these little slivers of you

know, pandering, and they're going to make a majority. I don't think it's going to work, and I don't think people like what he's doing. But so I think it could break. I think it could be broken open. I think if Trump is careful and gets you know, I don't know, that's a broken record. But if he doesn't, if he doesn't go after and call people, you know, right he said about Paul laying the

other I started laughing. He said, get that dog off of the I mean, if he hadn't said the word dog, it might have been more effective. But he could blow this thing apart. He really could. It does feel like a change election, right, It does feel like that's what I think it change election. I do because there's just so much It just feels like there's so much powder in the keg here. It's just going to

have to go. I would imagine within two to three weeks, Israel will feel that it's pretty much decimated Homos, and then when we get into late July or August, it's going to do something about his blaw and that's going to be a big, nasty war and that's going to put a lot of

pressure. Part of the subtext of what netnw who's video was about is that they're not giving them the actual Jaydam adapted all of that stuff that's necessary to stock up for his belaw, and that's going to be right during the election. And I think if Biden comes out, I mean, his blow doesn't get the kind of romance that the Palestinians do. It gets some, Yeah, but it's very hard for a young, stupid, useful idiot on say

Berkeley campus to start waving HASB law flags. It's easier with Hamas, and so I think that if he sells Israel down the road and they get into an existential war with HESBI law and you get major damage to hypha and stuff, it's going to really hurt him. I think, by the way, quick prediction Victor, I think that if that comes to pass, and I think it will, I think the Prohamas pro Palestinian left is going to aim to shut down as many American campuses as they can, and I think they

will succeed. Yeah, it's hard to know the stand. Did you see today that the Stanford outgoing president Richard Salier, who might know he was a classicist and I didn't think he was particularly muscular giving all these second third chances. But they are going to prosecute the so called journalists that claim that she

was just happened to be there. Right, And so I think they understand that if they get they all know deep down inside that if any it's sort of like the French, you know, a whiff of grape shot, or they they hung Admiral being Voltaire and encouraged the others that type of from Voltaire, that famous thing about what the British do If they just had one strong, muscular president that just put these kids in jail for vandalism, burglary,

violence, assault, felony charges, it would all dissipate. Yeah, So what you're looking for is one act of courage and academic a victor. Yeah, I saw you're a historian, one Saikawa haunted. Jump up on a car and can we zoom out for a minute, just talk about big sweeping things for a second. Margaret Thatcher, the the the serendipity of having Thatcher in Downing Street and Reagan in the White House. It was a huge unexpected

thing to happen. Really. Yeah, but now it looks like if you look at the rest of Western Europe right now, there is a in co it and probably in progress in information, a kind of center right maybe collection of coalitions that are happening all over the place, in places that you never expected in France, for instance, or Holland, or in Germany or places where this feels new, and it's almost like we're America's out of step a

little. It is. I just got back from France. I took one hundred and sixty people for the eightieth anniversary of D Day and traveled around all over the country and talked to people. And you know what's funny is that we all thought that Europeans were crazy, that they were these crazy socialist and one world government and naive, and they all there was a lot of truth to that, but compared to what where Biden has taken us, they are

We're way beyond that. They don't There's certain issue is that they you talk to them, and they don't believe, and they don't allow this sexual transformation of twelve year olds with dangerous surgeries and hormonal They're beyond that. They don't believe anymore in open borders. They really don't, especially the Swedes, you know, and they understand they're pretty or much more open about radical Islam than

we are as too, and that that's new. They're also they're also very if you went into Versailles at the are you went into Verdun at the Ossi area, or you went into any of these monuments about d Day that the French and you went and desecrated them like they did the Lafayette Statue. The French would go basilistic. I think they would. I think they put you in jail so that I think we all have to realize that we're in a jack of This isn't even a democratic party, this is a Jacobin revolutionary party.

And I think their attitude is we're going to run up so much debt that when you take over, you're going to have to raise taxes and that'll be our legacy that you had to become more redistributed, redistributedive. We're going to let in so many people, You're going to have a whole generation to do on do what we did. We're going to so we define the Middle East until as Obama did to the Hesba law, Ranamas Lebanon access that you're

going to have big trouble. It's going to be there. I think that that's what they're after to just cause so much mayhem that it will be lasting and it will make the Republicans and the Conservatives have to do things they don't want to do like, they'll have to, I don't know, raise taxes or cut entitlements or do something. And then the left is going to say, well, yep, maybe look at that. That's yeah, and that's good. Maybe you'll have to raise taxes and help the poor. So so

that's what they're doing. There's a lot. I guess what I'm trying to say is there's a logic to their madness. Mm hmm. Well, it's always been the issue that economic conservatives have always thought, well, we can't. We clearly can't run up instead, that's crazy. But economic liberals are like, no, of course we can. We have we have one hundred we have access to one hundred percent of the GDP if we want. We just passed a law and tax it. Modern monetary theory exactly, we could

do whatever we want. And they're kind of right. I mean that that absolutely is in fact true. I mean, but as margut Thatchers said it, pretty soon you run out of the people's money. How many of these you know, how many of these empires that you've studied, the big sweeping in and out across the land, and certainly even across the Holy Land, how many of them fell because they just went broke. I think all of them did, and thee the Byzantines did. The buzant Tings were completely broke.

The Romans were broke, and you know, the first century Juvenile wrote that famous satire about bread and circuses, and there was a million people at Rome, and probably half of them didn't have any source of employment, so you can tell. I mean, they had a word in Athens called redheads, and that meant that the silver tetra drachma, which was the coin of the realm and the Athenian Empire, was veneered, so that raised head of

a person's profile. You know, of Athena, for example, the thin veneer wore off very quickly and then they had red hair because the copper showed.

And Aristophanes has a take on that. But it was there were you know, if you look at the classical city state, Athens paid people to go to the theater in the fifth century, and by the fourth century they were paying people to vote, and they had twenty thousand people working for the government in various bureaucracies, and they didn't have the money anymore, and they

were and so's never happened here. That's amazing. We're in California, Steven, No, so well, we had a seventy six We had a ninety eight billion dollar as you remember, ninety eight billion dollar surplus just eighteen months ago. Now we then we had seventy seven billion. Now we're down to forty five billion, we're told. And I don't see any hope at all. This state, this state is a model of where the United States is

going, and it's completely dysfunctional. I where I live, everything is dysfunctional, nothing works, and it's very scary. The book is called The End of Everything, How War is the Sent into Annihilation, but the epilogue is titled How the Unimaginable Becomes Inevitable. So I'm giving you a chance here, Victor, to not destroy everybody's weekend. This is your opportunity. It's not inevitable, right, and we were Americans. No, it's not. It's

not inevitable. We can change it if we, if we, if we decide to the only thing you know in my whole here is I live in a town that's ninety five percent Mexican American, and my brothers were married to Mexican American people, and I can't I'm not exaggerating. I have not met and Mexican American over forty male who's self employed, and there's a lot of them who is not voting for Trump. They all are, I know their

kids aren't, and maybe their wives are. But I think you're going I think you're going to see forty five or fifty percent of the Latino vote in California get close to Trump. And that's that. Really. If that happens, then a lot of the bad things that are happening will start to I mean, the whole tribalism, chauvinism, white this, you know, Marxist oppressor, oppressor, victim, victimizer. When you start seeing minorities get close to fifty to fifty, then that all disappears. Then the left, of

course would shut the border in two seconds. But that's my hope. And economic Trump has been very It's such an irony for someone who was so uncouth and called a racist and all of these blasphemies, and yet he has appealed to working class people, including minorities, far more than McCain or Romney or the I think the two rules of American politics right one is the obverse of the traditional rule, which is they say, you know, you vote for

the guy you want to have a beer with. And I actually think it's sort of the obverse or the CONVERSI, which is that you vote for the guy you think would have a beer with you. Yes. Now I know Trump doesn't drink beer, but I think most people look at him and think, I bet you this guy would be fine sitting on my sofa. And you know, you know, you know in that in two thousand and sixteen,

you know that she did not want to be in your house. And I think the other one is that, well, the other the other rule is that you you the winner of the race is the person Is that a politician or the candidate who could behave like a normal person for ten seconds? Yes, because it's very hard for people in politics or even on camera to

behave like a normal person for ten seconds. So this guy who I mean, I full disclosure, I'm not a fan, but I see him broad and around, this guy who like lives in a tower and has a gold toilet and is the weirdest person I've ever been, think that he is somehow more normal than any like I was. It was just, you know, you're a musing with people. What's going to happen. You know why, why why wouldn't they just replace Biden? Just replaced Biden. And then the

question is with whom the who? There's nobody normal, There's no there's nobody, And that is like the essence of the problem. Yeah, it is Trump has he has a he feels at home with them, with the working class. He does. So I have a an axiom I teach the students when I teach the presidency, which is the trick of the presidency and means the candidates is this, Americans want to look up to our president. We want to put them on a pedestal, but we want to gaze at them

at eye level. That's our democratic sensibility. That's a paradox. Of course, the people who can figure that out of the ones who win landslides Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, right, George W. Bush to a certain extent. And the Democrats problem is they keep throwing up these obvious elitists who look down this like Al Gore and John Kerry and Hillary Obama is a sort of special case. But and then Biden is just an old hack they settled on

because they were terrified at Bernie Sanders. I think there are some plausible Democrats out there, but you don't hear much about him, like the governor Shapiro Pennsylvania actually, and even Jared Poulis of Colorado I think is a creditible guy. But nobody's talking about them. They're all talking about the identity candidates.

Yeah, and they can't. They have no future because yes, if they were to be reasonable on the border, or climate change or electric vehicles, they would they would be Yeah, their base would would canibalize them, right, and that the party is really a Jacobin party. It's been hijacked. It's funny, and they always project so that of course they say that the

Republican Party has been mega. But when you I was looking at today at a whole list of Republican issues, and you look at the MAGA issues except on tariffs and entitleed, entitlements, maybe budget, there's not that much difference between a traditional Republican. If Trump gets in there, he will pret he will get conservative judges. He'll close the border, he will up the defense budget, he will be reasonable about energy, he will try to be energy

independent. He will try to be no better friend and no worse enemy to or Allah he won't try to destroy all what they say, it'll be pretty much. One thing he won't do is have an optional military engagement in the Middle East on the ground. Yeah, but I suspect that that is in keeping with a vast majority of Americans. I think that is not ultimately the

most the deepest worry, which I think is probably unfounded. But who knows is American boots on the ground in Gaza and some kind of peacekeeping force after it's turned into a pile of rubble or Ukraine or something, And that is I think in twenty twenty four, is unacceptable to Americans. He's on the right of almost every issue, maybe the exception abortion, and that's complicated.

Trump is on the side of the American people on the border, on foreign policy, on deterrence, on the defense budget, on woke, on DEI, on energy, on inflation, every single one of them. He's on the right side. And that's very hard for Biden. For all the institutional support he has, academic, corporation, entertainment, the media, it's still going to be very hard for people to vote against their perceived interest on these issues. I know you got to go, and I don't want to keep

it. I just have one more question about this, because what we were just talking before you join us, and we're talking now, it looks to me, to me, looks like it doesn't look that complicated for the Democratic Party to pull this out. Just get rid of his old die and a numbskull he's got as vice president and find somebody with some gravity. Don't make

this big mistake, like it's such an obvious mistake. I mean, if you're reading, if this is, if you're were the history of this election, it's like, why did you guys not see the train coming down the other other end of the tunnel. I know they've done it before. I mean Roosevelt understood he was going to probably die, or they told him he was going to die in forty five. So they got rid of Henry Wallace. They just and they were unceremoniously about how they got and they just said,

you're done for He was not a bad guy. I mean, he was a communist, but he turned out he was good. You know, I had a soft spot because he was a farmer, but he turned out right wing right before he died. Actually, yeah, But my point is that they could easily open up the convention, release the delegates, and then I think either a Josh Shapiro or maybe Gavin Newsom would win, and they'd say to Kamalo, you know you're welcome to run. We hope you can

win the nomination, but you didn't get enough votes. Open it up. And I think that's actually why we have this historic I think everybody's pointed that out as June debate. We've never had it before either one of the candidates was nominated. It is a stress test for Joe and if he can take the adderall or whatever he's rumored to take like he did in the State of the Union or the first day, he may be able to do that. I think he'll be fine and they'll keep with him. Not fine, but

I mean he'll be fine that night. But if he has declined geometrically not arithmetically, and I think he has then and he stumbles, I think they will get him off the ticket. Right after looking at it from history right now, I might have a controlling theory of our current the past twenty five

years, which is that it's sort of the age of blunder. Very smart people making very big mistakes in every realm in the public health realm with COVID, in the financial realm with the financial collapse in the China nation build realm in Iraq invading Ukraine from a very smart Kenny leader Valderia Putin who didn't realize just how hollow his armforce. With all these like big mistakes. What what is the closest moment in your historical sort of sweeping understanding where you're reading the

history and you're shouting at the page, don't do this stupid thing. You still have a shot at getting at not doing this. I mean, is it Napoleon going to Moscow? What is the moment where it's sort of like this, where you're reading it you're thinking, why were these people driven to suicide? You sound? Ian Kershaw wrote a really good book called Faithful Choices, and we went through ten things in World War Two that were all preventable

going as you said, going in the Soviet Union. Why didn't the Japanese just sidestep Singapore Pearl Harbor and take the duchiest Indies and into China They had all the oil they needed, learned to be no war And a lot of it is perceptions. I think people they get caught up in the mood of xhilaration, hysteria, and they don't step back and look at the actual Mussolini.

Why would he invade Greece and go into France right at the end of the brands, and when you look what he had, he was told, you have no army, you have no don't do it, you have five you have ten percent of the GDP of Britain, don't do it. But they get caught up, and I think that happens. And the other thing is that I do think there in a lot of these places they're institutional training

of these leaders. It creates a predictable orthodoxy. And they get all of these titles, or they go to law school, or they get their BA, or they go to the Ivy League or the surroundment. And these brands supposedly guarantee competence. But when you look at history, most of the people who were pretty pretty good were mavericks, or if they did go through those chain of command or the curses of norm that they didn't like it or they had trouble. George Patten was a brilliant, I mean he really was a

military genius, and he was dyslexic. They hated his guts, he yelled, and there's something to trump about that. His first term I thought was so much more successful if you looked at just what he did than other Republican presidents, and partly was that he was not part of that consensus. And I think that's really important. I know that when I look at my field and I said, who was Schleimann who connected a historical event with the Homeric

poems? Or who was Michael Ventrist who deciphered leniar b Or who was Melman Perry who proved that the Homeric corpus was composed? Orally they were all either amateurs. Ventrist was a worked on codes, he was an architect. They were out outside the world of classics. And when I look at I've been reading about Fauci the last week. That guy is just typical of just getting award after award, and he knew nothing of virology, immunology, anything,

and he had fifty billion dollars to disperse to loyal psychophones. And so I think that's a lot of it. In the modern state, or any state, you've got to be very careful of bureaucracies, administrative groups, institutions that tell us that this person is very competent and because he got this this brand or this degree, or he went to this particular school, and I just don't think they have a record of I think one good thing about all this

campus disruption is there's a lot of parents that are not sending their kids at these school I have a lot I get under enrollment here. Yeah. I get a call every week from some Stanford alumnus and said, Hey, I'm not sending my two kids a Stanford. I know they're going to bring the SAT back, and my kids got a great SAT. But I don't want him anywhere near that campus because I won't he said. And one guy just called me and said, I won't recognize him at Christmas if he goes there.

Wow, seats right, So I go that will be good. Yeah, we can do. And if Trump can cut at tax their endowments and put some strings on federal money maybe and get rid of the student loan program and let the universities back their own loans, they could have real change. Anyway. Well, that's well that it does feel like a change, a cycle of change rendering. I hope since we start to see it in Europe and maybe it's coming here, So once again, I'm just going to say,

just for people, how many books have you written? A million? No, my wife says twenty six. Right. You really should know by the way she says that, because she asked me how long they take, and I said between two and three thousand hours. And then she's just said, these are the amount of times that we never see You're you're you're slumped over some book on the plane. Once you get a life, you're done. So I think my I got a bad case of COVID right now,

and I'm getting over. I had long COVID for a year and then I got over and I felt great after beating I said, you can't beat long COVID. I got over. I took one hundred and sixty people to Normandy. I had a long flight home and she and I got COVID and I'm having trouble with that long COVID again. But my point is that she just told me, why don't you enjoy life? No more? Out of state speaking, just it's sort of like your decision to go to the seminary.

Yeah, I think my seminary will be Yeah, you're going to try. I think I'm going to stay out here on the farm. Well, I speaking as a loyal and incredibly, I don't know what we wrapped reader. I have to save all your books. I have to. I hope you continue to not have a life, and you continue to not enjoy your life so that you can keep writing. The most recent book is The End of Everything? How wars to send it into annihilation? And I asked you one

last question. Absolutely, there's something wrong with the New York bestseller list. They don't that's not based on actual because the reason I asked that is I wrote a book, The Dying Citizen, and it was number one on Amazon for three weeks. It sold well over two hundred and thirty thousand. It was only on there for one week. This book, I know, has not sold as much. It's put on the New York Times for five weeks. And there's no reason it's Amazon's numbers don't correlate with And what do they

do? What do they use? Is it bookstores? Are a certain bookstore or bult certain books? Dear Times, there's the Economist magazine recently did a very deep dive study on this and they published it two three weeks ago, and what they found was and it is the Economist. They're pretty mainstream, but they found that the New York Times bestseller list is definitely statistically significantly biased against conservative titles. Yeah, and are you serious? That's pretty serious.

They've got a whole bitch right. That makes sense. That makes sense because the Trump Book, the Case for Trump, and the Dying States, and even the World War two have outsold this book. This book's not political. But this book has been on there for five weeks, and I because I was sick with COVID for two and I was gone for two. I haven't done any publicity until this week, so I don't understand why. And it hasn't been reviewed. That has got a nice view in the Wall Street Journal

a few others, but I don't understand they're calculus because they're not. That book has not sold enough books to be the top twenty, you know what I mean. It doesn't make sense. And I don't know why that is slipped through the ideological screen. Probably they have an AI that reads your book and decides whether it or maybe there's some judge who got sick of woke and said, I'm going to irritate people by putting this book on I don't know yeah, don't don't put any money on that one. Okay, Well,

I'm thrilled that it's doing so well because it certainly deserves to. Hey, Victor, thanks for joining us. Good luck for both of you, and feel better. Yeah I will, yeah, but not too much because we want another book. Okay. By you know, think about Victor. I always feel like when he I feel a little bit like I'm asking him questions, like I don't want to pay him to be in his class, Like if I have it here, i can I can ask him like, oh, you know, I was reading this thing the other day, could you

explain that? And I'm just hoping anyone else is interested in it. But when you have Victory kind of want to ask him questions about the sweep of human history from two thousand BC to twenty twenty four. Yeah, I mean you always realize right away that he's got eight or ten levels of depth of knowledge in these matters. And of course there's a gravitas about him too,

right. I mean you almost feel like you know he'll say as I was saying to Alcibiades right before the Syracuse I mean, and I mean the point I don't mean that's a joke entirely is that the point is that he is one of those rare persons who can actually bring to life in a vivid and direct way and relevant way, something that you thought is just a remote interest in, you know, pain loving antiquarianism. It's not that at all.

There's not a hint of pain loving antiquarianism about him. No, and he's somehow he's like managed to be it's kind of cheerful, even though what he's saying, well, what did you just say, We're all doomed? Like, oh, probably. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I always love having having Victor around, and I'm a sort of now thrilled that James and Peter weren't here because they tend to aug the chit chat and we

had a nice chit chat with him. If you are listening to this and you remember Ricochet, we thank you, and if you were not, we would like you to join. Go to ricochet dot com if you'd like to meet your fellow Ricochet members. There are meetups scheduled throughout the summer and in the autumn. Just go to a rickchet dot 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 and if you have a minute. I know everyone really says this and people don't do it for some reason, but if you go to Apple Podcasts 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, you know, classes are over, so I'm going to try and rest and relax and catch up on some

leisure reading. Oh that's yeah, all right, Well I'm just gonna I'm gonna hang out and drink beer and smoke a sgar. That's my my July plan. Well, thanks for joining me, and thank you of course again to Victor, and we'll see you next week. Ricochet, join the conversation.