The Ben Shapiro Show - Is War Forever Changed? | Victor Davis Hanson

00:00:00.000 It's one of the wrinkles of history that this guy who was a billionaire who can be very crude and callous has a natural affinity for working people.

00:00:11.000 And he's blunt and they admire his authenticity and he's genuine and he can be crude.

00:00:15.000 If Donald Trump were to win 21, 22 percent of the black vote and close the border and go back to an energy first 0.83

00:00:24.000 paradigm and then use the DOJ to stop the cartels and interstate coordination of all this crime and restore deterrence, I

00:00:36.000 think he could heal the country very quickly.

00:00:38.000 I really do.

00:00:39.000 By success, Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished classicist, military historian and prolific commentator on contemporary

00:00:46.000 geopolitics.

00:00:47.000 He's Professor Emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist whose commentary has been published in nearly every major media news outlet in America.

00:00:56.000 Hansen is also currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where his work is often characterized by a natural integration of historical narrative and modern issues, as well as an appreciation for Western civilization's heritage.

00:01:07.000 His deep family roots in California's Central Valley often inform his criticism of American immigration policy, agricultural policy, and the far left.

00:01:15.000 Hanson has authored or edited 26 books on matters ranging from the nature of citizenship to ancient warfare.

00:01:20.000 His latest work, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation, delves into the unsettling parallels between the conflicts of antiquity and our modern symptoms of decline.

00:01:28.000 In today's episode, we explore the ideological origins and historical analogies for our current political moment.

00:01:33.000 From the reverberations of war in the Middle East to the merits of federalism and the consequences of a possible Trump victory, this is a conversation you don't want to miss.

00:01:41.000 As we navigate an era marked by rapid change and global uncertainty, Victor Davis Hanson's insights prove the enduring relevance of classical wisdom in today's world.

00:01:47.000 Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.

00:01:50.000 Professor Hanson, thanks so much for joining us and spending the time with us.

00:02:03.000 Really appreciate it.

00:02:04.000 So we are recording this pretty close to the aftermath of the Biden-Trump debate number one.

00:02:10.000 I'd be remiss if I didn't ask for your takeaways on sort of the state of the race and where we are as a country.

00:02:15.000 Donald Trump really didn't have to do anything.

00:02:17.000 He obviously didn't prepare.

00:02:18.000 He winged it.

00:02:19.000 He had no notes.

00:02:22.000 If they get a new candidate, he'll have to up his game a little bit, but I think everybody's remarked it. 0.99

00:02:27.000 I don't know what people in Gaza or Russia or China, North Korea, Iran are thinking, but let's hope they don't feel they have a window of opportunity to do something stupid. 0.93

00:02:39.000 Because this president, we don't know who's running the country now, whether it's the Obama third term people or no one at all. 0.96

00:02:45.000 Yeah, it might be Dr. Jill, who seems to be the most enthusiastic person in the room about Joe Biden's run in true Edith Wilson fashion.

00:02:52.000 So this does bring us to the topic of Your latest book, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend into Annihilation.

00:02:57.000 I mean, I've been pointing out for months that I thought there was a significant possibility that this race would break open in June, July, August, that President Trump would start to gain a significant enough lead that dictators all over the world would see that window of opportunity you're talking about.

00:03:11.000 That window of opportunity is now open, regardless of what you think happens with the election.

00:03:14.000 Because even if you think that Biden's going to get reelected, that just opens the window of opportunity further.

00:03:19.000 for nefarious forces because there's obviously a vacancy at the top of the American government

00:03:23.000 and foreign policy is done almost entirely from the executive branch these days. So when you look

00:03:29.000 at the world scene, how dangerous are things and where are the chief lines of danger?

00:03:35.000 Well, you know, in the book I looked at four historical examples of complete

00:03:40.000 civilizational erasure and there were common themes.

00:03:43.000 One is that a society that is targeted or vulnerable has no idea that it is.

00:03:48.000 It keeps reassuring itself that its grandeur is still there, it's still powerful.

00:03:53.000 That has eerie similarities to the United States.

00:03:55.000 They have no idea about the people who are attacking them.

00:03:58.000 They don't know who Alexander the Great is or what he's capable of or Scipio.

00:04:02.000 And we see that today when we were assured that Putin would never, never, never use a tactical weapon, although he said again and again that he would.

00:04:10.000 That Iran would never, never, never get the bomb and use it as a first strike. 0.60

00:04:14.000 And yet, for the first time in the history of the Jewish state, they sent over 320 rockets and missiles. 0.84

00:04:20.000 We've had Mr. Erdogan in Turkey threatened to send missiles into Athens, send missiles into Israel, send missiles into Armenia.

00:04:30.000 We have Kim Jong-un.

00:04:32.000 Acting up again with flights.

00:04:34.000 China has made a video talking about destroying Japan if it were to intervene and all of this is dismissed as rhetoric and it you know 99% of it may be but We're getting to a point now where the United States is the keeper of deterrence worldwide is no longer there for a variety of reasons.

00:04:53.000 We don't have the economic clout with 36 trillion in debt.

00:04:56.000 We're borrowing a trillion every 90 days.

00:04:59.000 We're short 45,000 soldiers.

00:05:01.000 People don't remark at all that those are the soldiers of the white male rural demographic that died at two times their numbers in the general populations in god-awful places like Afghanistan.

00:05:14.000 And Iraq, 75% of those fatalities came from that demographic that only represents about 34%.

00:05:22.000 Yet we alienated them, Millie, Austin, calling them names, white supremacy, white privilege.

00:05:27.000 So I'm very worried.

00:05:28.000 And then with the Ukraine and Israel, I don't understand the strategy At all. 0.98

00:05:35.000 Ukraine is an ally, but it's not an ally like Israel.

00:05:38.000 And yet we tell the Israelis, you have to be proportionate. 0.99

00:05:41.000 Ukraine, you've got to seek disproportionality.

00:05:44.000 Israel, you have to have a ceasefire. 0.69

00:05:46.000 Ukraine, you've got to keep fighting to the bitter end.

00:05:49.000 Israel, you've got to have a coalition government.

00:05:51.000 You've got to have elections.

00:05:52.000 We don't trust you.

00:05:53.000 Zelensky, We don't have a problem with outlawing political parties, habeas corpus, and elections.

00:05:59.000 Collateral damage, Israel, you got to text people that you're going to might hit somebody.

00:06:05.000 When they sent, when Ukraine sends missiles into the Donbass or Crimea, nobody says, did you hit civilians?

00:06:10.000 So I don't know quite what explains that disconnect other than we have a large segment of the Democratic Party that is committed to overthrowing the Netanyahu government for some reason and doesn't like Israel in general and tries to, I guess, show daylight so that these actors, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran can get in between us and Israel. 0.53

00:06:34.000 And they've done a good job of that.

00:06:36.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

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00:07:34.000 You know, ideologically, the case that I've made for why the left particularly despises Israel is because Israel is just an extraordinary example of how the victim-victimizer mentality that they've promoted is just a lie.

00:07:45.000 And they hate domestically.

00:07:47.000 It's why anti-Semitism has been rising at the same time domestically in Europe and in the United States also, is because the entire victim-victimizer binary, which is false, and the intersectional theory, which is false, which is that basically we can determine that if your group is economically unsuccessful that is due to some evil system of white 0.53

00:08:04.000 supremacy and if your group is economically successful they must be the people who are the designers

00:08:08.000 and beneficiaries of the system and so if you have a disproportionate number of jews who

00:08:11.000 are doing economically well in the united states this means that they are the victimizers in a

00:08:16.000 zero-sum game with regard to other minorities but they also happen to be in this weird 1.00

00:08:20.000 area where it's very difficult to call jews victimizers considering that according to the hate

00:08:24.000 crime statistics they're the most victimized group in the united states

00:08:27.000 And the same thing holds true when you go to the Middle East, where you have wildly, disproportionately successful Israel with its $57,000 per year GDP per capita.

00:08:36.000 Taking on the Hamas-dominated, Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Authority-dominated Palestinians who've made nothing but horrific choices for the last 70 to 80 years, impoverishing themselves, impoverishing their children, spending every aid dollar on building terror tunnels and stocking up with rockets. 0.60

00:08:51.000 But the left-wing mentality says the Jews must be successful there because they're victimizing somebody.

00:08:56.000 And so it must be that they are the actual bad guys over there. 0.52

00:08:59.000 So I think that the hatred for Israel, the hatred for Jews, it crosses streams with the intersectional hatred for, say, white America in the left of the West.

00:09:10.000 And they actually would like Israel to lose.

00:09:12.000 They believe that Israel is an emissary of Western colonialist white supremacy.

00:09:18.000 And so Israel is actually in the wrong for existing in that way. 0.85

00:09:22.000 Yeah, I think they managed that.

00:09:24.000 That was difficult, because traditionally Jews had suffered anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, and, of course, the Holocaust.

00:09:33.000 And that was an obstacle for the intersectional, woke, Marxist binary people.

00:09:40.000 But they were able to say, well, the Jews have, for high per capita income, their privilege, and we don't really care about the Holocaust. 0.80

00:09:48.000 And they even played it down, and they're white. 0.65

00:09:51.000 And then when they transferred that paradigm in the Middle East, They didn't look at the reality.

00:09:56.000 There's 500 million Muslims in the Middle East and there's tiny little Israel, the only consensual society there, and they're surrounded by a sea of enemies that want to destroy them.

00:10:06.000 Instead, they just looked at Israel versus this terrorist clique Hamas or Hezbollah and said, well, they're the overdog, they're the settlers. 0.68

00:10:15.000 They had to think away or erase the idea that Israel is the underdog given the wider realities of the Middle East But they pulled all that off and the question is why did they do that?

00:10:26.000 And you know, there's a long history Recent history of the left of being anti-semitism.

00:10:31.000 I can't think of a major woke leader who hasn't said something about derogatory about the Jews.

00:10:37.000 We started with Jesse Jackson, Jaime Town, Al Sharpton, put on your armor and come over here.

00:10:42.000 Black Lives Matter with the glider posters that they issued. 0.78

00:10:47.000 Ilan Omar, the Benjamins baby, all of ALC with a map with No Israel on it. 0.80

00:10:52.000 So every one of these leaders of this woke movement has revealed that they're very anti-semitic in general.

00:11:00.000 They hate Israel in particular.

00:11:02.000 And the more that... There's other things going on though very quickly.

00:11:06.000 There's a quarter million Middle East students here in the United States.

00:11:09.000 There's no audit of them at all.

00:11:11.000 There's 10 to 20 billion dollars in endowed funding of these Middle East programs.

00:11:16.000 And every time I look at their curriculum, at these programs.

00:11:20.000 They're not Middle East historical, philological coursework.

00:11:24.000 It's all anti-Israel, for the most part.

00:11:27.000 And so, another thing I think it's explaining the campus, and people forget that, is at Stanford, just to take one example, we let in 9% of the incoming class of 2100 were white males, and 20% whites in general.

00:11:44.000 And we got rid of the SAT.

00:11:45.000 That's pretty much true of Yale.

00:11:49.000 Harvard, Princeton, all of these elite campuses.

00:11:51.000 So what you're really seeing is, and that 9% of males, it's not enough for athletes and legacies and the kids of administrators and donors. 0.96

00:12:02.000 And so what you've seen on these elite campuses that used to be meritocratic, the Jewish population has gone from about 25-30% down to 7-10%, while the Middle East and the foreign student body from China and the Middle East have just soared to almost 30, 40% of the student body, and then when you add that disparity, then you have your useful idiot, pretty poorly educated students, and they say, wow. 0.98

00:12:31.000 The majority on campus doesn't like Jews. 0.98

00:12:33.000 They don't like Israel. 0.94

00:12:34.000 There's not very many Jews.

00:12:35.000 There's no downside.

00:12:37.000 So we go into the president's office.

00:12:39.000 We burglarize it.

00:12:40.000 We deface these historic sandstone columns.

00:12:44.000 There's no downside at all.

00:12:47.000 And so we can do this.

00:12:49.000 And then they look at the Jewish students.

00:12:52.000 They're very small.

00:12:53.000 They follow the rules.

00:12:54.000 They don't cause trouble.

00:12:56.000 And they say, you know what?

00:12:58.000 The locus or the power or the focus Yeah, they put their finger in the wind and said, it's with the Middle East.

00:13:05.000 That's where the woke powers.

00:13:06.000 That's where the faculty is.

00:13:07.000 That's where the administration is.

00:13:09.000 That's where the majority of the students are.

00:13:11.000 And and so and then you add the final.

00:13:15.000 And I think people have missed this.

00:13:17.000 For the last three years, there has been no SAT, and there has been no comparative ranking of high school GPAs by the caliber of their high school education.

00:13:28.000 So you have thousands of students at these campuses who were very insecure.

00:13:32.000 The campuses themselves said, we had these standards that ensured we were going to be elite.

00:13:38.000 Because of the rigor of the curriculum, and then when they destroyed the entrance requirements, all of a sudden the rigorous curriculum was impossible.

00:13:49.000 Covertly, and without much media attention, they either have inflated the grades, 65% A's at Stanford, 80% at Yale, or they've watered down their curriculum, or they've added new courses.

00:14:01.000 So a lot of the anger of these Middle East students and DEI students is that they're not able to do the work, and they feel very insecure.

00:14:10.000 They're at these universities, and one of the ways that they square that circle is to be very active politically and suggest that they're victims.

00:14:18.000 of white oppression on campus and I don't know how we're going to solve this other than to tax the endowments, get out of the student loan business, require an exit test, something really drastic like that.

00:14:31.000 So, you know, one of the things that you talk about when you're talking about military policy and military history is, you know, what the future of the United States looks like.

00:14:39.000 Obviously, we have military shortcomings.

00:14:40.000 We've been pursuing the policy of technological advancement, but no actual restocking of the things that you need to do to make war, which, again, is actually not unique to the United States.

00:14:49.000 It seems like a lot of Western powers are doing this.

00:14:51.000 This is a major problem for Israel.

00:14:52.000 I was just there for a couple of weeks, and I was speaking with members of the military, and they had been so reliant on technology that they didn't actually have many of the basics.

00:14:59.000 Whereas if you look over in Ukraine, the Russians are well stocked with World War II era armaments and so long as you don't care about how many civilians you kill, you can do precisely what you want as long as you have an endless supply of mortars from 1957. 0.60

00:15:11.000 But I think this is one of the major disconnects that the West has experienced in terms of war.

00:15:18.000 I wanted to get your take on this.

00:15:19.000 And that is that I don't think that the West understands what it means to win a war anymore.

00:15:23.000 Since World War II, when the West basically said that was the war, to end all wars, we're not going to fight a war anymore in order to win.

00:15:30.000 And the West really has not won a significant conflict in the post-war era.

00:15:35.000 Vietnam was a loss.

00:15:37.000 North Korea was treated as a win, but it's actually a stalemate.

00:15:42.000 There hasn't been a significant victory.

00:15:44.000 The Gulf War was a temporary victory, obviously, that turned into a long-term quagmire.

00:15:49.000 But a lot of that has to do with this baseline perception by members of the West that in the post-war era, everybody thinks the same.

00:15:56.000 And it's a cardinal error.

00:15:57.000 It's a massive error.

00:15:59.000 And so there's this idea that you hear constantly, you mentioned it with regard to Israel, you

00:16:02.000 know, Israel has to be humanitarian in how it approaches the problem of the Gaza Strip.

00:16:06.000 And that's why Israel has to be really, really targeted in doing these strikes, not recognizing

00:16:11.000 that that actually is the incentive structure that's being promoted by Israel's enemies,

00:16:15.000 meaning that they will use whatever weapon is at their disposal, including their own

00:16:18.000 children in order to maximize pressure on Israel. 0.84

00:16:21.000 And that's not just true for Israel.

00:16:22.000 That's true for the United States and Iraq.

00:16:24.000 It's true for the United States and Afghanistan. 0.86

00:16:25.000 It turns out that war is cruel and bloody and terrible, which is why we should be hesitant

00:16:29.000 to enter it.

00:16:30.000 But because we have bought into this idea that everybody thinks the same, we all love

00:16:33.000 our children the same amount, we all want the same kind of world, we just have different

00:16:36.000 approaches to get to it.

00:16:38.000 Instead, we have basically decided that war can be clean and antiseptic, because everybody in the end wants human rights, of course.

00:16:46.000 And if it's clean and antiseptic, that means that it's easier for us to get into a war, and almost impossible for us to win one.

00:16:51.000 As far as winning, laws of war don't change.

00:16:55.000 The only way you win is you use a disproportionate level of force, and you destroy the enemy's ability, either psychological or actual, to make war against you, and then you submit them to terms that you impose on them.

00:17:10.000 And when you do that, you get peace.

00:17:12.000 And the funny thing is, you get more respect.

00:17:15.000 I once asked my father, who flew 40 missions in a B-29, I said, What happened when the war was over?

00:17:22.000 And he said, the day the war ended, we landed on a Japanese airstrip in Tokyo.

00:17:27.000 And I said, was there guerrillas?

00:17:30.000 Was there snipers?

00:17:31.000 He said, no, they greeted us with flowers.

00:17:33.000 And I said, how was that possible?

00:17:36.000 And he said we had dropped 20,000 pounds of incendiaries for nine months before the atomic bombs, and we were told if one person shoots at the planes, don't touch down, just go around and go back to Tinian, resupply and start bombing.

00:17:53.000 And so the point was that We have peace today with Italy and Germany and Japan because we used a disproportionate level of force, and they knew that if they continued to make war, or if they didn't submit to terms, it was going to be the annihilation of their regimes. 0.75

00:18:10.000 And then in our affluence and leisure, we think, well, we're beyond that.

00:18:14.000 We've evolved beyond.

00:18:15.000 Human nature has changed, and it hasn't, and our adversaries haven't changed at all.

00:18:21.000 Many of them are pre-modern.

00:18:23.000 The funny thing is, they have a lot more respect, let's say, for Israel, when Israel is unpredictable, when Israel uses overwhelming force, when Israel doesn't really worry about the UN, and when Israel is very close, usually to a conservative administration.

00:18:43.000 But the moment You get the left in, and they widen that gap, and they start to apply symmetrical criticism, or they single out Israel more than they do Hamas.

00:18:55.000 And all these opportunistic actors, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, they jump in, the Middle East, Jordan, Egypt, all these, the Gulf, they start to triangulate.

00:19:06.000 Europe doesn't see it.

00:19:08.000 But if you would just let, if we had just had a different administration and they had said to Israel, what do you need?

00:19:16.000 Here's the weapons.

00:19:17.000 We only have one requirement.

00:19:19.000 You have to destroy Hamas in five weeks.

00:19:22.000 Do whatever you have to do. 0.97

00:19:23.000 Don't be inhumane, but destroy Hamas. 0.53

00:19:26.000 If you destroy Hamas, Hezbollah will cease and then you will turn your attention to Hezbollah and we will give you all the wherewithal. 0.83

00:19:35.000 We wouldn't be having this conversation now.

00:19:39.000 If they had done that, and I think a lot of them wanted to do that, I think Hezbollah and Hamas wouldn't be capable of fighting right now.

00:19:49.000 It's very frustrating, and I don't know what's going to happen with Israel, but they've got a hundred thousand people who can't live on their northern border.

00:19:58.000 They're engaged in house-to-house fighting in Gaza.

00:20:00.000 We're cutting off bombs to them.

00:20:04.000 We warned Iran about the nature of the Israeli counter-strike, so it's in shambles. 1.00

00:20:11.000 And that was in the debate, you know, you could argue that Donald Trump should have brought in more detail and he had opportunities at each point to give facts and data.

00:20:21.000 He did very well in some cases, but mostly it was just, this guy is the worst president in history.

00:20:26.000 He's destroying the country.

00:20:27.000 And you have to sympathize with him because it is frustrating.

00:20:31.000 It's been a 360 degree destructive four years.

00:20:36.000 And I don't know how... Sometimes I almost think they get in a room and they say, Well, yeah, we let in 10 million people, there's borders open, and how are you going to stop that?

00:20:47.000 The remedy will be worse than the malady that we caused.

00:20:50.000 Or, yeah, Israel's weak now, and it's surrounded, and that's your problem when you take over, and see if you like it. 0.65

00:20:59.000 And inflation is high, but you know what?

00:21:00.000 You're going to have to raise taxes on the people who deserve to be taxed.

00:21:04.000 It's almost that the nihilism was intentional.

00:21:07.000 And they knew that people wouldn't like what they did, but they thought they were going to hand off a revolutionary system, a Jacobin system, and then the effort to undo it would be catastrophic.

00:21:21.000 We'll get to more of this in just one moment. 0.58

00:21:23.000 First, you know, last time my kids were sick, it was actually kind of a pain in the butt to get them their medication.

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00:22:23.000 So I want to talk about in terms of war, you know, the imbalance that now exists between defense and offense.

00:22:28.000 So it used to be that, you know, the idea generally was that defense is easier than offense.

00:22:35.000 Somebody has to come after you, you can defend your territory.

00:22:38.000 But when you're talking about very high-tech powers and very low-tech powers, it turns out that actually offense is much easier than defense in a lot of these cases.

00:22:46.000 A good example of this, because it's an ongoing military conflict, is what's happening between Hezbollah and Israel, or Hamas and Israel, versus what's happening, say, with the Houthis in the United States and shipping.

00:22:59.000 It turns out that we're having to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars to defend against incredibly low-tech weaponry. 0.97

00:23:07.000 that is dumb. 0.95

00:23:09.000 So every time Hamas would shoot a $50 rocket, Israel would have to shoot a $50,000 projectile 0.99

00:23:14.000 from Iron Dome in order to take it down.

00:23:16.000 And again, I wonder how much of that goes to the underlying message that I was mentioning

00:23:20.000 before about the West priding itself so much on its own view of human rights and its belief

00:23:26.000 that that is somehow mirrored on the other side.

00:23:29.000 And we've geared everybody in the West, all of our weaponry, toward exactitude, toward exact defense, toward high-tech.

00:23:35.000 And meanwhile, our enemies, who don't give any dams at all about civilian life, their own or enemy, it gives them a real advantage in being able to do things like knock out massive ships that are going through the Red Sea and shut down entire shipping lanes that used to be considered crucial and are still crucial, actually, to the world economy.

00:23:52.000 Yeah.

00:23:52.000 Well, defense and offense go through all, they're completely cyclical.

00:23:56.000 You know, when the tank emerged, then it rained for about a year and a half, and then Panzerfaust, etc., anti-tank rockets.

00:24:04.000 It goes back and forth, but you're right.

00:24:06.000 In this particular cycle that we're in, that the Iron Dome is very expensive to knock down cheap rockets, the Houthis you mentioned, but that's only because we've self-imposed these conventions on us. 1.00

00:24:19.000 If we were going to be imaginative, we could reverse that very easily.

00:24:23.000 We could make their defense much more expensive than our offense, and I'll give you a couple examples.

00:24:29.000 So, if we had an American cargo ship come through, and the Red Sea and the Houthis attacked it, And we had a couple of frigates, we would just tell the Houthis, if you do it again, we're going to take out on day one your entire electrical grid. 0.96

00:24:44.000 We could do that very quickly.

00:24:45.000 If you do it again, we're going to take out your water supply.

00:24:47.000 If you do it again, we're going to take out all of your harbors. 0.84

00:24:51.000 And then we're just going to sit there for a while and see how you like it.

00:24:54.000 And we could easily tell, Israel could easily tell Hezbollah, If you continue to do this, we're going to take out the main power grid for Beirut. 0.61

00:25:05.000 And we don't really care about the consequences.

00:25:08.000 If you continue to do that, we're going to block the harbors of Beirut.

00:25:12.000 And that would be far cheaper than their offensive weapons.

00:25:16.000 I mean, you could do it very easily.

00:25:19.000 But we have self-imposed restrictions because as you rightly infer would be two seconds and global CNN or MSNBC without a reporter with a microphone in a mother's face saying that they're freezing to death and they have no power and yet it would take it would require a leader to say war is hell and this is you know General Sherman said if you do not

00:25:45.000 Give up?

00:25:45.000 I'm going to go through Georgia and I'm going to burn every plantation I see.

00:25:48.000 I'm not going to kill people. 0.99

00:25:50.000 I'm just going to burn the plantation and destroy a 50-mile swath and free all the slaves. 0.99

00:25:54.000 They called him all sorts of names. 0.94

00:25:56.000 They said he was a terrorist, a killer, and he destroyed the interior of the South in two marches through the Carolinas and Georgia.

00:26:05.000 And then after the war, people said, oh my God, he was a genius.

00:26:07.000 Grant lost 100,000 men fighting in Between Washington and Virginia in that horrible summer of 1864 and Sherman won the war without losing anybody and they hate it's what Machiavelli said people hate you far more if you destroy their inheritance than if you kill them and that tells you something that we have the ability if we really want to to make the Houthis pay a terrible price and we could do that and I don't know why we don't I 0.98

00:26:38.000 And that was something about, Trump was very successful about that because they did, you know, under George Bush, they went into Georgia and Osatia, the Russians.

00:26:48.000 Under Obama, they went into Donbass and Crimea.

00:26:53.000 Biden, they went after Kiev. 0.56

00:26:54.000 They didn't do any of that because they thought Trump was slightly crazy, unpredictable, and might do something.

00:27:02.000 And that's an advantage in strategic poker.

00:27:06.000 Trump knows this, by the way.

00:27:08.000 This is the thing about foreign policy.

00:27:10.000 It's always funny because people consider themselves sophisticated on an intellectual level.

00:27:14.000 They like to focus in on foreign policy.

00:27:16.000 The nuances are really what matters.

00:27:18.000 And then when it comes to domestic policy, that's simple stuff.

00:27:20.000 And it turns out that it's usually quite the reverse.

00:27:22.000 It turns out that foreign policy is a fifth grade playground.

00:27:25.000 If you're the biggest kid on the fifth grade playground, then force or threat of force, credible threat of force, is what goes a very, very long way.

00:27:32.000 And that's something that Donald Trump innately understands, like on a gut level.

00:27:35.000 I remember I did a fundraiser for him out here in Florida, and this is exactly what he was saying.

00:27:40.000 My favorite anecdote that he was telling was he was saying, you want to know the reason why Russia never went into Ukraine? 0.99

00:27:45.000 It's because I told Vlad, I said, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of you. 0.98

00:27:49.000 And Vlad said, no you won't, Mr. President. 0.99

00:27:51.000 And I said, well, I might.

00:27:54.000 And that's right.

00:27:55.000 I mean, well, I might is a pretty good answer when you're leading the world's most powerful military. 0.98

00:28:00.000 And the fact that we're so shy about all of that, the fact that this is considered unsophisticated, it's incredible and stupid and it's also counterproductive. 0.88

00:28:10.000 And again, I think it goes to a deeper ideological malaise that's set in in the West, which is that we do not think that we are different or special in any way whatsoever. 0.98

00:28:18.000 And if we are different or special, it's because we're worse, we're meaner, we're more terrible.

00:28:22.000 And the proof of this is that when we're... And what that means, again, it's that victim-victimizer equation of success with evil.

00:28:30.000 And so the more we succeed, the more evil we are.

00:28:33.000 And if we've won a war in the past, well, that's only because we're an evil nation, an evil civilization.

00:28:38.000 And what's weird is that I'm starting to see this kind of horseshoe around, weirdly.

00:28:42.000 You're starting to see it in parts of the right as well.

00:28:44.000 I mean, there are prominent commentators on the right now who are saying, you know, how evil is the United States for having used the atomic bomb at the end of World War II? 0.99

00:28:52.000 That to me is, it's historically imbecilic. 0.70

00:28:56.000 I mean, there can be open debate over the necessity of the atomic bomb, but the reality is that the Japanese military was preparing to kill a million Americans when they got onto the isles of Japan. 0.97

00:29:08.000 I mean, they already had killed tens of thousands of Americans on tiny atolls all throughout the Pacific.

00:29:13.000 They showed no inclination to give up the fight before the end of the war.

00:29:16.000 Even when we dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, there was an attempted coup inside the Japanese Yeah, I think it might even be worse than that. 0.95

00:29:23.000 the emperor from going out surrendering. So this kind of notion that if only the

00:29:28.000 United States had been a lot nicer during World War II, things would have

00:29:30.000 been a lot better. I don't know where that's coming from other than a perverse

00:29:32.000 view of the United States's role in the world. Yeah, I think it might even be

00:29:36.000 worse than that. I think our problem is that we're culturally arrogant and we're

00:29:43.000 full of hubris.

00:29:46.000 And we think everybody wants to be like us.

00:29:49.000 And when we were in Kabul, right before the humiliation, when we lost these 13 Marines, $50 billion in weaponry, we just handed over $300 million retrofitted air base.

00:30:02.000 And then what did we do?

00:30:03.000 I mean, we had a pride flag from the embassy.

00:30:05.000 We had a gender studies program.

00:30:08.000 The University of Kabul, we had George Floyd murals on the streets of Kabul.

00:30:11.000 It was almost like British imperialism, but without the force behind it.

00:30:16.000 At least they entered, you know, they ended Suti in India and they had the force to back it up. 0.99

00:30:20.000 But a lot of people look at this and they say, Well, we don't see any connection from your wealth and your power with your values.

00:30:33.000 So we reject your values.

00:30:36.000 And there is a connection between democracy and freedom and technology and success, but they don't see that.

00:30:43.000 And the more that we try to appease them and say to them, We're Americans and we want to help you and we're going to go in and we're going to go kill Saddam Hussein and the Ba'athists, but we're going to build a park at the same time. 0.94

00:30:56.000 That doesn't appeal to them.

00:30:58.000 They interpret that magnanimity as weakness to be exploited rather than kindness to be reciprocated.

00:31:05.000 And they don't like the West.

00:31:08.000 They feel that, well, you didn't earn it.

00:31:11.000 And you were given it, or you exploited us.

00:31:15.000 So I think you have to be humane in the sense you don't want to...

00:31:20.000 To be Hitlerian in war, and you don't want to kill people gratuitously, but every time that we have pulled back and tried to reason with people and try to show how magnanimous we are, they hated us and more people got killed.

00:31:34.000 It happened in Iraq, it happened in Korea, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Vietnam.

00:31:40.000 And that, unfortunately, we've imposed those values on the IDF.

00:31:45.000 We'll get to more on this in just one second.

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00:32:47.000 This is one of the things I think that's also kind of hilarious about how we in America perceive ourselves.

00:32:52.000 I think that most Americans, they are willing to acknowledge the reality, which is that the things, when it comes to foreign policy, we don't love gratuitously ugly images on our TV.

00:33:04.000 But the notion that America is deeply invested in human rights abuses, just everywhere we see them around the world, is obviously untrue.

00:33:11.000 It's clearly and obviously untrue.

00:33:13.000 And the rest of the world takes our rhetoric seriously, but in reality, I'm not sure that they should.

00:33:20.000 In other words, there are a lot of countries that are sort of trying to play up to what they perceive to be America's stated interests, Israel being the most obvious, where Israel says, well, you know, you guys keep saying that you want human rights, you want human rights, so we're being really, really exact with drone strikes, and we're hitting one guy in the car, but not the other guy in the car, and we'll show you the tape of it.

00:33:36.000 And we're shipping in 3,200 calories per person per day into the Gaza Strip.

00:33:40.000 And we're trying to facilitate this humanitarian aid.

00:33:42.000 And for that, for their trouble, they're getting clocked across the head by the Biden administration.

00:33:47.000 When in reality, it turns out the American people don't really care all that much.

00:33:49.000 What the American people want and have always wanted is quick victory.

00:33:53.000 Because that's a very human thing to want.

00:33:55.000 It's actually, in many cases, the right thing to want, because it turns out that slow bleeds are far worse for a civilization than a quick victory.

00:34:01.000 It's much better for a civilization to win a quick victory in the long term.

00:34:04.000 I mean, the reality is that if the United States had drawn out, say, World War II rather than dropping two atomic bombs, not only does that end with probably a million dead Americans on the shores of Japan, it also probably ends with millions of more dead Japanese and the half-century-long occupation of half of Japan by the Russians who are coming from the north at the same time. 0.72

00:34:22.000 It turns out that quick victory sometimes is a virtue.

00:34:25.000 It is, and it is human nature.

00:34:27.000 I work in the Bay Area, and if the San Francisco 49ers are 10-0, all of a sudden it's sold out.

00:34:34.000 When they're 1-9, no one wants to go.

00:34:37.000 Even if they're the same players, they have their individual likes, they like to see good football.

00:34:43.000 But if they're losing, nobody wants to go.

00:34:44.000 And that's kind of a a human sin, but it's undeniable.

00:34:49.000 And most people have no ideology.

00:34:51.000 That's sad too.

00:34:51.000 It's 20% maybe on one side, 20% on the others.

00:34:55.000 And the other 60 or 70% put their finger in the air and they said, I have to be on the winning side.

00:35:00.000 And that's an instinctual, primeval human trait.

00:35:04.000 And so they look at a war and they think, who is going to win?

00:35:08.000 And if I think this side is going to win, I want to ally themselves with it.

00:35:13.000 That's what's so dangerous of what's going on with Israel and Ukraine, because with this new alliance of China, and Iran, and Russia, and North Korea, and maybe, you know, bad actors like Turkey, they're going around to the area, and they're going to Australia, they're going to the Philippines, they're going to Taiwan, they're going to South Korea, and they're going to Eastern Europe, and they're saying, look, the United States will not protect you. 0.82

00:35:36.000 Look what they did in Afghanistan.

00:35:38.000 Look what they're doing to Israel. 0.90

00:35:40.000 You may not like us, but we're the rising Sun and they're setting and if you're smart you'll make the necessary adjustments We're not asking you to be over.

00:35:48.000 We're not asking to renounce them, but just you know gradually distance yourself they've made this argument to India, especially and we on the other side don't seem to fathom that and so that was what was tragic about the Gaza War had Israel Israel was really doing the United States the biggest favor and Possible much more than Ukraine even because if it had destroyed Hamas very quickly and Hezbollah Iran would be completely humiliated and when isolated and we would have had a new I think 0.84

00:36:24.000 There would have been pressure to cut, once it was weakened, there would have been pressure to cut the oil and re-institute these sanctions.

00:36:32.000 But when you don't act decisively, then people feel you're weak and they get afraid for themselves.

00:36:39.000 And they think, you know what?

00:36:41.000 There is no such thing as the abominable IDF anymore.

00:36:44.000 Look at this.

00:36:46.000 And they start treating Hamas as if it's a quasi-state.

00:36:49.000 It's an equal interlocutor. 0.98

00:36:51.000 It's not just a bunch of terrorist murderers.

00:36:54.000 And that is very dangerous, what we've done.

00:36:57.000 And so, Netanyahu, I feel for him, but he's going to have to somehow have enough weapons to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah And then not listen to this administration.

00:37:09.000 And that's very hard to do, given their purse strings and the hatred they have within the administration, particular people, to Israel.

00:37:17.000 So, you know, to go back to your book, and you mentioned one of the factors in how empires collapse and how wars descend into annihilation.

00:37:25.000 And you said one of them is just people can't see it coming.

00:37:27.000 And as you said, that's very obviously true in the United States.

00:37:29.000 We're spending like there's no tomorrow in the assumption that there, of course, is a tomorrow, and that no matter what, we will always succeed.

00:37:35.000 This is what modern monetary theory also suggested, is that no matter how much money we spent, there would never be an inflationary cycle.

00:37:40.000 And then within three years, there was a massive inflationary cycle.

00:37:43.000 It turns out that everything that goes up comes down.

00:37:45.000 So what are some of the other factors when you're looking at empires that collapse or countries that are overtaken by new empires?

00:37:53.000 What are some of the other factors that you see present in the United States?

00:37:56.000 Finance.

00:37:57.000 We mentioned finance, but you can't underscore that.

00:38:01.000 Carthage that was destroyed was not the Carthage of Hannibal a half century later in terms of financial power and trade.

00:38:09.000 Another is that as society gets weaker, and starts to decline, they put more interest in, and I know this is counterintuitive, but they want to have more allies.

00:38:21.000 So take Constantinople and the Byzantines. 0.96

00:38:24.000 The more they were unable to hold back Mehmed and the Sultan and his announced plan to destroy Constantinople, take it over, the more they said the Genovese are going to come. 0.97

00:38:36.000 The Venetians will sail up the Dardanelles and save us.

00:38:39.000 The Florentines have always liked us.

00:38:42.000 Maybe we can unite with Western Christianity.

00:38:46.000 But nobody will allow the greatest city in Christendom to fall.

00:38:50.000 And that never happens.

00:38:51.000 And the Thebans kept saying, Well, we revolted.

00:38:56.000 Where are the Spartans?

00:38:57.000 I hear they're marching up to the Peloponnesian, up the Peloponnesian.

00:39:02.000 When they saw the actual disparity in forces and the nature of Alexander VIII, they just turned around and went home.

00:39:09.000 And so I think in the case of the United States, we keep talking, I mean, it's very important to have allies, but we keep talking about NATO this and NATO that and our allies, but in some ways it's an admission that the United States is no longer preeminent and will not lead.

00:39:28.000 And what we should be saying is we want all the allies we can, but if we don't have the allies, We still have the power to fulfill our foreign policy agendas.

00:39:37.000 We've got the best military, the best economy in the world, the best tech.

00:39:41.000 But as you start to weaken, you keep talking about coalitions and they never pan out because you see intrinsically somebody says to themselves, well, I'm a NATO partner of the United States, but when the United States starts to look weak, Then the NATO partner doesn't say, I'm going to step up and help them in their hour of need.

00:40:01.000 The NATO partner says, well, I'm on the front ranks with Russia.

00:40:06.000 I got to cut a deal with them or China has trade with us or something.

00:40:10.000 And it's just the opposite.

00:40:11.000 The more powerful you are and the more you take care of your own business, the more allies gravitate to you.

00:40:17.000 The more you do not, the more you seek out allies.

00:40:21.000 And when you seek them out, they tend to be fickle and want to know why you're doing that.

00:40:26.000 And they never really show up in extremeness.

00:40:29.000 And that was very tragic.

00:40:32.000 When I was writing the chapter on Constantinople and I was reading all of these first-hand Italian and Byzantine Greek accounts, And it was just sad.

00:40:41.000 Giussiani, the Genovese mercenary, kept saying, I know people are going to be on the horizon.

00:40:47.000 They're going to come up right from the Aegean in the nick of time.

00:40:50.000 And Constantine said, well, we have all these Greek-speaking communities.

00:40:55.000 They're still alive.

00:40:55.000 They're on the Black Sea shores.

00:40:57.000 They're going to come through the Bosporus.

00:40:59.000 And you looked at the evidence.

00:41:01.000 You think, no, they were never going to come.

00:41:03.000 They weren't going to send help to a dying civilization.

00:41:08.000 They were going to hold out on their own, and they all were destroyed separately, but they were not going to come.

00:41:14.000 And so, that's what's kind of pathetic about the Sullivan-Blinken-Biden axis.

00:41:19.000 They keep talking about allies, and we're going to do this, and coalitions, but people won't join us if they think you're weak economically, culturally, socially, and militarily, economically, you know. 0.55

00:41:30.000 And that's the problem.

00:41:32.000 So, when you look at, sort of, the future of the country, it's very difficult to imagine, because America's never experienced it, the possibility of, like, an actual split country.

00:41:44.000 I shouldn't say that.

00:41:44.000 We almost experienced it during the Civil War, obviously, but since the Civil War, we've not really experienced the possibility of a serious split country or a real foreign invasion since 1812.

00:41:54.000 And so, what exactly would a decline of America Look like.

00:41:58.000 I mean, you can see how America would decline economically.

00:42:01.000 That'd be very easy to foresee.

00:42:02.000 You could see the freedom of the seas that essentially the US Navy guarantees going away as the world fragments.

00:42:08.000 You could see the sort of issues that we've seen in the Red Sea, but expanded into the Taiwan Strait.

00:42:13.000 You could see a breakdown in global economics if China were to blockade Taiwan in and interrupt the superconductor market,

00:42:22.000 or get Taiwan to pass over the more sophisticated microchips to China, thus upgrading their military.

00:42:29.000 In other words, world fragmentation, you can see.

00:42:30.000 But what does that look like in terms of America domestically?

00:42:33.000 How does that exacerbate internal divisions 150 years from now when people are writing the history

00:42:38.000 of the United States and they say, well, here's what they should have seen coming

00:42:40.000 if it was inevitable.

00:42:42.000 Here's what it was looking like.

00:42:43.000 What do you see?

00:42:45.000 Yeah. Well, right now, does anybody believe that the U.S.

00:42:49.000 Navy has the power or the confidence to sail into some of the major waterways?

00:42:54.000 I don't think that we're going to send a fleet through the Red Sea.

00:42:57.000 I think we feel it's off limits.

00:42:59.000 I think the eastern Mediterranean coast off Lebanon, we don't want to get near. 1.00

00:43:03.000 I think this administration does not want to put a fleet in the Straits of Hormuz.

00:43:08.000 No one would dare go up into the Black Sea and sail around.

00:43:11.000 It would be too dangerous.

00:43:13.000 So already there's areas that our enemies have said, If you come in here, you would be attacked, and you're too risk-averse, and we're going to provide enough risk so you'll be averse to taking them.

00:43:27.000 And when you look at the finance, I mean, Israel has an Iron Dome.

00:43:32.000 Trump talks about, we need an Iron Dome, and we do need a sufficient, but do we have the money even to do it?

00:43:38.000 And that gets back to Libby's warning that when the Maladay, when the Medicine is worse than the Maladay. 0.91

00:43:46.000 You're in permanent decline.

00:43:48.000 I mean, can you really imagine people either raising taxes or cutting entitlements so that we can build a sophisticated air defense system against, say, North Korea or Iran that sent this? 0.81

00:44:00.000 I can't.

00:44:01.000 I think people would say you're either heartless or you can't do that.

00:44:05.000 And one of the things that starts, always what happens is with decline, it happened in Rome across the Danube and the Rhine, You have this idea that you're in decline and there are vigorous people on the other side of the border and maybe if you just destroyed the border and they came in and they had got a whiff of your superior culture or in the case of late Roman Christianity, then they would become kind of an infusion of dynamism. 0.55

00:44:36.000 That's kind of the American creed about legal immigration.

00:44:41.000 It depends on assimilation, integration, and it can't happen unless the numbers are very small and the host is very confident.

00:44:50.000 So when we let in 10 to 12 million people, And we think that they're going to work really hard, or they're going to make us compete with them, and they came from the poorest, most god-awful places. 1.00

00:45:02.000 I don't think that's going to happen.

00:45:04.000 And that's a good sign of a decline, that you don't have a defensible border.

00:45:10.000 And the reason that you don't is you have the wherewithal, but you think that you need an infusion of dynamism because you're a static, inert, ossified, calcified society.

00:45:19.000 And that happened a lot in antiquity, in the Middle Ages.

00:45:24.000 The other thing is...

00:45:27.000 There is this growth of a, I know it's a tired word, administrative state, but if you look at the number of people who were permanently occupied at Versailles in the last years of the Bourbons, 15,000 are under Philip II at the apex, and then the quick decline of the Spanish at the escarole, 7,000 people.

00:45:51.000 You look at the Kremlin and the Soviet Union, 10,000 people.

00:45:55.000 And we have this, we have these judge, jury, and executioner people, whether it's, you know, Francis Collin and Fauci or Mayork, all these unelected people, and they're exercising a degree of power that vastly exceeds a congressperson or a senator's.

00:46:13.000 And their only allegiance is to the ideology that created the administrative state and perpetuates it.

00:46:21.000 And it's almost as if it's like a coup that's taken over.

00:46:25.000 And it involves the media and academia and Hollywood and entertainment.

00:46:31.000 And so, you wonder how the citizen is going to get back, the dying citizen is going to get back the preeminence of the citizen to say, you know what, we want to get rid of this Department of Homeland Security or Department of Energy or Department of Education, just because you're too powerful and you do too much harm.

00:46:51.000 And they can't do it, and that happened to Rome especially.

00:46:56.000 You can't afford it, they can't do it.

00:46:58.000 So, just to sum up, when a society knows what it has to do and what's killing it, but it's afraid that the remedy would be too controversial or too difficult for the patient to handle, it does nothing.

00:47:11.000 And then the maladie or the disease progresses.

00:47:14.000 And I think that's where we are now.

00:47:16.000 Every single person in politics knows we have to start.

00:47:19.000 We could go back tomorrow to Simpson-Bowles paradigm that would have had us with a balanced budget and no deficit, you know, 15 years if we had adopted it.

00:47:30.000 We all know what we have to do with the Pentagon.

00:47:32.000 We all know what we have to do with the border.

00:47:34.000 We all know what we have to do with crime.

00:47:36.000 And yet we can't do it because we're afraid of being labeled a racist or xenophobe or sexist or transphobe.

00:47:46.000 We're kind of ossified right now and existing on the fumes of the past. 0.98

00:47:49.000 as clinger or deplorable or redeemable, dregs, chump, all of those pejoratives 1.00

00:47:55.000 have been used. So we're kind of ossified right now and existing on the fumes of 0.90

00:48:00.000 the past. Another thing is very strange about these societies in decline.

00:48:06.000 They don't have a romantic version of the past.

00:48:10.000 You would think that because they think they have extended the glory and they're still constant, they're still Justinian city, or they're still a Pamanondas of Thebes, but they don't really honor the past.

00:48:22.000 They don't really say, we have to live up to what these people did.

00:48:26.000 They have a I guess it's a modernist idea that we apply the standards of the modern age to the past and find it wanting, because they surely, when they talk about rejuvenation or restoration, they don't really articulate that we want to be Hannibal City again.

00:48:43.000 When you look at, say, a map of the United States, so usually when you look at an empire decline, the map starts to change pretty radically.

00:48:50.000 You see the Roman Empire shrinking and then you see it breaking into two.

00:48:55.000 You see the Soviet Empire breaking and the map changes.

00:48:59.000 When you look at the United States, it's difficult to imagine how the map changes per se in the same sort of way. Obviously we've got,

00:49:05.000 we're very lucky, God has blessed us with extraordinary geography,

00:49:08.000 we have autarkic economic power at a lower level of economic development, obviously, but we have dominance

00:49:13.000 across an entire continent, we have Canadians in our north who are no 0.93

00:49:17.000 external threat to us, we have Mexicans in our south who, you know, don't seem to 1.00

00:49:22.000 have, they may have infiltrative power in some of the southwest particularly,

00:49:27.000 but now across the nation, thanks to the drug cartels shipping people across the border,

00:49:31.000 But do you foresee the possibility of a change to the map of America in the same way that there is a change to the map of, say, the British Empire or the Roman Empire or anything else?

00:49:41.000 Well, it had been conventional wisdom that the salvation of the United States was the Federalist system, the idea that we were not America, we were the United States, and that we had a system, and the left, of course, hates that system, where the House was popularly elected and represented The people in the Senate represented the states so that, you know, they had six years of a term.

00:50:03.000 They had to be older.

00:50:05.000 And, you know, Wyoming, every senator represents 250,000.

00:50:09.000 California, it's 20 million.

00:50:10.000 And that was okay because the senators represented the state and their congressional representatives represented the people.

00:50:17.000 And that would allow the states, if you didn't like something in one state, you could go to another state.

00:50:23.000 There was commonalities, but there was enough respect for state autonomy that each state was experimenting in various degrees with consensual government.

00:50:33.000 More freedom, less freedom, less taxes, more regulation, etc, etc.

00:50:38.000 And then that was a safety valve so that the nation didn't explode.

00:50:43.000 However, The problem with federalism is that when people conglomerate in one geographical area, that becomes a force multiplier, and you create two alternative systems.

00:50:58.000 We saw that in the 1850s with the rise of the idea that even though 1% of the southern population own slaves, the other people, and most people suffered from it, both black and white.

00:51:10.000 Black, certainly, but also white, poor. 0.97

00:51:13.000 Nevertheless, there was a larger paradigm that they accepted, that the holy ground of the Confederacy, we don't want to pay for internal improvements, tariffs, or killings, all of that stuff.

00:51:25.000 And they created a subculture, the red states, Mason-Dixon, south of it. 0.53

00:51:31.000 And that was the only time that it really happened.

00:51:34.000 But today, when we look at things, everybody is self-selecting.

00:51:39.000 And so I think 10, I saw the statistics, 10 to 12 million Californians have left in the last 30 years.

00:51:47.000 One right here.

00:51:48.000 And they go to places that are, yes, they go to Nevada, they go to Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee.

00:51:54.000 Florida, Texas, even now we've got a lot of people going to Alabama.

00:51:58.000 And they do that because the societies work.

00:52:02.000 They don't have deficits.

00:52:03.000 They don't have huge pension programs.

00:52:06.000 The police are trying to fight crime.

00:52:08.000 There's a lot more liberty as far as opening a business, less regulations, etc.

00:52:14.000 And the blue paradigm is not working and it's collapsing.

00:52:18.000 And yet it inherited the bi-coastal media, the bi-coastal universities.

00:52:24.000 It has a lot of the CEOs and corporate headquarters.

00:52:29.000 And so when you ask that question, it's kind of scary because under our federal system, it only happened once.

00:52:37.000 But we're starting to see two different societies.

00:52:41.000 When I go to Florida or Tennessee or Texas and I come back to California or Washington, It's a very different place.

00:52:50.000 I mean, you say to somebody in, I don't know, Arizona, do you watch the NBA?

00:52:57.000 No.

00:52:58.000 Do you watch the Oscars?

00:52:59.000 Never heard of it.

00:52:59.000 Do you ever watch the Tonys?

00:53:01.000 Nope.

00:53:02.000 Do you watch NBC, ABC, Network Nerves?

00:53:05.000 Nope.

00:53:06.000 Do you go to a first run Hollywood movie?

00:53:07.000 Nope.

00:53:08.000 Do you watch late night comedy on TV?

00:53:11.000 Nope.

00:53:13.000 And, uh, What do you know about transgenderism?

00:53:18.000 I don't know anything about it.

00:53:19.000 It's just a monastery of the mind where a whole half of the country is culturally, socially disconnecting.

00:53:28.000 And the thing is that the North always, from the Civil War days, had all the advantages.

00:53:35.000 They had the industry, they had the capital, they had Wall Street, they had Harvard and Yale, and then they had the West Coast and Oregon.

00:53:45.000 And so you thought that that wouldn't be possible.

00:53:47.000 And yet what's happening is you're seeing a red state antithesis that is draining the blue states of all the talent and using the old blue state model in red states.

00:54:03.000 And the red states, in some way, are more like the North of the 1850s.

00:54:09.000 And the blue states are more like the Confederacy in the sense they're obsessed with one-drop racism and the wokeness.

00:54:16.000 They love to nullify federal laws, like sanctuary cities.

00:54:21.000 They hate the Supreme Court.

00:54:24.000 And I'm very worried about it because all these are force multipliers of differences.

00:54:30.000 And I don't know what, so far, we have these common military, common media, and some, but even that is bifurcating.

00:54:41.000 And I can see a point, and if something doesn't done, the white male rural soldier will not join the military anymore.

00:54:51.000 And if something is not done, There will be two entirely separate medias.

00:54:57.000 There will be no intersection between them at all.

00:55:00.000 And if something is not done, I think there's going to be an implosion of Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York.

00:55:10.000 They're not sustainable.

00:55:12.000 So, yes, we're going to be in a very dangerous position unless we get a unifying type of administration in Congress.

00:55:21.000 One of the things that would be fascinating about what you're talking about is that unlike the Civil War, where one side was insisting on the power of union and the other side wanted to break away, in what we're looking at right now, when I talk to left-wingers from California, they're saying to Floridians and Texans, go with God.

00:55:37.000 And if you're in Florida or Texas, you're putting up lawn signs saying, don't New York my Florida.

00:55:42.000 And so there's this sort of mutual belief that we're better off without one another

00:55:47.000 that seems to be growing rather than minimizing.

00:55:50.000 And in truth, the only thing that has historically ever papered over differences like that are

00:55:55.000 success.

00:55:56.000 It turns out that in success and prosperity, people are willing to paper over a hell of

00:55:58.000 a lot of differences.

00:56:00.000 But when things start to fail, then all of the fissures come to the surface.

00:56:03.000 This is a point that Neil Ferguson makes in The War of the World, is that when you have

00:56:07.000 economic turmoil, when you have ethnic tensions, when you have declining empires, the combination

00:56:13.000 of those three usually ends up with some of the worst things in human history, ranging

00:56:18.000 from tremendous violence and war to actual genocide as people begin to target one another.

00:56:22.000 And it feels like those factors are quickly building up as we refuse to face up to serious

00:56:28.000 problems both foreign and domestic, as we undermine our economy, as we rack up the national

00:56:32.000 debt, as we demonize one another to the point where in that Biden-Trump debate, and what

00:56:38.000 I thought was by far the most overlooked point of the debate, there was a point where Jake

00:56:43.000 Tapper asked the sitting president of the United States if the millions of people who

00:56:47.000 will vote for Donald Trump are enemies of democracy if they vote for Donald Trump.

00:56:52.000 And Biden says, as they find out more about Trump, yes.

00:56:55.000 Meaning that if you know about Trump and you vote for Trump, then this means that you are now a traitor.

00:57:01.000 I mean, he's been doing this throughout, but that was the most explicit statement of it.

00:57:05.000 It wasn't even an attempt to sort of brand it as the ultra MAGA, super MAGA, super duper MAGA.

00:57:08.000 It was like, you vote for Trump, you're the enemy now.

00:57:11.000 Well, you start thinking that way, and it's very difficult to see how we share a country together.

00:57:16.000 Yeah, I have one.

00:57:17.000 Maybe I should end on a note of optimism.

00:57:22.000 Trump and the people around him are light years ahead of 2016 and 2020.

00:57:28.000 They're just more professional.

00:57:31.000 But more importantly, he's hit on a paradigm of unity where he's trying to substitute class concerns and solidarity for race.

00:57:42.000 So, for all the vituperation about he's racist and polarizing, what he's doing by going to black areas and Latino areas, and appealing because he has a natural empathy for working people.

00:57:58.000 He is basically saying to them, you have more in common if you're in Bakersfield, California, or you're in inner Chicago with the people of East Palestine than you do with Joey Reed and Oprah.

00:58:12.000 Because you're black and Latino, bi-coastal elite in the media, in Colleen Gray, in the universities. 0.83

00:58:19.000 They're just, they have the same relationship to you that The people at Harvard or Yale do to East Palestine, the white elite. 0.87

00:58:30.000 And you need to unite and make the majority, and we can And then he gives them an agenda.

00:58:38.000 And the agenda is, we're going to close the border for you. 0.73

00:58:42.000 And we're going to very quickly, and we can, mine rare earths, build nuclear plants, be the greatest gas producer and oil producer in the world.

00:58:52.000 And that's going to help you and that's going to give us national strength.

00:58:57.000 And we're going to get back the military because we're going to get all of these people, the middle class, and we're not going to emphasize race in the military anymore.

00:59:05.000 And that's a radical idea, and I never thought that a Paul Ryan or a Mitt Romney or John McCain who were claimed to be so sober and judicious, they never attempted that.

00:59:21.000 They never did at all.

00:59:22.000 All Paul Ryan talked about was capital gains cuts, which I'm for, but it was just a That Republican Party had no ability to do that and yet it's one of the wrinkles of history that this guy who was a billionaire who can be very crude and callous has a natural affinity for working people and he's blunt and they admire his authenticity and he's genuine and he can be crude and they're starting to form this nationalist worker solidarity and I think

00:59:56.000 If Donald Trump were to win 21, 22 percent of the black vote, that would require probably 30 or 40

01:00:03.000 percent of the black male, or 45 to 50 of the Latino vote, and close the border, and go back 0.99

01:00:10.000 to an energy-first paradigm, and then use the DOJ to stop this, the cartels and interstate coordination

01:00:19.000 of all this crime, and restore deterrence.

01:00:24.000 I think he could heal the country very quickly.

01:00:26.000 I really do.

01:00:27.000 By success.

01:00:29.000 Success.

01:00:31.000 And he was right about that.

01:00:34.000 I'm kind of confident because I'll just finish by saying it this reminds me a lot of the 1980 race with Carter and Reagan Carter You know everybody said Well, he gave us stagflation, inflation.

01:00:48.000 The Russians are in Afghanistan. 0.91

01:00:49.000 They took hostages, the failed rescue.

01:00:52.000 All he does is scold.

01:00:54.000 He scolds us.

01:00:55.000 He says what we can't do, malaise this.

01:00:59.000 But on the other hand, Carter's right.

01:01:01.000 Reagan's never held federal office.

01:01:02.000 He's very old.

01:01:04.000 He speaks in platitudes.

01:01:05.000 He never gives detail.

01:01:06.000 George H.W.

01:01:07.000 Bush said he had voodoo economics.

01:01:10.000 How can you do all this?

01:01:11.000 And then suddenly, 15 days before the election, Reagan was polling seven points behind Carter in the Gallup poll.

01:01:19.000 And then he had the debate.

01:01:21.000 There you go again, Mr. Carter, President Carter.

01:01:24.000 And people just collectively said, you know what?

01:01:27.000 I may be a Democrat or an Independent, but I don't believe what they're saying about Reagan.

01:01:31.000 I'm done.

01:01:32.000 I'm done with Carter.

01:01:33.000 And I think a lot of people are saying, you know what?

01:01:37.000 After that debate, and I saw that, and I was coming to that conclusion anyway, I do not want to be told what I can't do, and scolded, and hectored, and have all these unorthodox things mainstreamed.

01:01:50.000 And whatever Trump is, this is our last chance.

01:01:52.000 And I think you're going to see him blow up the election and win by about 9 or 10 points.

01:01:58.000 But it won't be until August, I think.

01:02:00.000 Well, that does put me in a good mood, and that's a good place to stop.

01:02:03.000 Professor Hanson, really appreciate the time, appreciate your insight.

01:02:06.000 Thank you so much.

01:02:07.000 Thank you for having me, Ben.

01:02:18.000 Associate Producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick.

01:02:21.000 Production Intern is Sarah Steele.

01:02:22.000 Editing is by Jeff Tomlin.

01:02:24.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

01:02:26.000 Camera and Lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:02:28.000 Hair, Makeup and Wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

01:02:31.000 Title Graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

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01:02:35.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:02:38.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

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01:02:42.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - July 28, 2024

Is War Forever Changed? | Victor Davis Hanson

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