Victor Davis Hanson: Trump Managed to Expose the Left’s Neo-Confederate Policies

Somehow we have now six over 600 entities, counties, cities, entire states. If you're in California and I've had this happen four or five times, we're an illegal alien on a Sunday afternoon or Saturday night when airborne drunk and plowed in and took out ten almond trees or twenty vines and the car was littered with drugs and alcohol bottles and the driver took off. I call the police. When they took him in and bailed him out, I said, "Are you going to deport him?" And he said, "No, we're not going to deport him. We've had this now for, I guess, fifteen years. We're not going to deport him. We don't recognize federal immigration law here." Well, hello ladies and hello, a gentleman and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen. In his own words on the daily signal network, Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, and he's a senior contributor at the aforementioned daily signal whose hacked Victor is wearing. Victor also has another show there, which is called Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. We are recording a special Victor's on vacation episode of this podcast and the good people, many good people from the Victor Davis Hansen fan club at Facebook submitted questions. Thank you very much for doing that. I'm going to ask a few of these to Victor. We are recording. Well, it doesn't matter when we're recording, but this episode will be up on Thursday, August 27th, 2026. Victor's website is the blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com, the address. Do subscribe. It's only 65 bucks for the year, and when you do that, twice a week, you'll be able to read Victor's exclusive articles and what he does a weekly free, excuse me, exclusive video. I see some things going on as per, yeah, folks, we love what we love about this podcast. Amongst the many things is the kind of garage band aspect. He's a garage band aspect. Yeah. Yeah. It's very cool. We don't have a high big budget. How's that? We don't. We don't. But it's still, beloved. Alright, Victor, I'm going to start off this show by talking, asking you a simple question about sanctuary cities, and I'm going to do that when we return from these initial important messages. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. I have a new book out on September 8th of this year, and I think you're going to enjoy it's called Counter Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump, and the Maga Movement. It starts right after January 6th, and it details the lack of popularity of Donald Trump, the invective that he endured, the five civil and criminal trials, the effort to get him off the ballot, the raid on Marlago, the two impeachments earlier, one in which he was tried as a private citizen, and yet he came back. How did he come back? And why did he come back? I explained in the book how he defeated his primary opponents, how he was outspent. He had a hostile media, and he defeated the Democratic Machine and Camilla Harris. It starts on January 6th. It ends pretty much now in May of 2026. What's the title about? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary, he's not a revisionist, he's a counter-revolutionary. This time around, he is not addressing just the symptoms of the progressive project of the last 50 years. He's talking about the causes, not just an open border, but how to stop illegal immigration entirely, not just crime, but sending the National Garden to make sure cities are safe, not just an Iranian nuclear threat, but ending that threat that seven other presidents had identified but did not act on. And just addressing the transgender issue are the green new deal and all of those issues that are so dear to the Democratic Party, but ending them, defunding NPR and PBS. So it is a counter-revolution to unwind and to roll back the entire progressive project of the last 50 years. I think you're going to like it. It's pretty interesting. You're back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own word. So Victor, I asked two questions from Barry MacDonald in the last episode. We're doing two vacation episodes you and I are, I know you're doing two with The Great Sammy Wink and he asked simply about sanctuary cities. Victor, tell us, what are, what are their dangers, their legal loopholes? I don't know if you need to get into that. How did they come to be? Victor, you've talked about sanctuary cities before, they're not just a simple happenstance in America. I think they're dangerous things. But what do you think, my friend? Well, they're unconstitutional. That's for sure because, and I will just preface my answer with if Donald Trump, the Maga Movement, conservatives, Republicans adopted the idea of sanctuary cities, a neo-Confederate states rights idea right out of the mouth of John C. Calhoun. They would do something like this. They would say the state of Utah or a city of Casper, Wyoming or Mobile, Alabama, we declare that we don't honor the Federal Endangered Species Act. We just don't honor it. So if we have a developer and he's carving out a golf course and there is a three-year toad that's an endangered, he's just going to smash him because we don't honor a Federal Wall here. We're not going to cooperate with the EPA or if somebody in a county, I'm not picking on states, I'm just doing it randomly of conservative, but let's say a county on Arkansas said, "You know what? I can read the second amendment," says I have a right to bear on. When I find an art county, we've decided that it is unconstitutional to make you register a handgun with the federal government. So we are a sanctuary city and no one in this county in Arkansas is going to register any federal guns and we're not going to cooperate at all with the ATF if they come in. Alcohol, tobacco, fire, if they try to come in here, we're going to protest, we're going to combine, we're going to do everything we can. Well, you can imagine what would happen. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton would say you're an insurrectionist and they would call out federal troops because in the Constitution it's clear that in matters of federal law, they Trump state law and that is a federal matter immigration. Somehow, we have now over 600 entities, counties, cities, entire states like California is this and that means that when law enforcement arrest, if you're in California and I've had this happen four or five times where in the last 40 years we're an illegal alien on a Sunday afternoon or Saturday night when airborne drunk and plowed in and took out 10 almond trees or 20 vines and we heard a big crash and we went out there and the car was littered with drugs and alcohol bottles and the driver took off or sometimes on two occasions he was there. I call the police and first of all, I couldn't possess the car. They wouldn't let me tow it away or keep it as to pay for the thousands of dollars of damage. But they didn't, when they took him in and bailed him out, I said, are you going to deport him if he said, no, we're not going to deport him. We can't, I mean, we've had this now for, I guess, 15 years, we're not going to deport him. We don't recognize federal immigration law here in California and then you say, well, because federal, maybe you shouldn't go to your simmity, maybe the federal government should say we own your simmity and we don't want you to go into our national park until you honor our national law. You're an American first in a Californian second. But they get away with it. They get lower court judges to rewrite the law and Donald Trump is the first president and people should remember that who are so critical of him. He's the first person to challenge it. He said, he has tried to cut off transportation funds to these, and some federal funds to these cities and entities and counties and states that break federal law. And of course, the lower courts have opposed him. They've just, it's a neal confederate. I thought we settled the issue Jack with Fort Sumner, which was a federal fort. Lincoln fortified it and South Carolina just fired on it and they said oh it's in our proximity and Lincoln said no no no no it's a federal fort it's a federal land and by the way post offices and armories in your Confederacy don't belong to you they're federal property and that was really the pretext of the whole civil war the issues were slavery of course and states rights but the the trigger was they were not going to let federal troops occupy federal property which was illegal so all of a sudden I guess the left is turned into right wing states right people and it won't stop until the federal government gets a simple it goes to the supreme court and says you have a right to deny federal funds to country to entities that break federal law and believe me they don't allow any state any red state purple state county to defy federal law you know what I mean yeah I can't do it one struck by that victor the cut the accessibility to federal funds and from our youth mine anyway at 50 implementation of the 55 mile an hour was somehow tied to if you didn't do it you weren't getting federal funds exactly I remember that a lot I think it was Montana or Ohio I mean Wyoming or Montana that said we're not going to do it yeah and they said if you don't do it you're not going to get federal funds I don't know why we can't do that again but what it means is you you arrest somebody for drunk driving or for murder or for assault and if he post bond or there is no cash bail and you let them out we used to say that you you check their immigration status and you called ice and then ice showed up and they got him and they looked at him and they deported him if if it was a crime that was you know a minor felony or a misdemeer they deported him immediately but now as we saw with that judge if ice shows up at a hearing on immigration status of a felon or even not on immigration set just a felony and they know that a little alien the judge as we saw in that one case she helped him escape from ice the Wisconsin judge yes yes they've got to wrap on the hands yeah they didn't really do much to and they don't they so law enforcement is ordered by these sanctuary mayors and governors and supervisors not to cooperate it's against a lot mandami will fire you if you are a policeman and you rest at legal alien and when he gets out of jail you call ice yeah we talked on a recent episode about these 21 blue states in the district of Columbia suing the federal government over you talk about illegal licenses you just struck me while you were talking is it's a crime I guess to have to be here illegally and to and to be have a CDL license but what about the people who are handing out the CDL licenses who are government workers there is a felony going on there there is you remember it was was it a cat a candidate for governor in Maryland or somewhere that had an illegal alien living in their loft in their barn or garage and people and they cited a statute that said harb knowingly harboring an illegal alien and abetting him was a crime it is but no one the the left just says there's your law and then there's our sense of more our law and we're we're better we're smarter than you are we're more morally superior so we we like the law when it's convenient and we can be it can be used to advance our agenda or to hurt your agenda but otherwise we don't really follow it we don't really care if we if we don't have the court we want to pack it if we won the popular vote but want lost the electoral college we want to get rid of the electoral college if we don't we can't win enough senators we want to bring in two states and get four senators if we're in the minority within the filibuster is great when we're in the majority it's a racist holdover they're like adolescents they really are you know anybody it's raised teenagers knows that they always look at the entire world through their self interest for a year or two until they grow up but they never grew up they're arrested development. Victor you're talking about those cars flying into your almond trees what's I'm just curious what's happening right now in on the Victor Victor Hansen's farm I've all the almonds been collected is no there there is the way almond farming works is there seven or eight varieties there's independence it's very early and then there's old old varieties Carmel, Naples, Ultra etc and they all ripen at different times my particular orchard forty acres is independence which is self fertile so there's no pollinizer but most of them have two run two rows of one variety and two rows of another and then they cross pollinate it bloom but the point I'm making is what mine have been shaken on the ground swept up and hauled away within two days and we had we couldn't even see and but we're not over with it because we're in what's happened in the last thirty years what was a great growing raisin producing monocroped area has now completely flipped with the collapse of the raisin industry and the mechanization of almonds where you don't need any labor it's all mechanized so everybody pulled out their vineyards and including myself planted almonds and now you go from variety to variety to varieties so essentially from about July 25th to the mid-September or we're going to it's going to be just you because you don't irrigate because you don't want the almonds to fall on the ground obviously and get wet and mildew so you deliberately have drip only on the berms and you cut back on the water and you stress the trees so it helps the the almonds fall off you shake them you get all that pollen all that dust from the whole summer on the from the leaves it just makes it looks like a nuclear winner and then when it falls another machine comes in and with big fans and brushes and pushes all the almonds into the middle and then another machine comes up in the middle like a scooper and throws them up in the air and and blows out the dirt and then it goes into a bin or carrier to a bin and the result is that the I never really it never really bothered me but when you have 40% of your lung capacity removed and you've had lung cancer and you're still healing there it's amazing I go out like I went out today and I thought well it looks like I don't have to wear a mask but within 15 minutes I could hardly breathe it was like I had asthma or something yeah and so it's it's hard to breathe and and unfortunately you know we have pets and we don't have relatives close by so it's hard to get somebody to watch the house and the grounds or I could go up in the Sierra when I go up to the Sierra I thought it would be bad because it's 7200 feet where we go but the air is so clean it outweighed the you know the lack of oxygen in this yeah so it's bad it's it's bad well I have another question from Barry McDonnell about Charlie Kirk but first to our viewers and our listeners if you've studied enough history you start to see a pattern nations don't lose their way overnight they drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundation you thought was permanent was never permanent at all today America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime we've normalized deficits that would have stunderlier generations and policy makers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention more printing more distortion but here's the historical truth every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price the wise though they never waited for collapse they prepared for the correction and that's why so many thoughtful Americans especially those nearing or in retirement are reallocating part of their wealth into something that has outlasted every paper experiment in human history physical gold not a speculation but as insulation now our reputation matters here at Victor Davis Hanson in his own words which is why we're partnering with a legion school the company distinguished by integrity reliability and innate plus rating from the better business bureau for years that guided Americans through transparent education and longstanding relation ships built on trust. And right now, they're extending a special Liberty offer to our listeners and viewers to help you get started with real gold, whether your funds are in a retirement account or sitting in the bank if you believe us we do, that the best time to reinforce your position is before the storm comes, becomes obvious, call 844-790-9191-844-790-9191 or visit, protect with Victor.com. That's 844-790-9191-844-790-9191 or visit, protectwithvictor.com. History rewards those who take the long view and we thank the good people from Allegiance Gold for once again sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor, here's what Barry McDonald writes about Charlie Kirk Void. It's might it's will bias being in Charlie's generation, but I'd love VDH's perspective on his legacy. And the unfortunate vacuum it's created for people like Tucker and Nick Fuentes. Charlie Kirk was a fan of yours, by the way. Yeah, and I talked to him 10 days before he was killed. But I went out on two occasions, I think, to speak to his group in Phoenix. He had two things that were unique about him. Number one is he did not go to college. So he was written off by the left as uneducated, but he was a absolute, highly disciplined auto guy, teaching himself and he did it through online courses. He would write me an email now and then said, which is this Hillsdale professor good or should I take this class from Prager? He watched all the Prager all and he was very well educated as a result of that. And people underestimate him. If you think that I exaggerate, go on to YouTube or TikTok or X and look at some of these debates he did at Oxford or Ivy League schools against very skilled people. I mean, he debated Hassan Parker and defeated him. I thought he went to Oxford and did beautifully the Oxford debate society. So he was a natural talent. He didn't go to school and that meant that he wasn't burdened with a lot of the baggage of academia, both good and bad. So that was a liberating experience. The second thing he had, he had a unique idea, it seems simplistic and obvious to everybody, but no one quite developed it or exploited or tapped it the way he did. And it was something like this, young people between the ages of 18 and 25 are the future of any movement and you have to replace the old guard with a new guard. So you have to focus on that group, if you're young, as he was at the time. And all youth are rebellious. That's their nature as a transition from adolescence to adulthood. And they resist the authority, and I, you know, when I saw protest as a college student, most of it was just mindless, just, you know, you're not going to tell us what to do. So I'm going to shock you with my nose ring or my personal habits, etc. But he knew that. And what he did was he told millions of American youth, hey, the authorities, the establishment is the left. It's not the right. They run entertainment. They run sports. They run the corporate boardroom. They run the media. They run K through 12. They run academia for sure. They run foundations. They have all the bureaucratic and institutional power. So go to it. Develop your skepticism and your rebelliousness. But let me help you direct it about who is oppressing you. It's not some state legislator from Arkansas or Oklahoma or a red state. Democrats, people in Washington and New York, the part of the bicostal elite who have nothing but contempt for you and you have a righteous urge to rebel against it. And so he started all of those chapters, all over the United States of young people that he encouraged to be outspoken and rebellious, but he channeled it from a conservative perspective. And that was one reason that the left hated him. They hated him because he was successful. And I mean successful in going into purple states in 2024 and registering voters in Pennsylvania especially in Michigan and may have helped swing those votes. And two, they hated him because they did tested. They hated the idea of being tagged as the Fuddy-Duddy old establishment. They always thought they were reliving their Vietnam. The baby generation could be 80 and decrepit with a cane. And they viewed themselves as, you know, not wearing a bra and smoking dope at Woodstock. But he said, no, no, no, these people are materialists. They're about as establishment as you can get. And they deserve a counter-revolution against them. He was a counter-revolutionary like Trump, he really was. Yeah. And a lot of people who would come out of academia didn't, they thought he was an auto-diedact and the negatives. I liked him. I liked him a lot. I thought he was very, he's something, he reminded me of Rush Limbaugh who also didn't really go to college much. And he had had some setbacks like Charlie and Rush was, Rush was 10 times as Charlie was. I would say, if I go and meet 10 academics a day, seven of them don't have the natural intelligence, much less the rhetorical skills or the common sense of a Rush Limbaugh or Charlie crew, just the way it is. Plus, you know, I knew Charlie a little, I knew Rush a little more and I know you talked with him, text him all the time, talked to him a lot, but I was with him a few times and he was such a nice guy. I mean, Rush really a nice guy, he was one of the tragedies of the people didn't understand. He wasn't just a nice guy, he was completely devoid of ethnic or racial prejudice. Yeah. I joked when I went into his studio, when I would speak in Palm Beach, I'd go to his kind of camouflage studio. And snurdly and all the people who, and I always a guy would pick me up and I'm a beauty, as I said, a beautiful Mercedes. And it was Rush's Mercedes that he bought the year before. I mean, not a regular Mercedes, I mean, a huge $150,000 Mercedes and then he would give it to one of these guys. And I just, the first time I went in there, I had talked to him on the phone, but I had never really been with him. So I said, Rush, I guess you don't like white people, do you? He's just first all, he said, well Victor, you see any here? I said, no. And then he went through all these great guys and that guy started, you know, doing my landscaping, that guy started looking at my cars and I told him to start a business and I helped him. And then so it was, yeah, I think I've also told the audience that he, he once, I don't know if he was paying a trick on me or what, but he said, one time I was at the breakers giving a talk in Palm Beach and he said, it was going to be a guy out and this guy, I sat out, you know, you sit outside the door, waiting for Uber, that kind of place in front of a hotel. And this guy drives up in this enormous black Mercedes, I thought he was, I really did think he was in a cartel. He was a Hispanic guy, Cuban, and he had all black on and he had a few men to mouth stash and he had a ponytail back down his hair. And he looked like machete, you know, that great actor that played, you know, he, he, I really like him. He's still alive, by the way. And in any case, he started staring at me like he was, you know, staring me down, but it was all kind of a put on it and he said, you get in, I said, why should I get in? Because because I'm here from Rush Limbaugh. So he, I liked him a lot. We text a lot, kind of, you know, weird things happen in the world. We can't explain until the next world, I suppose, but he said to me, one of the last things he did when he texted or called me said, I hope you never had get lung cancer. I just hope you never get it because, and he had a type of lung cancer that was pressing on a major artery, so he couldn't be removed. But he took, he went through hell with immunotherapy as his lovely wife can attest. Yeah. Well, he certainly outlasted the initial protections. I just have to tell you what, the quickly we, Rich Lowry and I and, and Jade Nordlinger, this was a long time ago. We went to visit him at that same office and when it was over, it was just a lovely time and he said to Rich, Rich had an eye paddy. So let me see that. Now, this is very heavy. right back and he came back. All three of us gave us an iPad each one. Every time I went there, I went there once and it was one of those Florida downpours and marks. It must have rained five inches and I had to get back because I was supposed to go to part of my job was to give a lecture and then I got two hours off and go to a dinner. So I said, I got to call Uber and it was pouring rain. He said, why would you do that? And I said, I got to get back to the hotel rush and your guy went home at five. He said, he went home at five because I'm taking you back. So we got, he opened it and we both, he got completely drenched and drove me all the way back to the hotel. And then every time I went there, he opened up this closet and here were iPads and iPhones. And he had a smaller one of computers and he said, now what do you want? And I would say, I don't need any, no, no, you're taking, I'll give you this and these were beautiful iPhones. And then he said to me, you have children, I remember that. You have a son. I said, yes, my, my daughter is married, oh, take this for your son. He did that all the time. He was very generous. I still, I still use mine. It's I cherish it. It's very, you know, I have a theory that part of our problem right now when people say we're not articulating the accomplishments of the of the Trump presidency and we're not, we're just saying, we're just harping on socialism without giving an alternative view or we're not harping on socialism in a way that's more effective is the loss of these irreplaceable people. If you had Rush Limbaugh, I'm not making, I'm not detracting from his replacements. My wife listens to Clay Travis all the time in those guys. But my point is, if you had Rush back in the saddle right now and you had Charlie Kirk and I'll even go so far as I was watching a TikTok the other day of Tucker four years ago. He gave one of the most brilliant exegesis and explanations of the dangers of Sharia law, radical Islam and honest simulated Islamic communities in the United States. Could you believe that? He did. It was 2026. I can't, but yes. No, I couldn't. I thought it was AI. But my point is there was a time when Tucker was in that category. He did. And so the loss of him for, you know, he's an apostate now, but it's, you can't really replace, we've never replaced Charlie Kirk. We won't replace Rush Limbaugh. I don't know. And then you add Dennis Pregger who had that horrific accident. And he was a big, he was a larger the nature for, bigger than nature for us with his radio and is running that enormous program. It's just that you lost a lot of key voices on the conservative side. Well, Victor, we're going to ask a few more questions from our listeners. But first to our listeners and our viewers, we tend to forget that civilizations are remembered less by their politics than by what they made. The tools, the objects, the things built well enough to outlast the people who built them. Most of the last century Americans made things and America made things. Then like much of the old productive economy watchmaking packed up and moved overseas. Today's sponsor is trying to bring it back a piece of it back anyway. That's a var V A E R var is a Los Angeles watch company whose goal is pretty straightforward. Bring American watchmaking back. They now assemble watches in California as well as Arizona, Rhode Island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. And these aren't fashion accessories. I got a whole mine up here. These are proper tools, sapphire crystals, premium materials and full waterproof warranties, meaning you can actually swim or dive with them on. Now VDH has Var's C5 Korean Field Solar and I have a C5 Tactical Field Solar. They're both great. Var has already earned over 10,000 five star reviews and has become one of the largest independent watch assemblers in the United States. If you value things that a rugged made to last and built here at home, take a look. Go to varwatches.com/vdh. That's var V A E R watches.com/vdh. We thank the good people from var for sponsoring Mr. Davis Hanson in his own words. I also want to thank Victor, by the way. I told these people, I give them some callouts. Our great friend, Shraga Kawiar, who sends you shirts and other things. He's such an a long time supply. It's in dry cleaning right now. I wore it too often. That's Shraga, thank you. Then Abbey Abigail Murphy and her dad, Reverend Murphy from New York City, who are big fans of the show too, so I want to give them thank you. Give a little love. Another fan of the show is Jonathan Moore. He's always on ex promoting you, Victor. He's sending a question. This has to do with Iran and Iranian history. It's an honor to get to message you. I would love a discussion about the foundation of the current Iranian regime. Beginning with the 1953 coup against Masada. However, you tell me how to pronounce that, Victor. Mosadek. Mosadek. And a little background. Mohamed Mosadek, I think. And a little background as to who he was, along with who Khmerni was, and his actions before the Islamic Revolution, up to the Iran Iraq war. Considering that we'd probably be hearing about Iran a lot more in our future, any information Victor VDH could provide on the regime would be greatly appreciated. Well, I haven't prepared, but I can tell you, here's the official narrative from the left, and from the Iranians, and from the academics. And it goes like this. British petroleum, the Iranian oil company, and it's its earlier iteration, depended on Iranian oil for much of its oil, the British empire after World War II. And they had a sweetheart deal. So far, I'm telling you, everything is uncontested. But the sweetheart deal was because Iran was sitting on a huge deposit of oil and had no ability to extract it. So British, what became British petroleum came in and created all of car, all of the infrastructure you see today. And they had a revenue sharing that would first pay back all of their investment, hundreds of millions of dollars. But they were taking oil out of Iran, and the Iranians were saying, "What do we get out of it?" And the government, and this was the Shah's father, and they did have a parliament, were saying, "Well, we have to pay this back." And then most of deck was a popular legislator. He was from a very, very aristocratic, wealthy family. And his family knew the publics. He was very well established. And he wasn't a communist, but he had close affinities with a two-debt party, the communist party. And this was right in the heart, right at the height of the Cold War. And the Soviet Union was paying the Iranian communist party and its affiliates to overthrow it. So British petroleum wanted, they were in the midst of renegotiating, and most of deck and the parliament passed legislation, and I'm doing this by memory, which emasculated this Shah, and they brought through legislation to confiscate our nationalized British petroleum, which they did, without fully paying all the investment back. And then they said, "Well, negotiate a deal if you want, otherwise it's ours." So British petroleum called in M6, or whatever the appropriate intelligence agency and a Briton, and they didn't have the resources. So they called the United States, and John Foster Dulles, and this narrative called his, he was Secretary of State under Eisenhower. I didn't like the idea. He wouldn't get involved later with Suez. He did not want to get involved, but Dulles did, and he called up his brother, the head of the CIA, Alan Dulles, and then he called up a CIA guy, Kermit Roosevelt. The grandson, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, and he knew the area pretty well, and he organized a resistance movement to most of deck, to help protect the British investment, and what was the American interest to stop the Tudor Party and most of deck, who was a democratic, we would call on the Democratic Socialist. and they helped stage, they were trying to stage a coup. In the meantime, most of that got elected, and he was made Prime Minister, and then he did some, and he worked with the Shah father. But then he did something, I think it was in '51 or '52 that was quite stupid. He declared martial law and said he was suspending the Constitution. And the powers of the executive, the Shah, and suspending the work of the Parliament and would rule arbitrarily, I think, for a year or six months. And that gave Roosevelt, ammunition, and said that he was a dictator. So the Western world said, "We have a elected representative who's served as in cabinets, almost a deck, and now he is under the influence of the Communist." There wasn't really even a proof that he was a Communist, although he was a leftist. And now he has taken control, and he has confiscated completely British petroleum. And he's confiscating the aristocratic land, I think 20% of it. He's redistributing, and he's doing it all by faith, and he's also a secularist. And so, Herman Alexander was able to create a coalition of the aristocracy, the land-owning class, the monarchist that, if that's the proper word, that supported the Shah's father. And get this, the Ayatollas. And the Ayatollas were on the side of British petroleum and CIA. They wanted him out, too, because they felt he was an atheist, agnostic, and had taken over the government and wouldn't give them subsidies as the Shah had done. And so, they didn't kill him. They put him under a house arrest, and they removed him from office, and then they appointed, they didn't trust the elder Shah, they appointed his son, the famous Shah. And he took over, I think, in 1953, and then had a coalition where he gave subsidies to the clerics, and he supported the conservatives that own land and property. And he cut a deal with British petroleum. I think it was for 10 years to pay it back, and then after that it was all going to be renegotiated. By I think 1970, the Iranians were getting most of the profits without, and having paid back the investment of BP. And so that's pretty much what happened. So the final analysis was he an idealist Democrat who, a bunch of shady westerners working with right-wing fascist Iranians overthrew the elected government, not quite, somewhere in between he was a populist legislator who opposed foreign influence and wanted to redistribute wealth in the socialist context. But he made a lot of tactical errors by turning on the clerics, by suspending. I think he had, he was basically a dictator for about six or eight months, nine months. I can't remember exactly how long. And he developed friendly relationships, or working relationships with a communist. At that point they said, you know what, the Soviet unions taken over China, they've taken over Southeast Asia, they've taken over Eastern Europe, they've taken over Cuba, they're working on Cuba. But that was later, but there was a Communist Party working in the early 50s in Cuba and South America, and we're going to stop it. And so that's why they, the Western interest and the irony was that BP really didn't need to do it. They had a lot of, they, they were in with Saudi Arabian and then the Americans were the Ramco and they could have easily just told the Saudis and they did to pump more. They had so much oil at that time. We don't even need the Iranians. But it was kind of like, nobody just takes our property without compensating us because we're the British. And then the Americans, Eisenhower basically said, well, so what? But it was the dullest brothers that partnered and used American resources to, only we had the influence and the money to form a coalition against Mossadak. Okay, well, I have, I have a military policy question and we're going to take a final break and I have a military history question, but I also have to say you mentioned Clay Travis before. Yeah. You know, his partner, Buck Sexton. Yeah, Buck Sexton. I like Buck. I've met him. I've been on his show. Do you know what high school he went to? He went to Regis High School in New York City. I just want to tell you that. Is he another part of, he's a part of the Catholic monarchist conspiracy? Yeah, the anti-Fouchy wing of Regis alumni. Okay, Victor, policy question from John. What do you think about the old college deferral policy used from Korea through Vietnam? Was that fair? You could get a deferment because you were in college versus if you were a plumber, I guess, not now. What was the rationale to justify that? The rationale to, it was a couple of things. I would say I didn't think it was a good idea when I was 16. My father, who was a combat veteran, said to all my two brothers and I, no one is going to evade the draft. The war is winding down. You'll probably be turn 18 and I turned 18 in '71 and there wasn't really a ground campaign, but we got lottery numbers. I think my brother and I were 241 so we registered for the draft and I think that year they only got to 30 and then the next year they abolished the draft and had the volunteer army and then there were no real ground operations by '73 that were that big. I don't think it was a good idea. I know that my parents, and I say that because when you're 18, you don't know what to think. Because everybody was saying everybody in my high school class was trying to get into the classes ahead of me into the National Guard because they thought the California National Guard wouldn't be called up as a unit. But my dad just said, you're not going to get in the National Guard, you're not going to do any of that, you're not going to go to Canada, you guys are just going to wait and they're talking about a lottery and he said something that was really interesting. This family does not volunteer for wars, they get drafted and he says your grandfather was on his farm, he was 26 years old and the draft board came to Nell's Hansen as father and said, you Swedes, we're going to take one of your four boys, the others were too young, you take him and they said, well he's married and he's 27, doesn't matter. And they took him and he was disabled for the rest of his life with lung damage from phosphine and mustard gas and my father was a, he was in college until 44 and then he was notified that he was going to be drafted. So he and his first cousin, whom my grandfather adopted basically as his brother, they volunteered to join the Marine Corps. That's another story how he ended up in B29, but the point I'm making is a lot of people had that attitude that they will serve but they weren't going to volunteer. And so I don't think it was a good idea, I really don't, I think. And you could see that one of the myths, I think his name is, if you read Dan Odendorf, I'm pronouncing it wrong, I'm doing it by memory again, he wrote a book called TET, that reporting on the TET offensive and Lewis Sorley, a better ward about Creighton Abrams. And you start looking at the equipments and guess what, it's pretty much a big lie what we were told by the left that it was a white people's war and black and Hispanic people died. They did die, but they died almost in exact proportions to their representation in the general population. If you look at the 58,000 people who died, it was about 7 or 8% Hispanic, about 9 to 10% black and the rest were white. And the disproportion was, although the first to 10 and up were a lot of the times from suburbs, they weren't wealthy, they were middle class kids from the suburbs, but you start looking at the social economic profile, that was what the travesty, it was so disproportionate to America. These were poor white kids, south of the Mason discs and line from upstate New York, rural Michigan, San Joaquin Valley of California, poor, and they died in numbers that were not proportionate to the college students, so what I'm trying to say, there was a class element of who died and it transcended racial lines. It was Hispanics according to their numbers in the popular blacks according. and whites according to their numbers, but all of them were from the lower middle classes, or poor, not all of them, but the great majority. The officers were not necessarily true. They were more suburbanites, but that's what, and it was very ironic because the wealthy kids in college or the upper middle class that was protesting and damning, I don't mean that in a pro-fane way, but really libeling people going into Vietnam, they were safe, 'cause they had two S deferments, and they were calling monsters the lower classes that didn't have that opportunity to go to college. So, and I saw it at UC Santa Cruz, and it was, so in my high school, I think there were three people ahead of me who got killed in Vietnam that I knew. And one of them was, wow, he was a all-star, straight-a-Eddie Zamora, I can remember that, he was like the hero of the town. He was a fantastic athlete, a fantastic student, and he was killed in Vietnam, and then I knew a couple more as well. - Well, no, that's a good question, and I think that was, that was one of the reasons why they had the volunteer army, because the army came to the conclusion that they wanted people in for more than two years in the draft, so they could train them, and they were becoming more and more mechanized and sophisticated weaponry. They needed people four, five, six years. They didn't want the protest from the campus. They would, Nixon wanted to get rid of that problem, and they knew that it was disproportionate. But if you say that they volunteered, then that, they weren't coerced, and that sort of stopped the anti-war. And you know, it was so funny when that volunteer army passed, just to let, there was never a protest at Santa Cruz or Stanford again that I can remember. - Yeah. - They didn't care about, you know, the pilots, from '73, '74 and '75, it was an air war. We were bombing, but they never were protesting too much. They were against it, but they didn't really go out in the streets because they weren't liable to be called out. All right, in fact, we have one more question that's about military history, and we'll offer you that when we come back from these final important messages. - Every state is home to significant historic sites that tell the American story, but not every site is telling that story honestly and fairly. That's why the Heritage Foundation created the Heritage Guide to Historic Sites. This interactive guide equips American citizens with the tools they need to enjoy the sites that depict some of the greatest moments in our nation's history, analyzing them for historical accuracy, and provides resources for families or educators planning a visit from Mount Vernon to Independence Hall to Gettysburg and more. Americans deserve transparency and sites that steward our history faithfully deserve our gratitude. The Heritage Guide to Historic Sites invites every American to rediscover the places and stories that define our nation, whether it's across the country or in your backyard. Visit historic sites.heritage.org to start your adventure today. - Hey folks, we're back with Dr. Davis Hansen in his own words on the daily signal network. This particular episode, I believe, is up on Thursday, August 27th, and this is a vacation, a victor's vacation episode. So a victor, here's a question from anonymous. It says, essentially from the revolutionary war through today, what would the top two battles, American battles that were strategized and well executed where America proved victorious? This could include the civil war. I guess it could include midway or sea battles also, but what's your take on the most impressive, designed, executed American military action through in our history? - I'd say, first of all, the campaign from August of the Army of the West under William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864, the Army of the West left Tennessee and cut all their rail support, all their supply support, and went into the heart of the Confederacy. And its mission was to save the Union because it was pretty clear given the summer of death with the Army of the Potomac underground. I mean, they lost 100,000 casualties. And the copperheads, those were the people who were in the North, but wanted a settlement with the South were in ascendance. And in that primary, John C. Fremont was running sort of, as Lincoln didn't know what he was doing, he should be much more muscular in prosecuting the war, and then McClellan was saying that he was incompetent, and it was a waste of time, and they wanted to have a settlement, and it looked like they were going to win. So Sherman came up with the idea that he had a strategy and he said, "I'm going to cut all support," which was completely antithetical to all military doctrine that you have an army, and it was a huge army, 65,000 of them. And they were all from about five states. They were Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, and they were farmers for the most part, and they were used to living outdoors. And he said, "It's going to be late summer and fall. We're going to live off the land. We're going to wage war against not the people who are fighting the war necessarily, but the people who caused the war, the plantation plas, and we're going to make, as he said, we're going to make Georgia howl. So we're going to head into Atlanta and we've got to get there before November, and we're going to take that city, which was the main transportation hub, basically of the Confederacy, and then we're going to take off. We're not going to tell anybody where we're going, but he wanted to go to Savannah, the march to the sea. And so in a series of draws, he was able to outmaneuver John Bill Hood, and they could not stop him. If you'd look at all the Confederate forces under John Bill Hood or Hardy, if they had Wheeler's Cow, if they had you, had of United, they might, and they were a little bit more a droid, but William DeCumse Sherman was an authentic military genius. So he got to Atlanta on September 2nd. It's very controversial. He shelled the city after he said, stop everything, and Hood, and earlier had taken over from Joe Johnson, fired back, and they had a exchange of letters is very famous, but the city caught fire, and then he took it, and he sent the famous telegram to Lincoln. Atlanta is ours, and fairly one. And that was the end of the anti-war movement. It just collapsed, and Lincoln would go on with a landslide victory, partly because of mail-in ballots, by the way, in the first mail-in ballots from the military. 65, 75% of the Union Army voted for Lincoln, but he was a winner after that. And more importantly, Sherman said, I'm going to not only destroy the plantations and the armories, I'm going to spare the middle classes to show you that we don't have a problem with them and create dissension, and I'm going to free slaves. And then I'm going to go to Savannah, well, he didn't tell them Savannah yet, but he had a mind to go to Savannah, and I'll get there by Christmas. And then I'm going to take, and that was that whole thing from Tennessee to Atlanta. That was about three or four hundred miles with no rail support, no supplies. And then I'm going to march up, get resupply in Savannah by sea, and then I'm going to go through the Carolinas and mid-winner. Even if I have to quarter-roy the roads and do the same thing, and I'm going to pull up behind Bobby Lee at Richmond, who we never, the Army of the Potomac never got, Lee was a, he wasn't a great general on the offensive as we learned from Gettysburg and others. I mean, he was a good tactician, but not a grand strategist. But boy, if he had a fortified position, he was brilliant, and Grant could not take it, take Richmond. The reason the Civil War ended when it did this huge army of veterans pulled up right behind Lee, and they couldn't stop him. Joe Johnson couldn't stop him. Nobody could. And the irony of it is of that huge army, they ended up weighing more in better health, tan, And uh, they only lost about one percent to disease and the enemy, and they just terrified the South, and the whole purpose of it was to break to so dissension between the architects of the war and the middle classes, to free slaves, to help Lincoln's abolitionist message, and to show that as far as military prowess and bravery, and courage, and daring, the northern, the northern yeoman farmer was as good or superior to the Calvary men or the Wade Hampton mystique of the South, and because they had said that everybody's getting off the boat from Ireland and Germany, and they just joined the Union Army because they're short men now, and they don't really want to fight, and we can beat them at Chancellorsville, Fred Wicksbury, or Etc., and Amanda Manfight, and he shattered that sense of invincibility of the Confederate Army, and he got people, and he got up to how Cobb's plantation is, I remember, and how Cobb, who's governor of Georgia, two hundred slaves, fled to Savannah, but left his wife and daughter there to plead to protect it, and so Sherman came up to them and said, "All your papers say I'm a terrorist, I haven't killed, I haven't killed anybody, and I haven't touched one house of poor people, but I do want to destroy Confederate railroads and armories and plantations," and they said, "You're a terrorist," he said, "If I'm such a terrorist, why did he leave his wife and child in my car?" because he knew that I wouldn't hurt you, and so it was kind of ironic, and he went to the Carolinas, and that was it, and then the final anecdote to that is, after that great campaign, they had a victory parade, and the Secretary of War, and the Chief of Staff Halleck didn't like him, Sherman. Sherman looked rough, I mean, he looked crazy, he had a mental breakdown, he smoked cigars, he dressed his uniform was torn up, they called him Uncle Billy, they loved him, Uncle Billy, there's Uncle Billy, he was like 38 years old, Uncle Billy, and he was like Grant, a misfit, and he didn't drink like Grant, but the Army of Potomac, they put them all in new uniforms, they marched through the parade section, they looked great, Sherman deliberately kept all the rag uniforms they'd had for six months, and then he had all these black pioneers, he called them, that they had freed, he trained them, they had pickaxes, saws, and they'd went ahead of the Army and made the road through the wilderness, so they marched, and they couldn't believe how great these black people look, and strong, powerful, and then they had the Army of the West, and these guys were all big husky farmers, I must say, many of them were Scandinavian, I was going to say, I smell something sweet, yes, and the German attaché, who was there watching it, said this Army could plow anywhere, wanted through it, there's not a European Army that could stop that Army, and they were so scared, because when he went up on the diast, shake hands, he didn't like Halic, and he didn't shake Stanton, I guess was Wolf Rumor's name, the Secretary of War, and Winston, he didn't shake his hand, and everybody, and you know how the papers were in those days, Sherman to take Washington, who can stop him, Army Potomac can't touch these people, so then he marched them right through the town, and they thought he was going to have a coup, and he went out to a big meadow, and he dismissed the Army, he said, "Go home." So that was a most brilliant campaign, then very quickly, I think, actually the most incredible victory, there's a book called Incredible, it was the Battle of Midway on June 4th to 6th, 1842, and remember that was only six months after Pearl Harbor, and it was only a month after Coral Sea, where we lost our big carrier, the Lexington and the Yorktown, was almost destroyed, and the Japanese had at that time nine carriers, and the whole idea was they were going to, here the bombing of 30 seconds over Tokyo, the campaign of the B-26s, that Billy Mitchell, Billy Mitchell, well I'd say Jimmy Doolil, excuse me. Jimmy Doolil orchestrated from the was in Hornet, they were so paranoid, they said we've got to take Midway Island, and we cracked the code, and then we sent, all we had left was the Enterprise and the Hornet, and then the most amazing fact, they brought the Yorktown in, it was almost destroyed at Coral Sea, and they only had 72 hours by the time it went back to get back out to Midway, because they knew the Japanese were coming, and they shut down the power grid, and they rebuilt or repaired the Yorktown, so they had three carriers, and the genius Yamamoto, who wasn't such a genius, instead of having six carriers against two, so you're talking maybe 400 planes against 120, and the zeros were better than our wild cats at that time, they only had two disabled carriers at Coral Sea, and they went into the illusions with another two, so they only had four carriers, and then they thought we would only have two, but we had three, so it was four against three, and we lost the Yorktown was finally destroyed, but in a brilliant move, Bill Halsey got a skin disease from nerves for some reason, it wasn't quite shingles, and they put this untried Admiral Spruence in, and he bet he went, they didn't really know where the Japanese are, they knew they were going to attack, because they broke their code, but some of these brilliant life or pilots from the pre-war army, Lim Massey, and others, they all had names like Wade and Lim, and they were kind of a pawn sacrifice, they sent in the torpedo bombers, Tevistator, they only went like a hundred miles an hour, they were like 1937 planes, what were they called, like Buffalo? No, those are Brewster Buffaloes, they had those on the Island of Midway, they were obsolete, but they were called Devastators, TBDs, and they would go very low, when they went against the wind, and they had that huge torpedo, many of the torpedoes were defective, they only went a hundred miles an hour, they had a crew of two or three, and they had to have fighter cover, and they went in, they got separated from the fighters, were way above, and they went in, and they didn't, they did not flinch, they went right out the carrier, and on forty planes that went in, one survived, they butchered them, and then another forty, and I think fifteen survived, they wiped out the entire torpedo plane arsenal of those three carriers, but, and this is the irony of it, why the zeros and the carrier protective air fleet were too greedy to kill these vulnerable, they didn't look up, and up was the dive bombers, and that was the SBTDs, they were a good plane, and they usually would be shot down though, they weren't nearly as fast as zeros, but they weren't flying level, they were diving from about fifteen thousand feet straight down, and what did they see, they had a protective fighter cover, they came straight down, and the Japanese Nagumo had been bombing the island of Midway in preparation to invade it with high explosive bombs, then he was told, "Uh-oh, the carriers are here, we've got to change all of the bomb armament to anti-armor penetrating bombs, so they can go through the fleet, you know, and blow it up." So they said, "Well, just if he, and his subordinates say, don't worry about it, just get everybody off these carriers, because we've got gas out here, we've got people, because if you cite a carrier, they may be coming." No, no, no, no, that's not protocol. Take all the planes on the deck, take all the bombs off, and replace them with anti-armor penetrating bombs, and then we'll launch it properly. Well, that took about two hours, and right when they were ready to launch, out of the nowhere came the dive bombers, and there was gasoline, hoses on all four of the carriers. There were bombs that hadn't been taken below, and they blew up for them. They wiped all four out. Three the first day, one the next morning. And so they had a tough time for the rest of 1942, and the naval battles around Guadalcanal, because we got down to one. carrier, the Enterprise, and the Japanese had such a lead on us. They still had five or six, but of course we had 27 Essex, each one of them better than any carrier in the world that were being built. And so by early 1943, basically the war was predetermined in the Pacific, the naval war. We were going to have this huge fleet coming. But that battle of Midway and Sherman's march this year, I think the most incredible feats of American arms. Well, folks, where three credits, so you know, it's like a seminar course. That was brilliant. I didn't get into the worst ones, but we could talk some about that. Well, I'll do that another episode, because we've gone way over, so no comments, we're not reading any comments at the end of the show, so just say, Victor, you were terrific as ever. Thanks for all the wisdom you shared. I want to thank the people from the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club on Facebook for sending in the questions. Victor, I want you to have a very restful, a dust free vacation, and I will. And Mrs. Hansen too, thanks for very much. Victor, thanks folks for watching and listening, and we'll be back soon, I'm going to show my watch again. We'll be back soon with another episode of Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Bye bye. Thank you, everybody, for watching and listening. See you soon. 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.