Victor Davis Hanson: Trump’s Leverage Over Xi Jinping EXPLAINED

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So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back from these messages. I'm going to leave you with some content for the Daily Signal. Victor Davis Hansen in a few words, but always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war. And in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. And if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signal's long form interview podcast called the Signal Sitdown. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC, as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially with the Trump administration back in office, because in 2024, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government. And together, we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal Sitdown. Welcome back. For those who are new and for Victor's affiliations, he is the Martin and Neal Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buske Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, VictorHanson.com, is the address, and it's called the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there. Everything that Victor does is posted there in one form or another. So Victor, I know that Donald Trump has just, has returned already from China, but I was wondering all day yesterday, the news seemed to be China, China, China, and if you had any reflections on his visit. Well, the key thing is, well, they meet their commitments or promises. They never do. They were supposed to reduce fentanyl, and they never did. And they were supposed to cut back on dumping and currency, and they never did. But he has, he has a number of levers that they don't have. I think everybody should realize that. He could just say, I believe in equity, parity. So you have 300,000 students here, and they appropriate our technology, and that's their pipeline to parity with us. So we're gonna, we only have 10,000 in your country, and we don't want any more. So we'll just make it even. You have 10, we have 10. We don't own any property next to your basis, so you shouldn't own any next doors. In fact, we don't own any acreage at all. You shouldn't either. They could just go, he could do that, and that would, he doesn't have to do it, he just have to raise it. Then the other thing is, this myth that China is all powerful, and I think everybody should realize that this is a meme, a trope, and the American psyche, that we always do the best thing or the necessary thing last, and we just kind of get complacent, then we get paranoid. If we were having this conversation in 1936, we'd say, oh my God, we're still in depression. We've been in depression for seven years, unemployment's 20. Have you seen what Mussolini's doing? He's got a vast rail project. The trains are running on time. Have you seen the new German airplanes? Charles Lindbergh says we'll never catch up. That was the wave of the future. Maybe fascism is the wave of the future, and then, boom, wouldn't want to be you. Then after the war, oh my gosh, the Soviet Union has taken over all of Asia. It's got, China has flipped. They're in Africa. They've got nuclear weapons in 1949. They've got 240 million people. Kuschev said he's going to bury us. Maybe this command system is better, because they're ahead of us in the space race. There's a missile gap. It's the wave of the future, and then the Berlin Wall comes. Then we take a deep breath, and I thought, what's this going to be next? Japan incorporated. The Japanese have mixed capitalism with government. They target strategic industries. They work hard, our cars are no good. Everybody wants their Toyota. They bought, why? They bought Pebble Beach. They bought Rockefeller Center. Now they're buying Columbia Pictures. Sony's going to run the world, and then, boom, they have the worst deflation in history. They're shrinking. They're aging. They're a closed society. Well, we took a deep breath, and then at the Millennium, we said, well, we did that one. It's the EU. They've got a new paradigm. All these countries together, 450 million people. The new Euro citizen. We started out at 90 euros to a dollar, and now it's 2006. It's a dollar six just to buy one's a dollar point six, dollar and a half to get a Euro. They're just leaving us in the dust. They've got a new, it's so much better. They don't waste, they've got green energy. They have open borders. They're not caught up with Christianity. They're not wasting their money on defense. And then all of a sudden, oh, wow, they're shrinking. They're overrun with Islamic chords that hate their guts. They dismantled all of their nuclear and Germany plants in coal, and now Germany can't compete. And Britain is just in a mess. So then we took a deep breath. Well, who's the next one that's going to bear? Oh, it's China. China is just, oh, you don't know. And then I was looking at some on the internet the other day, articles from 2005, they all said in 2020, 25, they were going to surpass our GDP. Our GDP is $31 trillion. There's this 20. They have 4, 1.4 billion people. We have 340. I'm not saying everybody works, but if you wanted to just do a back of your hand little calculation, you could say that four Chinese produce 60% of what one American does. And they're going to bury us and then look at anything. Top 50 STEM universities in the world, about 40 of them in the United States, three are China. If you look at top 10 corporations on market capitalization, one is Chinese, eight, maybe nine, depending on the rankings or American. If you look at, Elon Musk launched more satellites than all of Europe put together, Elon Musk. So if you look at the Chinese military's air defenses, they sold to Iran, they were just a joke. The United States and Israel destroyed them in one day. And so we have 11 carrier groups. They have three, two and a half. And we've been doing it for 100 years, the Langley, USS Langley, we're masters at it. You can't make a carrier group in 10 years. They haven't had, they've been doing it for 12 years. I can go on, this idea that they're going to bury us, no. Oh, okay. But what sort of a challenge does China present for us then? I mean, it's our challenge, our laxity. If you allow them to dump product and run up big trade surpluses like we've been doing, if you allow them to buy sanctioned oil all over the world, it's supposed to be embargoed. They get on a discount, but it's Wayland, Iranian. If you let 300,000 students come over here and say 3,001%, but it's more than that, steal all our technology. If you don't arm yourself, yeah, they're dangerous, but they're completely at our mercy if we don't let them do that because we have an open capitalist, free market, constitutional federal system. They don't. And the other thing that gets me a little upset, Chi quoted the Thucydides trap. That was a reference to Graham Allison. He's a great political scientist, but he's not a classicist. So he came up with this idea. It's an old one that in the first and second books of Thucydides, he's talking about the rise of Athenian power the great 50 years. And then at one point he says that it was the fear of Athens that made Sparta preempt and invade the countryside in 431. Allison seized upon that. Said this is a paradigm that's universal across time and space. When you have an ascending power, the status quo power can strike out. And we are the status quo power and they are the ascending. Now that was the first wrong mistake. We are the ascending power and they are now the status quo power and decline on fertility. They import 65% of their oil and gas. We are the greatest oil and gas producer in the history of civilization. They were self-sufficient in food, but as they got more affluent, they now import 30% of their food. So they thought they had us around the neck, a boot on our neck with rare earth materials, but now the output possible from the Wyoming and the California and the Utah new mines and some are existing and Greenland franchise, we can produce more than we need. We're very flexible, innovative people. They're not. They're very good at taking technology and then standardizing it on scale. Absolutely. So you have to be very careful. The other thing about the Euthycides trap is it's not based on a close reading of the text of the city. I taught it for 20 years in Greek. The city is not a little book on the Peloponnesian war. So I'm not bragging, but I will tell you that a Thucydides and scholar knows that he didn't go back and revise that text. He wrote it serially. And then at some point, whether it was 401 or 390, he died and he left it in 411 incomplete. Okay. So there was contradictions. I'll give you one example. He said during the five invasions of Attica, he said the Spartans ravaged the countryside. And at one point he said they ravaged the entire countryside. And then when he's talking later, much later about the Decalian, he said this was the worst attack on it because the prior invasions hadn't done much damage. It was complete contradiction because he hadn't revised it. So when Allison says that there's this line of Thucydides, he says that Spartan fear phobos, that they were afraid of the rise of Athens, they had fought a war with, they already had something called the First Peloponnesian War. And the Spartans had even tried to invade. They had a falling out in 480. It wasn't that Athens was rising in 431. They had the biggest fleet at Salamis. The Mysticles had the biggest fleet. He went down and tricked the Spartans to build the walls around Athens. So they had parity earlier. And more importantly, they didn't fall out because Athens was strong and Sparta was paranoid. They fell out because they had completely antithetical societies. Every aspect, Athens was a sea power. Sparta was a land power. Athens was ionic by tribe. They were Doric. Athens was a commercial big metropolis. Sparta was an out-of-the-way hamlet. Athens had a chattel slave system. Sparta had helots, indentured servants. I could go on, but the antithesis were so great that they were always going to be at each other's throats. Sometimes they had alliances of convenience, but the idea that suddenly they look at Pericles and Athens and they see the Acropolis and the Parthenon and the Athenian Empire with 170 tribute allies all over and they, oh, we can't defeat them. That wasn't why they invaded. They invaded because they felt that the differences that had existed for a long time had not been resolved by an earlier war. So we are not in decline and China is not going to attack us. We're not going to attack China before it gets to a point where we can't. If anything, they are in decline. If there is such a thing as a Thucydides trap and there isn't, then the power to watch would be China getting desperate and say, well, the United States is getting too strong. It's got all the oil. It's got gas. It's ahead in biotech now. It's giving everyone for money and AI. All the companies are American. They're popular cultures all over the world. Their military spends three times as much as we do. We better take Taiwan now. I could see that, but that's sort of what Hitler did. He said, I can't take England. It's like the first sea lord during the Napoleonic when they asked him, sir, can Napoleon invade Britain? He said, I don't know, but I know he won't do it by sea. And that's what the British said in World War II when Chamberlain, actually it was Churchill after he came to power in May 10th. They asked him, will operations sea lion work? And he said, they won't come by sea because the British Navy was the second largest in the world. And they were actually, it was still the largest in the world. And so there was no way in the world that that was going to happen. But in any case, when he couldn't take Britain, why would he turn on Russia when who was supplying him with 30% of his grain, oil, lubricants, and had no demonstrable idea that he would pre, I know that Daryl Cooper and all these people said they Hitler attacked because Russia was about ready to attack them. That was a Nazi canard. There was no evidence that the Soviet Union was going to do that. Their idea was to fuel Germany and sit back and watch Germany and England kill each other off and then walk through Europe and take it. But they were not going to turn on Germany until they had destroyed England. So why did he attack Russia? Because he said, he said why he did. They said, there's no way we can take England. We're going to control Russia. We're going to control everything from the Pacific to the English Channel and we'll have all the resources of the continent and we'll have all the wheat and we'll have everything, oil and Britain will concede and America then won't ever come in. Well, Victor, I have a few questions about that. But first, let's welcome back a sponsor, pure health research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, this message is for you. Pure health research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best-selling health supplements are leading the way. First is liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with baddie deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile up on the pounds and make you feel tired. Liver health formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. 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Trump has said they can have up to 600,000. And this is what he said, to tell China that its students were not welcome here would be a big insult to them. They are some of the best students in the system. And it would destroy a lot of the smaller colleges that rely on the money of having these students in. And I was wondering, do you want to address what Trump says? I know you're maybe not. I politely disagree. The students are at the main big universities. If I go to Hillsdale College, there's not a lot of Chinese students. And they tend to be Stanford, I think as the graduate students are probably about a quarter of them from China. The problem is that when you have 300,000 and the Chinese Communist Party interviews every one of them when they come back, it only takes one or two percent to give you 3,000 or 4,000 active people that are appropriating technology. We had the mayor of an Orange County city just yesterday convicted or she pled guilty to being a conduit for Chinese propaganda. We had a visiting lecture in neuroscience at Stanford University that was a major in the People's Liberation Army and the Stanford faculty. We had the Stanford Review running a whole series of articles about people, Chinese and non-Chinese, at Stanford who criticized the government. And they were targeted. And there was a little Victor who wrote a very critical thing of China. And the next thing I know, somebody called Feng Feng called me. So, you have been correct. I'm not being racist when I said that. I'm doing this for a purpose. You have incorrect views about China. I'm coming to see you. I said, no, you're not. And she was outside my front door. And then when she came up, I have to correct you. And then all of a sudden, hey, man. It's like, you guys are losers. She went into a valley girl like a Cal State, I guess, Hayward or somewhere. I can't remember where she said she went. And that's when I said that Eric Swallow must be a, that was before all things came out that he was an idiot. But gosh, any case, Trump should limit the number of students here because they are, when you, I was looking at a tape of their aircraft carrier. They even have copied the insignias and the colors, color-coded guys on the deck and the Americans that do all of the messaging to the pilots and conduct traffic on the deck, flat top. They're even doing that. And their planes look like ours. Their tanks look like ours. I know it's a, it's emulation. It's not, but they innovate too. It's the best form of flattery, isn't it? Imitation. I wish Trump was right. His theory is the more that they were culture-rated, the more they want to stay here. And then that undermines the system or they go back. But we've been told that for 40 years. That if you just don't press the violations of the World Trade Organization, just let them dump, let them manipulate currency. Let them conduct copyright and patent theft. They will become affluent. When they come be affluent, they'll be middle-class consumers. When they're middle-class consumers, they'll be democratic and they'll vote. That didn't happen. Yes, but he said also that, you know, they spy on us. We spy on them. So that part of the equation is equal. We do spy on them, but we don't have 300, I wish we had 300,000 American students over there. But no, I don't. American students would probably turn. And Heath feels like not all of them are going to become westernized, but enough of them will to... Maybe the Chinese would see it this way to put their population in a state of, you know, threat, because they've got these subversives within China who would rather be western. Perhaps, I don't know. He has to be very careful because he's an excellent deal-maker. And he values personal one-on-one relationships. And the Chinese communists have studied that. And they know chapter and verse about him. So one of their strategy is to magnify his importance, to brag on him, to give him a fantastic, tremendous pageant when he arrives, and then say, you're so powerful, you could allow this to happen and, you know, cut a deal. So he's got to be careful. Yeah. And Donald Trump returns the favor on all of that complimentary stuff. I mean, ultimately, they're the inheritors of the most genocidal government in the world, Mao Zedong's Communist Party. Yeah. So let's turn to Iran. And it seems to be devolving down to the Straits of Hore, where Muse recently with attacks, or some firing on ships that have tried to break the blockade, and the firing is coming from the U.S. military. But that's the most recent news. But do you have any reflections on Iran this morning? Tactically, it's clear they have no military to speak of. You know, conventionals are a strategic sense. They can't hurt us. So what's going on? We had 42 days of destroying their military with the help of the Israeli Air Force. Now we've had 30 days of merchandising. We'll do it. No, we won't do it. We'll have to, and with them. And they have wasted a month of our time and were five months out of the midterm, or less. And that's important, and that's why they did it. So their argument is this. Donald Trump's counterrevolution will fail if he loses the midterms in the House and Senate. The left in America is already saying that our survival is victory. Just to survive, they're on our side. His midterms are coming up. The price of gas has gone from a low of $188 in Iowa up to almost $4. That is because we put our little mosquito fleet out there and harassed and harassed ships and made it dangerous. And we have some missiles we sent. And we terrified the Gulf States because we have our little caches here and there of subterranean missiles and drones. Yes, Iran has done that. Yes, yes. And we're threatening the Gulf. We'll take out. And all of that tension has spiked world price of oil. And we're getting to the point where we think it won't come down in time. So we're going to keep doing this. And Trump is saying we debank them. We cut off their oil revenues. We're cheating with China and land routes, railroads through the Caspian Sea, but more or less they're bankrupt. They have no military to speak of. They've got a bunch of mosquito boats and some hidden missiles and drones places. And they don't pose a military threat. And I'm running out of time and I'm getting pressure from the Europeans and the Japanese to get the straits settled. That's where we are. It's not a military question anymore. Militarily, whatever is choice is very quickly. Choice A. He can say I'm tired of this. I've waited and waited and waited. And I'm not going to send any ground because ground troops in the Middle East are a mega taboo. I don't want them to be this adventure like Afghanistan or Iraq. No Helmand province, no Ramadi, Fallujah stuff. I'm going to do the following. I'm going to take out all the dock works, all the piers, all the port facilities, but not the oil pipelines or storage on Kargayma. So if our friends in the Iranian resistance ever rise up, they can refurbish it and they'll have an oil. But they will not be able to ever unload oil and sell it, at least for a year or two. And I'm going to take out the key bridges that have dual use. And I'm going to take out generators that we know operate in areas where the military is dependent on it. And I'm going to do all that. And then I'm going to order our fleet of warthogs and apaches, tactical aircraft, to blow up every mosquito boat in the entire straight. And then I'm going to get our strategic aircraft, the B-52, everything and bomb a corridor all along their coast. And then I'm going to clear a victory. And I'm going to tell the Europeans and Japanese, I would like to lead an armada to enforce what I've done and keep the straight open. But I don't need it. If you don't want it, fine. But I'm going to go home. That's one thing. Two, he can keep negotiating and negotiating and hitting there and he will run out of time. And there won't be enough time. It's not likely that Donald Trump will do that. I hope not. Or three, he can do what I said with choice one and stay there with a carrier, one carrier group. In other words, he can do a lot more damage to their dual use assets and oil. And then he can keep one carrier group to make sure that they don't try or their friends or anybody tries to close the straight. And the thing about oil futures, they keep saying that's too late the price, but there's so much speculation. They thought it was going to go up to 150. And they still think it might. So you've got all these oil speculators that want to make a killing and they're willing to pay high prices because they think they'll have a monopoly on a tanker with a million barrels in it, you know, and they can sell it for 200. The point is, if he can increase US production by a half million barrels, if Russia's oil is now on sanction, de facto will come in on the market. If he can get Venezuela to prompt another 200,000 or 300,000 barrels, and he can get the Gulf States to ramp up. So I give you an example, UAE just left OPEC. It's going to ramp up by a million barrels, maybe a million and a half. And he gets the straight open. He can collapse that price. And the price will go down very quickly because people will want to unload what they bought at a high price before it gets lower. You know what I mean? As it starts to go down, it's a stampede mentality. And if he can get, if he can say to the American people by October 15th, the price of gas is $250 a gallon or $3 nationwide or even, you know, $250. And I eliminated the Chinese and Russian footprint in our Western Hemisphere. They don't threaten the Panama Canal anymore. Maduro's government is pro-American. We're going through a transition to a consensual government there. We are overseeing their oil, so it's not stolen from the Venezuelan people. And I've done the same with Iran. It's no longer a nuclear or a conventional threat to its neighbors. And Cuba is about ready to do a Venezuelan deal where they're going to agree to a transitional strongman, maybe, but it won't be the Castro brothers, communists. If he can do all that and there's a good chance he could, and the economy then is receiving daily more foreign investment, the tax cuts are what, $175 billion in tax that was remitted to the people. The stock market's at a record high. Unemployment claims are going down. The job market is strong. I think it's 4.3% unemployment. All he has to do is just one thing, is inflation. And he can't say, I inherited 3.2% inflation. I only rose it because of the war because he said he was going to end inflation. So he has to honor that. So he can win the midterms. That's still possible. And when you add in the wild card that once they got into this redistricting wars, and just as a sidelight, Heicum Jeffery, everybody said he was genius. I remember George Will wrote about the future of the Democratic Party. He's really a limited person because he keeps this bluster they're going to win this and win this. All he has to do is count the legislatures and see if they're red or blue. And once you start with that language and what you saw in Virginia and California, the red states are scrambling now to redistrict. And he's going to lose about eight seats, eight to ten. And then if Congee Brown stops delaying and the appellate court and districts start delaying, but they implement the Supreme Court's majority rule on racial gerrymandering, they could get another eight to ten seats. And then of course, long term with the census, they could get another ten seats. So they could get another 15 seats maybe right now before the midterms. And who knows if they can solve the problem on Iran and the economy is well ready to boom. It really is. It's just the oil and the availability of oil and the residual inflation. But GDP is good. Employment is good. Foreign investment is great. Stock market is historically high. It's all good. You know, I was going to ask you why you think that is given that typically when we go into a war and there's uncertainty in that war of its outcome, et cetera, and the price of energy goes up, then the market, the stock market and the economic indicators usually start to take a dip. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts. I know you're not an analyst or anything on why that is that it hasn't taken a dip. There's a couple of reasons. One is it's never absolute. It's relative. So what is the American stock market compared to the Chinese or European? And you look at their GDP, et cetera, et cetera, and it's good. Number two is are there crisis in the world that are going to blow up in the next six months? There's not going to be a Venezuela crisis. There's not going to be a Cuba crisis. There's not going to be what you think in Panama. The Greenland thing was a big nothing burger. Iran doesn't have the ability to cause a big war. The Gulf States are now secretly having Israel go away and help them. It doesn't look like Hamas and the Houthis and Hezbollah are going to have much left when they get their money cut off from Iran. So the investor surveys the world to see and then they look third, what is the long-term viability of the Americans? Well, they're the largest gas and oil. It's not 2007. We're importing 6 million, 8 million barrels a day. We're exporting. We're the biggest exporter, not just producer, but exporter of gas and oil. That's going to really help the economy. We hate paying $100 a barrel, but we're getting $100 a barrel. So the economy collectively is getting rich and that trickles down to use the leftist term. And then when you look at food, we're the biggest agricultural producer in the world by value. As I said earlier, the companies, Apple, Google, EnVita, all of them, they run that whole thing. 85% of movie and streaming revenues are American worldwide. So they look at all those things and they don't see a decline anywhere. They don't. They say to themselves, what are the essentials of civilization? Food, excellent. Fuel, excellent. Defense, excellent. STEM education, not K through 12, excellent. And they think that for the time being that the left does not control the House. It does not control the Senate. It does not control the White House. It does not control the Supreme Court. So there's a 50-50 chance that you're not going to get socialism rammed down your throat from Mondami and AOC, or it's going to be localized. So they look at all the long-term and they say, you know what, compared to the Europeans or the Japanese or the Chinese, it's better to invest here. And it's safer. And the economy is going to boom if he can solve the Iran. Iran can be a big, big liability, but it can also be a big plus if he should solve it. And there's always a wild card that in two months, there could be a revolution. So you never know. Everybody thinks they know exactly what's going to happen, but they don't. So Victor, before we go to break, I need to make a note because we did talk about the Pope giving an award to the Iranian ambassador. And on InstaPundit today, there was Sarah Hoyt, who is one of their posters. He's a Portuguese-American? Yeah, and she's Catholic. And she explained that that award was pro forma for years served. I was wondering, and so we should apologize for criticizing the Pope for that, but I was wondering, this sounds to me like apologetics for awarding a murderous, threatening, bloodthirsty and tolerant regime. No, no. Shouldn't they hold it off? Yes. Yes. It would be like you're a little league coach and everybody gets a participation trophy, but one of your students is a town bully and he just beat up four people. And you just said, I'm not going to give you your pro forma trophy. So I don't take anything back. The Pope should know that that government of which the Vatican ambassador is a member just killed 40,000 people, murdered them. Now that would be one thing. He could say that that's not my political purview, but he has weighed in on politics on the Iran war and other time very critically. So he has basically said to America, I as a divine person, near divine person, James with, you know, I'm appointed to represent Jesus crisis Catholic church and Saint Paul and Peter. And I think it's my duty to speak about politics. So once he does that, that's what I mentioned three weeks ago. He shouldn't do that because he's not responsible for all that. Once he says he is and he can make political judgments, then he should make political judgments. And it's a no brainer that you don't give even a pro forma award to somebody from a genocidal government unless he's Nobel Peace Prize material and he's a dissident like Sarkoff or somebody. Yeah, it seems to me that you've made your award, even if it's pro forma, completely valueless if you allow such things to go on. You've got to be very, very careful on all these matters because the things that are most dear to people are religion and you don't want to get in weighed into Catholicism, Protestantism, but in this particular case, he waited out of the realm and became an editorialist on contemporary political matters. Yeah. And the second thing before we go to our break, I don't know if you have more to say on Cuba, but our CIA director, John Radcliffe has gone down there to meet with his counterpart, who is actually the grandson of Fidel Castro, his name, Raul Castro, who is one of their security men down there. And I was, I know you've said a few things already about it, but I don't know if you have anything more. Is this a significant meeting? Yeah, the Venezuela option. He's saying your grandfather and his cronies are the maduros of Cuba. So here's the deal. We're squeezing you to the point you're going to pop, but if you get rid of these people or we take them and you don't contest it, then you can be a transitional figure. Just be a strong man and keep orders. There's not rioting and killing in the streets and we will pour in USA and investment. And then you can be a transitional figure. Now, if you're a right wing, excuse me, if you're a left wing thug and you start, we'll get rid of you, but if you want to transition, then maybe in a couple of years, there'll be a constitutional system you can run for office. Even Maduro's son, he has one son. Did you hear what he said the other day? No, I did not. Well, kind of sort of looking back, we kind of blew it. We were kind of a little bit too mean. Sounds like my orcas. Yeah, we kind of, we kind of didn't tell people what we were trying to do so we can kind of understand. And but yet we left us are still in power. So you got it. It was kind of revealing. So I think that's what the, it's a Maduro plan for Cuba. All right. Which would be a big achievement. Yes. I know what would happen if they cut a deal and said there's a transitional government caretaker government for two years, but it's not communist and it's going to protect foreign investment. You would have 5000 multi-millionaires from Miami to go in there and buy up all the beach front and factories and everything. And that place would look like. That isn't already owned by the Castro's. Apparently they call this guy the yacht official or something because he's got a lot of money from the Castro's. I think they would find out that he expropriated it. And I think it would look like Singapore or Hong Kong. His brother has a nightclub and other things in, in. Every communism for them, but not for me. I know. A capitalist in the hiding. It's like DEI. Every time I saw a DEI in my years, DEI for all you junior faculty, but for us white males, why would you ever think that we would have to give up our slots for someone who doesn't have my unqualified, perfect acumen and publications? I mean, I've had people tell me that. I said to you, you're not going to hire this guy. You've stopped him five times in a row. He's a white male. Why don't you just, you've been here, you're 70 years old. Why don't you retire? But I have done so much. I'm so invaluable. I said, no, you're not. You can replace you in two seconds. But they, they're like the Soviet apparatus. They always think that they're, they don't have to live by their ideology they impose on others. All right, Victor, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the God Dionysius, the party God. Stay with us and we'll be back. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kennett cast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure it might have been useful at one time as a doorstop, find the Tony Kennett cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. If you want to watch Victor and contact him on social media, he is X. I'll call it Twitter for a second there. His X account is at VD Hansen and his Facebook handle is Hansen's Morning Cup. So please come join us there. So Victor, I'm excited to hear about Dionysius, the God of party and fun and your thoughts on it. Well, like all the other gods, he is known in Mycenae and Linear B tablets. So what I mean by that is that period from 1800 BC to 1100 BC, you associate with Mycenae and Palaeus, he was a Greek God for that Greek speaking people. Then they were destroyed. The memory of that magnificent civilization was exaggerated over five generations, oral culture. Then the city state came and that's when the period of mythology. In that period, they lost the idea that he had been a God all the time in Greece, but he came from Thrace, from the east. And he's portrayed sometimes with breast, sometimes he's portrayed like pan with little horns and hooves, beard, tail, sometimes he's effeminate, sometimes he's male, but he's a foreign God that comes in. The Locus classicus is the playwright, Euripides great play, the Bacchai. He's known in Rome as Bacchus, Bacchanalia, and that comes from the word Bacch, Bacch, Bacch, Bacch, Bacch, that you shout in ecstasy. And in Greek religious observance, he doesn't have a lot of temples of Dionysus, it's more of cults, but he is the God of relieving pain, of enjoyment, especially we associate primarily with wine, with resurrection from the dead that your soul will live on in the underworld, mad, ecstasy. In Euripides Bacchai, he comes in and he represents liberation and then women called main heads go up in the mountains, they chase cows, they reportedly are naked, they have a theorist, a theorist that's kind of a stick, like a green, evergreen limb, and they shake it, and they chant music, they dance and frenzy. They drink wine supposedly, although they deny it in the Bacchai, and they go through a rite of passage. So he is in mythology the giver of pain relief through alcohol. So the Greeks don't know the chemistry of alcohol, what it does to the brain, but they do know that empirically it makes people lose their inhibitions. And therefore they do things they otherwise would not, they make fun of people, they commit crimes, or they have sex where they otherwise wouldn't. So they try to control that period and say that at certain times during the great and lesser Dionysia, we're going to allow people collectively to let their hair down, drink, and in Athens, they had three plays, three tragedies and a comedy during the greater, Dionysia. So there were festivals honoring Dionysus. And they actually believe that when you drank wine, he was present in the volume of the wine, so you drank Dionysus and then he came into your brain and liberated it. So if you had a severe cut on your leg, you drank on mixed red wine or some type of distilled liquor and you lost the pain. Dionysus did that, you prayed. I had a tooth implant yesterday that was very hard to do because I'd waited too long because of my lung surgery. So they had to after six months and really drill through the bone. And I didn't have Dionysus, but they gave me a painkiller. And that was like, I don't know what God he was, but I took him and swallowed him. And I didn't act funny, but it did give me four hours of sleep. But that's the idea. And it's caricatured in the barcay that old stodgy men are always suspicious that bad things are going on. And Dionysus says that there's an element in the human experience for me, ritual, frenzy, dancing, music, hitting a drum, frothing in the mountains, getting away from the city. Kind of like, what's the festival down in, is it Coachella? Down by Palm Springs, Fireman or whatever it is. Oh yeah, I guess Iron Man or something. Iron Man, yeah. I don't know, yeah. So all these wealthy people and people go out there and then they take drugs or they just relax or they have sex. I don't know what goes on. And it's a release of tension through music and alcohol and drugs. It's a bacchanalia. A bacchanalia. And the same thing in Rome where he's known as I said in Bacchus. And then he's kind of contrasted with Athena and Apollo that are part of the rational side. It's what Nietzsche said is the way to contrast rational, the need for rational and irrational. E.R. Dodds wrote a great book years ago called The Greeks and the Irrational that they had understood there were elements of the human experience that were prone to irrational behavior, but it would be better if they were controlled. So this is the time we do it. This is where we do it. This is how we do it. Go up, get drunk, run around, but there'll be limits on it. It's a very, it's a tragedy because you know, Penteous is so, he's supposed to be the uptight paranoid that they're all up having sex and then he tries to insult Dionysus and then he appears to his mother as if he's a cow and she cuts his head off in a frenzy. And then that famous line where Cadence says to Dionysus, God's are supposed to be better than men. You're like shame on you. You're not supposed to be like us. And so he's an Eastern God supposedly who sweeps in with a new product for Greece, wine and alcohol and says to the Greeks, you're uptight and you can have, you have to worship me. If you worship me and you give me honor, I will bring pain relief and joy to your world through wine. So he's often, when you see statuary has vine leaves and clusters of grapes and because the Greeks were so paranoid about female sexuality, he's sexually ambiguous. And the Bacchai, they're almost talking about his little curled hair like he's gay or something in some moments. But he's, sometimes he looks effeminate, but he is worshiped by women who are usually confined to the house, married, children stayed, but they're given an opportunity at certain festive periods in that calendar year to worship him and to let their hair down and sing and yell and dance and act. Out of the ordinary, but apparently not to be completely sexually promiscuous as is alleged in the Bacchai. Dianysus says that's not what we do, but apparently in Rome, especially they did that. So who knows. But he's the son of Zeus. At any time you see the word D-I-O-S, it's the genitive in Greek of the word Zeus. So Nisaus, he was from the island, the mountain of Nisa. I don't know where that is actually. I don't know if they were found. It must be in Thrace. So there is also a word Nuaus in Greek for offspring. It's either the offspring of Zeus or from the mountain of Zeus. But he's sometimes the daughter, a son of Persephone and Zeus, sometimes just Zeus who stitched him in his leg, kind of like the head of Zeus with Athena jumping out. But he has a conduit, he's a powerful God because he's the son of Zeus, like so many gods. You know, you mentioned that he's got medicinal purposes. And I know that we don't have planned for this the God Asclepius, which if you go to a lot of those saints, I'm sorry. So yeah, could you say a little bit about Asclepius since he just for the people, he's the God that... He's the steward, sometimes he's the son of Apollo, but he's the thonic God. So that symbol of American medical situation with his staff, with his snake. Snakes come out of the ground. He has a temple at Epidaurus, for example, the Asclepian. And there's one, I think, big one at Samos. Yeah, so the idea is that there's certain supernatural powers that come out of the ground. So you go into the temple of Asclepius and you, whatever your problem is. So I've had lung cancer, so I get a little plastic piece of my lung, clay, and I hang up the little thing on a wall. And then I go to a little merchant and say, I have lung problems. Can you give me a lung? And then you hang it up and you sacrifice. And maybe I buy a little lamb, cut its throat, pour the blood in the ground for Asclepius, maybe eat all the good stuff and give the bones to Asclepius and burn it. And then I go into the temple and I'm in a kind of a hospital with other people. And then apparently the Asclepius comes up from the ground. So they may have some tricks and things where snakes come out of the foundation because there's little vents that come out and then vapors come up and they burn certain types of incense or mushrooms. So they'll theorize what was the narcotic they use. And then people go into a trance, sometimes it's alcohol-aided, and then they pray to the priest of Asclepius for cure. I was at Pergamum and down below that site there is a medicinal site that had, and they had, I believe, hot baths as well in there. And they do. And remember, this is separate from the Greek rational tradition. This is the folk medicine. At the same time this is going on, there's the Hippocratic corpus of all these medical students where you can go today and look at it still. And then the Roman version, Galen, and you'd look at it and it says, if you have a sore throat in five days, if you see white pustula, this is this and you're going to die. And it's very up to date. They knew things like rabies and everything, but this was separate from the common folk. This is a religious. This is sort of, oh, when my son was on the baseball team, a couple of guys had sore arms. And I think I took him to an orthopedic surgeon, but one of the parents said, take him to a brujá. And I said, a brujá, it's Spanish for witch, but not really witch, healer. And they said, yeah, if you go to this town, I won't mention the name of it, she can recite incantations and burn incense and then put on miraculous gels and solves and give a prayer. And so that's that Dionysus aspect. Going to an orthopedic surgeon is what people in the fifth century often did, the educated people, perhaps. And so these hospitals had both elements to it that were by these. And they mixed. So finally, if you were at an exclipion, when you prayed for deliverance, say, from tuberculosis, there would be a person maybe who was actually rational come out as a priest of a sklipi, a skip prayer, but then he would treat you with things that might work. All right, Victor, so let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk a little bit about California nonsense. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed. But some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive. As long as we keep first things first, we've only just begun. America, the beautiful. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So Victor, the governor knew some strikes again, apparently, and he and I know again and again, and I know that you wrote an article on it. But the latest thing is he's giving tablets or replacing the tablets that prisoners already have in California. And they're using them for things like porn. And I was wondering that. And then in your article where you talked about Newsom, you said that he's been in there for 32 years. That is incriminating and been in the California government for 32 years. Yeah, supervisor, mayor, lieutenant governor, governor. But think about it. $240 billion price tag for high speed rail, 20 billion already wasted. 90% of our snow melt let out to the ocean. Two big refines in these leave California, 300,000 people leaving a year. 21% of people living below the poverty line. 40% of the people on Medi-Cal, 50% of the. Burst on Medi-Cal 25% are not paying their power bill. Highest gas prices and taxes, highest electricity, but fifth highest sales tax when you add all local and regional add ons and highest income tax. And yet the biggest deficit. And with all that he's saying to himself, I've got to find a solution for California. Now a couple of years ago, I thought 500 million for illegal alien healthcare would solve all these problems. But I got a better idea. I think all of our inmates, especially those on death row, need iPads. I can get them for eight or 900 bucks each and then they can just look at pornography all day. That would be a good thing to do. That would save California. That's how he thinks. That's so crazy. California is one of these places where you came in 1965 or 70 and you saw all these state of the art freeways and this California water project and Central Valley project just established. He's brilliantly engineered aqueducts, 40 reservoirs. You went into San Francisco was immaculate. You went to Los Angeles. Hollywood was booming 90% of the world's all these sports, great sports arenas. People were well dressed, polite. And then you said, how would I ruin this? How could I destroy it? So it would just be chaos. I think I would elect somebody for in various capacities for 32 years and I would raise taxes and then take the money and gauge in the biggest wealth her scandals in history and I call it spread the wealth. And then I get a bunch of homeless. I shut down all the mental hospitals and put them all in the street. Then I wouldn't enforce any hygiene or laws about fornicating or injecting or defecating on the street. Then I think I would hire everybody by their race or gender and not merit. I make sure that all the government offices were unionized and DMV and everybody so that the unions had power hospitals. I think I would just say we don't need any more freeways. So I'm going to double the population from 17 to 40 and we're still going to use the old two lanes in each direction I five for most of the state. Maybe 99 should have to lob just two lanes in one direction. You also said in that article that 99 is the deadliest freeway in America. It is for a mile. It is. It is for the for the not a mile. Especially in that corridor between Tulare and Delano. That is really scary. When you add 20 ton trucks being driven with people who did not pass a driver's license in English. It's even scarier. Well let's turn then since we're in California to the governor race and the L.A. mayor race and get your reflections in California on the governor's race. An Emerson College poll shows that Xavier Becerra is ahead for the Democrats now at 19 percent. So he's it's since Swalwell has gone out. And then I was just wondering your thoughts on it seems like Spencer Pratt is really giving Karen Bass a run for her money. She won't even participate in the next debate. I hate to say it but I like both Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton. But whoever is polling the highest and I think that Steve Hilton the other should drop out and consolidate that boat because if they don't. Somebody like Tom Steyer or somebody's going to sneak in there and they're going to not either Republicans going to win. But Sarah is a joke. I mean he gave an interview the other day and he basically told the interviewer you can't ask mean questions. It was pathetic. He was a disaster. I think he was HHS secretary. It was a complete disaster. And he would be worse than no he wouldn't be a nurse and worse than he would be as bad as Newsom. Hilton would be good. I mean he's everything you said is exactly what you need to do. The only problem he would have is he has super majorities in the legislature and he's got a bunch of left wing judges that everything he would do they would declare unconstitutional. But it would be a start. As far as the mayor Karen Bass can't debate so she's not going to debate. And she basically said to Spencer Pratt I have all the SEI unions and I have all the teachers union money and I have all the Hollywood movie money and they don't care what LA is like. They just want to get a big salary that's guaranteed income and the Hollywood people are wealthy anyway. So they don't care. They like to hear good things that I'm helping the homeless and I'm helping this group and that so that's her whole I'm just going to see it. We don't want to be until Election Day. And he's got a difficulty because he's trying to say he has to be careful of what he says. So he looks at the Palisades and he can't quite figure out he can figure out he's a very bright guy that they burned it down. I mean they let it burn and they knew it was going to burn because they had these high Santa Ana January dry wings and they had a nut nuts that were trying to imitate Luigi Mangione. And the creed of LA and California is if somebody's wealthy let's just kill them or destroy them. And these are the most beautiful homes in the state and it was dry. So if you really wanted to burn down the Palisades you would say the following. I'm going to make it illegal to clean your brush next to your house. When the winds get really, really high and it's been not yet very much water. I want to make sure the mayor goes to Uganda for a wedding and she's not around. Now the vice mayor I want him to phone in a bomb threat so he's not around. Of course he did and they only gave him they gave him no jail time at all. He was DEI, black guy. And then I want the water and power director. I think her name was Keones who came from PG&E who now is trying to help the grid in Puerto Rico. Pay her $700,000 and just say we hired the first Latina CEO of our water and power. And we're not going to check to see if the reservoirs are empty or the hydrants don't work. And then I will hire the fire chief and I want to make sure that she's DEI. So she's going to be LGBTQ plus and she's going to cut videos with everybody about its LGBTQ quest. And she's not going to worry that there's not all the hydrants working or that Karen Bass cut the fire budget. And so when the fire hits, I'm going to have people that are running the fire department, that are running the water supply, that are running the municipal government and the mayor either not be there in residence at the fire hazard peak of the season or they were hired for reasons other than what they're supposed to be doing. And that's what she did. That's what happened. And they voted for that. People forget that DEI is one of the most pernicious tribal pre-civilizational protocols there is. You're hiring people on their superficial appearance or their gender or their sexual orientation. And you're hiring them over people that often are according to their own standards of testing or education or whatever the criteria are better qualified. And you're doing that for some utopian idea of fairness that's not really going to apply to you. And once you do that and give somebody that exemption, that's not the beginning. That's the beginning. It's not the end because then you're telling them you were hired for your race or your nationality or your gender or your sexual orientation. And because you were given that job over someone who was better qualified, we're going to continue to protect you against people who are better qualified. So if you don't have water in the reservoir or the hydrants don't work or the brush is being burned down because of you, anybody who says that's a bigot, sorry. Although they did finally, they started ending up fighting among themselves. So Karen Bass thought she could save her candidacy by firing the fire chief who was better than Karen Bass, but terrible. And then they thought they could save the water and power by farming her off to Puerto Rico, I guess. Maybe she can do for Puerto Rico what she did for LA. I guess. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show and we have some comments from your viewers of Jack and your podcast. And here's what they say. Short ones are CUNY BROTTEN 9318 says, Absolutely love both of you finishing the session honoring your mothers so beautifully and respectfully. Blessings to Jack and Victor. And Grand3241 says, I was a Democrat for 40 years. I'm sorry to admit. And the biggest difference between them and Republicans. Republicans have no problem challenging ideas and leaders if we don't agree with them. That is healthy for a republic. And then finally, Lynette Polka 2775. And this is a little longer. She says, Victor, your Pierce Morgan experience reminds me of the great Douglas Murray being ambushed by Joe Rogan. When Douglas was surprised to find he shared the show with Dave Smith. It doesn't matter how correct you are, how wise or well spoken. When your opposition won't think or listen, there's not much you can do. So much love and gratitude for your dedication to the truth and for sharing it with us. It's so true when somebody is debating you and he says bombing where we've done all this illegal bombing. And you know, one third of the German people were resisting Hitler till we bombed them. I thought, wow, this guy is really ignorant. We bombed in April of 1942. We started and the only reason people ever resisted Hitler was because he was losing and they didn't even do it actively. There was no, you know, 100,000 troops in France stopped the whole French resistance. So there was never any widespread. The only resistance was Operation Valkyrie and a few officers, maybe four or 5,000 sympathizers in a nation of 80 million. So that was the most ignorant thing I'd ever heard that the resistance was crushed in Germany because we started bombing and everybody became empathetic. I don't know, but that was what the whole interview was like. So anyway, oh, but be sure to take a look at the counter revolution, the fall and rise of Donald Trump. Donald Trump, Victor Sinclair will be out in September, I believe. September 8th and you can buy it now. I want to apologize today. I had a tooth implant yesterday and you put a when you extract the tooth, you put the bovine or other types of graphs. And then you're supposed to do it in three or four months where it's still flexible, but I was operated on. I couldn't do anything for three months. So it was six and a half months and it was hard as a rock. So the, the dentist was quite skilled, but he had to kind of jackhammer a hole in. So the reason I'm kind of sore today with my jaw. And then just one more thing though, in addition to your new book on Trump, you talked a lot about Thucydides and I know you've, you know, obviously you're researching, right? Do you have any place where you have done a series of lectures that would help people who would want to read the book, the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, because it reads like a chronicle. So it's very hard to. If you buy the, it's called the landmark Thucydides and it's the best selling translation of Thucydides. Thucydides, I wrote the introduction to it and I explained about how he wrote it, why he wrote it, what are the problems and understanding it, how it compares to eroticists. So I wrote the introduction 25 years ago. And that helps with the reading of it. And I helped the editor find the free press and my agent helped. So I was instrumental and I also wrote one of the end notes. Kind of an appendices about certain aspects of military affairs, political. I wrote one of those. I'm surprised Hillstale has a book called Award Like No Other, a book on the Peloponnesian War in which I talk briefly about Thucydides. If you're really interested in something that's really boring, if you go to classical antiquity about 35 years ago, I wrote an article on how Thucydides uses numbers in the Greek and that was a best selling article. No, actually I think two people read it. Yes, but also just so your audience knows, Thucydides Peloponnesian War has been a long time curiosity of this big war between Athens and Sparta. Even Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century translated it. So it's been something that military historians in particular have been curious about. Because it's not just a history, it's a philosophy. He doesn't just say this Spartans invaded in 431. He says why they invaded and how they invaded and whether it was smart or stupid. So he has a Melian dialogue where he talks about whether right makes, right makes, might makes right. Or the Corsairan stasis where people go into collective hysteria and kill people and destroy institutions. Things like that or the Sicilian expedition, a misadventure that destroys Athens' ability to win the war probably. Alright, well thanks everybody for joining us on this weekend and thank you Victor for all the wisdom. This is Sammy Winkin, Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at VictorHansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.