[Music] Victor Davis Hanson a classical scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California dr. Hanson has published more than two dozen books including a war like no other the definitive account of the Peloponnesian wars and the case for Trump the paperback edition of which has just been published Victor welcome and welcome everyone to uncommon knowledge with Peter Robinson Victor let's start with your own experience you live among farmers and ranchers you yourself owned 40 acres what is the shutdown meant to the San Joaquin Valley well you know it's funny because we're the richest in terms of actual value crop sold about 40 different varieties in the in the United States in fact for density in the world and we're feeding right now we mean not me but the people of this County and why was no heater there's a main thoroughfare from two rural towns Danube and Carruthers there's a lot of chicken processing almond processing chicken beef the Harris be flawed is right over here and citrus and it's just booming I mean its people I'm looking out the window right now and there's two people out in my almond orchard working so it hasn't stopped a bit because it's outdoor activity and we're told that 97 percent of the transmissions of the virus are within doors and then people feel they do really feel a need they have to keep working because the truckers and them and the processors and the packing houses and the farmers are they feel they're needed but if I go into these little local towns that are right the one two miles behind me has a per capita income of $13,000 salma and it's been it looks like a you remember the neutron bomb of our college days we dropped the bomb and the radiation destroyed everything without impairing the infrastructure that's what it looks like no yeah so that people in the barber shop the restaurant all of them have been wiped out I will say that among a lot of the immigrant community many of them here illegally I admire their entrepreneurship because up and down this rural road there are illegal daycare centers barber shops canteens and my neighbor right over here must have 30 cars a day I shouldn't say that because I don't want him to be turned in but he's cutting hair all day long oh really yes and so they had another customer before this is over yes I know it if I had hair I'd be his customer but I think you have a Newsom's at some point I don't think what Newsom or Cuomo or Trump says will be the ultimate arbiter arbiter of whether we get back or not it's where people feel confident enough to go out and book a fly go to a restaurant bite people over for dinner accept or accepted until that confidence is restored with Victor Kelly California itself California stuff you've written in the last couple of weeks you've written a couple of times on the Golden State let me quote you on the eve of the epidemic California seemed especially vulnerable given the large influx of visitors from China close quote yet California you went on to know it has so far suffered a relatively low death rate even a relatively low infection rate as these antibody tests begin to come in by comparison with other large states the only large state with a lower death rate per unit of population is Texas California's much better off than New York for example what's going on do we know yet I don't think we do and I what a controversial article I didn't come down necessarily and anyone exegesis I just said here were the parameters of the debate people had said well maybe California's notorious bureaucracy it's pretty bad anybody's gone to a California DMV the testing was late or was inaccurate or maybe there is some credence to this theory that warmer weather it's going to be 91 here today or maybe it could be that Gavin newson on March 19th was the first to order a lockdown but I mean people three days later in New York and two days later in other states followed suit or it could be and this is what got me into trouble is that I might suggest that the January 21st official date of anybody in the United States getting the virus and I think it was March 10th I questioned that and I said when you had 15 to 20 thousand people come in from China and of that number people had estimated 3,000 a day to Los Angeles but maybe 6,000 at San Diego San Jose SFO and LAX on direct flights including more than 25 flights from Wuhan in november/december in January before they cut off and then after the cutoff on directed flights from Europe for two weeks it would be very naive to think out of that huge pool of anywhere from 700 to a million people there wasn't somebody that was positive and that we would have well I didn't say we'd had herd immunity 50 to 70 percent I thought that the number of people that were infected was much higher than we thought and what I meant by that was we were doing even better than the statistics because we were running as we are now about three out of a hundred according to those who have test positive in the denominator versus the fatalities in the numerator but when you look at the USC study and the Stanford researchers study they suggested it could in fact be if you do the math not three out of a hundred but one or two per thousand right and that's pretty a stark and that suggests to me that there is I'm not gonna say it's 15 or 20 percent 15 was found in New York today 15 in Germany but let's see what infected 15 yeah I think there's more people that have it and we're finding out that it's not quite as lethal and California is not quite it's 1/10 dense most dense state in the Union so it's not scattered like Wyoming but we're not like New York and we don't have people don't use the subway as much and we have I think there's a lot of studies that suggest warmer weather it's not going to kill the virus but if you had a choice you'd rather have the a warmer climate because when it's out of the body on the surface or in the air it's not going to live as long so all of those I think incrementally help explain what's going on but we're surely not going to get his March nineteenth letter you remember to Donald Trump and CDC etc that we were going to have 25 million cases and we were going to have at the gather new that said that yeah and we at the lethality rate of three percent at the time that would given us almost 800 to a million deaths he said that would be in eight weeks were only three weeks away from a million deaths and we're having about 1,500 1,400 dead right right again to quote a column that you wrote recently moving from California to the nation now throwing some twenty million people out of work since you wrote that the numbers gone up to 22 I believe 22 million people out of work destroying trillions and liquidity sending the GDP into depression like descendants and shutting up over a hundred million people in their homes is having health consequences that could ripple out far more so than from the virus itself close quote explain that Victor I don't think we've even scratched the surface Peter because there are I just went to a doctor this morning a cardiologist and and they don't have any patients there and then he referred me to as many referrals as he could cram in because they don't have any patients and what I'm getting at is there are hundreds of thousands of Californians who need scans they need procedures they didn't need diagnostic tests they need quote unquote optional surgeries in cardiology oncology diseases chronic conditions lupus are thriving it where we know from the 2008 meltdown that the suicide rate went way up as unemployment went up we know that spousal and familial abuse increases when people are locked within we know anxieties and when you add six or seven trillion dollars of destroyed liquidity and GDP that that's gonna have an effect on people's lives so and we're another thing we're go ahead are you say Attis fide you've dipped into the White House briefings that have been taking place the president speaks and then he takes questions but then there other officials dr. b RI x bi RX dr. Burks I'm not sure how to pronounce it yes dr. foul G other public health officials have spoken I myself keep waiting public policy forming public policy you learn this in any Kennedy school any school of public policy it's all about trade-offs the fundamental form of analysis is cost-benefit analysis and I have not heard them once refer to the costs that you just outlined that is to say why not because the the left the progressive left has prepped the battlefield and given the narrative to trump that if it's worth to save one life right and you can't you're he's he thinks in a political sense he's not going to be able to get the country back if we get a hot spot and then the New York Times has this picture of this picture this picture with a cap Trump dad from and so he's airing but you're quite right what he should be doing is that every one of these press conferences he should have minuchin he should have the chairman of the Joint Chiefs he should have some type of Federal Reserve Officer and then he should have Falchi and burps and I should say these are the medical opinions this is these national security threats because after all China and Iran are doing all sorts of strange things right now and this is the economic and I've got to take all of these frames of input and synthesize them and give you an answer that's what he should be doing but the medical community has established this premise that unlike any other contagion in our history that we have certain rules now that we've never had before when we have the flu like 2017 60 million people were estimated but we didn't just say well the denominator to determine the molarity will only be determined by the number of those who test positive for the flu go to your doctor that would be the quarter million and and we know that somewhere around 61,000 dice over there for Wow one of ten people died of the flu let's shut down the country but we're doing that with this virus because it's a corona not an influenza strain we know that it came from China we know it's an election year we know Donald Trump is widely hated by his opponents and it turned out to be a perfect storm it was just too many you know straws on the camel's back to bear and we ended up with this utter hysteria and panic well okay - let me see if I can tease you into getting yourself into trouble again do you oppose the shutdown as it has taken place so far I oppose the lockdown after pretty much next week God because and then I do support based on what you see will say the swedish model or the japanese model explained that for a moment the swedish yes but in both of those cases they have the swedish model people are social distancing older people people with underlying conditions are being told to stay home and self isolate but the economy schooling restaurants remain open like what japan is a little bit different but essentially the japan also has not shut down its entire economy yes and they tend to be doing probably not quite as good as germany but nobody ever does as good as germany and most things and then not as well i mean better than places that are completely shut down like France or Spain or Italy or the UK and then the second thing that the Stanford researchers and the USC researchers have also pointed out that for people who are not my age I'm 66 but under 60 and don't have a chronic health condition it's likely that about 99.9% of them one out of a thousand will die but the other 99.9 will live and therefore they could be going out into the general population and acquiring herd immunity and then that would actually protect the people that are shut in because when they go out after this lock over people that were younger have weather disease with either mild or no symptoms and then they're not going to infect the vulnerable people but what we're doing now is we're putting generations within the same house people do go up to shop and we're making people more vulnerable because it's easier to transmit the virus within close quarters and we're not developing the level of immunity that will be necessary to get us to the vaccination Matt you know promised land Victor you have I hope once all this is over in my own mind I've been saving this for late summer when the campaign is beginning to get underway in earnest I want to do a whole show devoted on your new paperback edition of the case for Trump to which you've added new material well let me just ask right now Donald Trump's comportment as national leader in this crisis strengthens or weakens the case for Trump well I think it strengthens the books theme I don't know because the case for Trump wasn't Trump isn't infallible but this is why people voted for him it was really the case for the people who voted for Trump or are trying to explain to other people who did not why he won and why he has not imploded or why he wasn't a left winger or why he wasn't a nutty right winger or not why he wasn't incompetent because what's - things are happening he did and it's typical Trump what Trump says and what Trump does are two different things right now if you look at right now the the travel ban was supposedly called xenophobic and racist by everybody from CNN to the Chinese Communist Party to Joe Biden everybody now who said that is not willing to have the intellectual integrity to say I was right and you've got to lift that ban right now they're welcome to try it but they don't say a word so they agree with it and then we know that after that three weeks in the case of Nancy Pelosi she said come to Chinatown and hug people we know that blah blah CEO and Cuomo did something analogous so that was a brilliant move and it stopped fifteen to twenty thousand people coming in we also know that nobody is saying I wish we had open borders with Mexico we had more caravans like last summer nobody's saying that so that was that was good they're also saying we'd like the idea that the president has the ability to stop travel from any country that cannot guarantee passport control that was that was good we like the idea the president said I'm not if you want to have an off-label use and he did that in 2018 with end-of-life desperation drugs so to speak off-label uses so that was a precursor for hydroxychloroquine so all that's been very good and he got all those executives in and we're gonna have ventilators coming out of our ears pretty soon we're probably going to supply the world with ventilators because of world war ii like ramping up yes but where he I think and I've said this in the book as sort of a tragic hero is that he gets in these press conferences and it's basically the New York Washington East Coast corridor media trying to get get him and bade him and this is a guy who was a Prentice star for eleven years so he loves the repart t yeah and he goes back and forth and he best them and he beats them and he he scores these tactical victories but strategically it explains why his ratings have gone down a little bit because what happens they take a snippet here and a snippet here and they run it on network news CBS NBC ABC MSNBC and they take it out of context and he looks like he's petty and he's narcissistic so I think he would be much better and you hinted at it to come out and say this is all that we've done here's fowey here's Burke's here's minuchin here are the military people go to it and cut the whole thing down from two hours or an hour to 25 minutes all right plague in the ancient world Victor you wrote recently I'm going to quote you the unknown plague at Athens 432 429 PC killed one quarter of the Athenian population during the Peloponnesian War wrecking the social structure of the city in 542 ad during a virulent bubonic plague epidemic millions perished throughout the Byzantine Empire we could add the black death of the 14th century that killed between 30 and 60 percent of the population of Europe incidentally as I understand it is now believed that that black death originated in Central Asia who knows Wuhan of the Wuhan of the day the so the point here is that that you make plagues pandemics these have represented an expected feature of human life as recently as a century ago when we had the influenza of 1918 should we have seen this one coming we meaning the human species should have we kind of got in the idea that unlike I don't know what the Athenian plague is there's a good case for typhus or even typhoid maybe smallpox I doubt smallpox and we know that the constantinople byzantine plague was black plague as was but we know what the 14th century bubonic plague that really wiped out italy and a lot of the mediterranean so we had the idea that these were all biblical plagues like and they were dangerous they were typhoid mary in chicago or yellow fever with general washington but they were the results of poor sanitation for drinking water sewage disposal they and pre vaccination pre-antibiotic pre viral and that we had transcended that well nobody ever said humans and animals are in a constant challenge in response technique and human nature being what it is the more knowledge you gain that can help you defeat natural phenomenon of the more danger somebody's going to use it or be lacks about it putting a viral for level 4 laboratory in the hands of the Chinese is like giving a firecracker to a five-year-old because they had not had the institutional checks and balance the 7280 a hundred year history of two steps forward one took back in Bible research so all we have done is substituted the the 19th century problems of sewage and drinking water for the 21st postmodern problems of viable safety and an antiseptic environment so I you have argued before to me and in men of your books that war is a permanent part of the human condition and it is simply modern hubris to suppose as so many people seem to suppose in the 20s that the League of Nations would stop war or that the whole first world war would be in the end the war to end all wars war was a permanent aspect of human life so if we learn anything deep from this virus is it that the virus is teaching us something about is that that the virus is another affront to modern day hubris this could learn about the human condition I think especially in the Obama years we had this idea of there's a trajectory of the arc of history remember the moral arc yeah bending and the more and that it was a pre determinist we got that a little bit with Paul Kennedy the rise and fall the great powers we got it with Francis Fukuyama end of history there was this idea that as we could become more free and democratic and more technologically adept and we have more Facebook Google Apple we're and Bill Gates working for us and all that we're getting morally and economically and financially at a higher plane we're all going up here and there's no evidence necessarily to say that history always goes in a linear progression is cyclical maybe the cycles get better as we go but I'm not sure I think if I lost a $5 bill in my hometown today I would have a less like Leslie less likely opportunity of getting that back than 50 years ago or 200 years ago when it first America was first violent so I'm not sure that with material progress you don't get moral regress and the other thing is that I think it's very important that we don't worship science on this altar if you and I had talked about ulcers 30 years ago we would say oh there's this all this new strut study that it's stress does it and aspirin and if we did it 20 years ago we'd say wow there's this new thing called h pylori an advil or add to it we don't know what the next exegesis will be I was looking at two drugs at my dad thought were wonder drugs he's passed away twenty years ago and one was flomax and the other was zantac and I just saw the other day that both of them now have serious side effects and they're they're even talking about phasing both of them out and what I'm getting at is not that they weren't good drugs because they really helped him but there's not going to ever be something that's a magic bullet that science is an evolutionary process that has a bad and a worse choice but we want immediate and instant perfection so if you tell somebody today especially in the coastal corridors the elite global communities that if you're not 60 60 and you're in pretty good health you've got a 99.9 chance of not dying from this virus they're going to tell you I can't take the risk because one in a thousand is not good enough for me because I'm a blank blank blank I'm a fin in Syria I'm a college administrator I'm this I'm a media elite and the world is so perfect I'm not going to risk it and more importantly they're shielded and this is the central truth of this entire epidemic who are the heroes of this epidemic I haven't called my financial planner I really haven't I am NOT helped any at all by the Stanford vice Provost's of diversity inclusion it doesn't matter I don't think that Rachel Maddow is going to say the United States yoohoo is hilarious Lopez right now out there working in the almonds or Joe Smith with a gut driving all night to Costco to get toilet paper there by 6 a.m. or the guy that you call when your freezer comes blows up and you need food and he shows up from Home Depot and he doesn't have a mask on and you say oh my god he doesn't have a mask on because he's breathing hard and he's trying to get you a new freezer so I think that's been good it really tells us that the essentials of life never changed there are food fuel health housing and if you can't get food you can't go to a food market and you can't go to Home Depot to fix something and you can't get fuel for your heating and and you're not gonna let it live you can do a deal without the other stove but there are people in the shadows that we neglected we thought they were global losers or they didn't make it but I was thinking the other day I was reading Richard the third just for the heck of it again and I thought this must be a financial planner when his circuit breaker goes out or his baffle on his toy it doesn't work he'll say handyman handyman my kingdom for a handyman because he's helpless most of them right right Viktor trying to pick on financial planners I like them they're very brilliant people but right now I'd rather have a guy who's a handyman Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week this is China Holman Jenkins on January 7th President Xi we now know this president she gave a secret speech on the Wuhan outbreak China's government issued no public warning the Wuhan city government permitted a gargantuan banquet for 40,000 families on January 18th Wuhan bigger than any American city at 11 million inhabitants was a major rail hub inside China and through its international airport exported thousands of travelers a day to the world Gigi Peng bares unique responsibility for a global pandemic that will end up killing millions close quote Victor well I would add to his list the key one for me is January 23rd when he locked down all travel to and from Wuhan to every Chinese city in his country and he was perfectly willing for people he thought were infected or could be infected that posed a danger to Chinese he was perfectly willing to have them get on direct flight to San Francisco or LAX or burn or Paris and he was also perfectly willing to unleash the Chinese military propaganda and Communist Party megaphones who said that it was racist in home phobic they have a travel ban seven days after he did and we were and we were the beneficiaries of another 150,000 visitors from Ground Zero of the plague and so I thought to myself when I heard all this I said well that's the most racist thing in the world to say that my people who are Chinese have to be protected but all those other people in the world that's that's their problem and then to say that you're racist for not allowing people from my country to come and possibly infect you in a way that I wouldn't let them ever go to infect each other and so and that was effective and so I think what happened is I'm not a conspiracy theorist who think that the virus was necessarily engineered I don't think it was deliberate I think it's more likely that they were way over their head in the level of complexity they were researching versus the level of security they could master the virus got out they tried to stop it they tried to hide it because they thought it would hurt their global brand and at some point and those are the dates that you recited somebody said that she you know what this thing is out we can't stop it you can't put the bottle the cork in the bottle and it's gonna hurt us so let's just let the whole thing go to hell in other words if we're gonna get hurt there's let's not let a crisis go to waste I say that because almost immediately they didn't warn us their megaphone at the World Health Organization mouths their platitudes and fool people and people died but more importantly what has China been doing they had a propaganda campaign to bring blame us even though we helped pay for that damn laboratory and then they went right out to the Spratly Island South China Sea and started renaming islands so that people during the panic would know that they're there then there were reports that they started to resume low yield or no yield nuclear testing which was outlawed and then they started cracking down on Hong Kong and then there were stories that they were going to ignore international outcry about the re-education camps and maybe use waiters to go out and do labor so what they've shown empirically is that they're taking advantage of the crisis and they feel and they haven't told us how many people have died are how many cases they've had I think it's been the last four weeks and we're stupid enough we the the Western world that when we look at John Hopkins or world meters we list China there with this frozen figure and then we go over and we look at deaths per million or desk for cases fatality kit for cases and then these idiots get on cable news and say we're not doing as well as China China how could they to be doing and it's like saying wow you know in 1939 Hitler's done a lot better job with the people who have mental mental problems or they have cerebral palsy because they're not the hospitals are empty of them well he killed them all right and I'm not saying they killed people with the virus although they may have but my god they understand our mind better than we do they're the most brilliant propagandist I've ever seen and deal in their dealings with the Western liberal mindset victor is is it too late to talk about managing the relationship with China has a new Cold War begun I think John Kerry said just that didn't he have a relationship with China well I think there was a cold war going on and I'm hoping it will stay at a Cold War where they're going to what's gonna be interesting is China if you look at their strategy and the Communist Party congresses it was to brag and humiliate us in a tactical sense but strategically not to get us get in a war with us after all we got 6,000 nuclear weapons and we have a sophisticated missile defense system and there are only military threat to us is when we get close to them or cyber all of their technology is appropriated from us they may master us in 10 or 12 years but they're not quite there and they have some real problems with a sophisticated Japan on its borders a sophisticated South Korea on its borders a sophisticated Australia on us for a huge India that has border disputes it doesn't like them and who knows about Russia so what I'm getting at is they were not in Hong Kong Taiwan and Hong Kong or Taiwan and Hong Kong at Hong Kong as is done very well and so I think what they're thinking is oh oh this virus preempted what we wanted to do but it made us sort of it's sort of like Hitler saying I well the the generals telling Hitler you might have won Poland but we were three years away when we wanted this war it was too early for the Japanese telling Yamamoto I wish you had held off for two years so I think that China would have preferred what this estrangement another decade from now because they're not ready for it so in a strange of what here's the parallel that comes to my mind well maybe it's a parallel let me just put it in the form of a question Reagan takes office after a decade a dozen years of day taught and the public opinion polls show that the American people have warmed to the Soviet Union during that period of course they did there was Richard Nixon kissing Brezhnev on both cheeks when Brezhnev visited and then the Soviets shot down Korean airliner double-oh-seven and the polling changed overnight nothing that Reagan did although of course we know Reagan was in favors that he ran a campaign on standing up to the Soviets but the Soviets showed there was a moment when everyone could see what kind of regime it really was and it feels to me as though that kind of inflection point in public I don't even want to call it public opinion but an actual realistic perception on the part of ordinary Americans about what China really is may now have happened with this virus am i being melodramatic here no I don't think you are I think we're we ourselves are evolving and people are starting to blame the Chinese but remember the difference is that this media which the liberal Shorenstein Media Center at Harvard said was ninety-three percent negative to the presidency has been basically regurgitating Chinese talking points and that they've said to us who were flew in the face that China is blaming is being blamed by Trump to deflect from his own culpability is what they're professional so they're not getting we're not getting through our media a dispassionate disinterested view of what the threat China I don't think that's gonna be sustainable because you know why you don't because the modern Left worships at the altar of the European Union and they feel that we want to be where the EU isn't in tenure and the EU is sick of China not just Italy and Spain as you would but even Germany there was a German editorial blame I mean far more accusatory of China anything I've seen in the American press because they have a much thinner margin of error in terms of fuel supplies GDP unemployment and they're very angry and they're bleh and so are the former Commonwealth countries like Canada or Australia and even countries like Mexico are furious and so China is not it's gonna be roundly condemned the worldwide India's attacking at the belton Road client countries are saying we're not gonna pay you back Africa especially and so I don't see that that propaganda is going to work indefinitely and the other thing is the left wasn't too worried about China's military domination or economic they were two-degree they were worried they weren't compromised they they focused on human rights violations and with and they've got a whole pot pourri of these when you have scientist or who just disappears or data that's destroyed or people that were deliberately exposed that makes the left a little bit more sensitive to calling that out but everybody has their their pet Chinese complaint military economic financial and what I'm worried most about Peter is not that we're gonna decouple because I think we are but there's two things that really worry me one is the process of decoupling right it's sort of like a divorce you read about that they're all happy after it's over they get along but during the process both sides lie and connive and we're not lying and conniving it's just gonna I think the Chinese are not going to freeze up I mean allow frozen bank accounts to be unfrozen I think they're not going to compensate companies for their factories or their investments or any of the amount the money that's stuck over there in China and the second thing is yes we got to have pharmaceuticals yes we have to have railroads rest we have military technology yes medical supplies but we have spent a large portion percentage of our K through 12 and our undergraduate experience and our professional schools and what the Chinese would call fluff social science - studies courses and we're not turning out the stem student or the math and engineering people that we need to get a grip on these ki and they still under studies instead of calculus yeah and it's really tragic because the top minds of these disciplines that create the new research and the new breakthroughs are all American but then the middle level who absorb it and take it back to China there's far more of them than American students studying that stuff right I guess if I wanted to be really cruel I would say and get back on a vice provost of inclusion that that might sound very well in theory but for every Provost of diversity inclusion we could probably hire three professors of electrical engineering and now them and then we could we could we could prepare us I don't think we're prepared yet to be autonomous in the areas we need to be and we're gonna have to be very careful because China has a hold over those supply chains and we have to find a way and that's why people get so food is that let me just name three three ways in which China differs from the Soviet Union to China's advantage three ways that complicate any effort to draw lines between us and them and one of course is that the supply chains yeah take take your grocery cart down aisle after aisle at Walmart that stuff's made in China yeah get it if we're talking about a virus but get a respiratory tract in fact get a bacterial infection and take a z-pack the antibiotics come from China they make stuff on which we have come to rely 1 2 they have something the Soviets never had cash and lots of it and as you well know up and down the valley where I'm seated you're in a different Valley you're in the Central Valley I'm in Silicon Valley the Chinese have investments in company after company after company I don't I just don't know how you unwind those and then the third point you mentioned this in a column just the other day is it smart I'm quoting you is it smart to have some 360,000 you know Chinese students enrolled in u.s. colleges there were never anything like that in numbers from the Soviet Union a token physicists would study for six months at MIT and then go back to Moscow State how did let's let's let's pause it that we're awake to the danger right now in a way that we never have before how on earth do we untangle all of this it's gonna be very difficult and I've had a forty or that even frightens me more and that is people had no problem demonizing Russia they were called the alt-right the Orthodox crazies the Rasputin like country white and what China has done is they have grafted their monolithic racist xenophobic society that systematically puts people in re-education camps for the religion or doesn't allow Africans to go into a McDonald's and DJing right and they've transmogrified themselves as part of the affirmative action identity politics other in the United States and its insidious so I write an article to the effect that I'm worried about that 360,000 student body because even if one or two percent were operatives of the Chinese Communist Party that's a large number three hundred three thousand and then I'm also worried why are we gagging that group for pay 10% above real cost to subsidize these universities at a time of Americans have 1.6 trillion dollars and collective student debt so I write this immediately slate comes out and attacks me there's no insidious it is she says that was racist for mentioning the Chinese students but get this slate itself her own magazine she didn't even know it six months earlier had written an article calling this sinister because they had done some research and said that most of the 360,000 Chinese students were not representative of the 1.4 billion Chinese but the word that they used were the princelings they were the princelings of crooked provincial officials and Chinese communist elite that were sending their kids over here to master American culture on the premise that we and our arrogance and ulis would think oh wow they came over here they saw rap music they wore jeans they had the liberal atmosphere of the college landscape they love us we've corrupted them haha and no they could develop contempt for us mastered our lingo notice how that they use that word conspiracy theory even better than the left us and there so they have become immune from criticism by playing a traditional postmodern American victim and you dare criticize them and you're called racist and xenophobic and that's that's there's no no accident that Joe Biden and the central Communist Party used the exact same adjectives of the travel ban racist and xenophobic picture some last questions here before the coronavirus the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump's re-election campaign was that he would have to planks to big claims one was a roaring economy lowest unemployment in some cases lowest on the Connecticut unemployment since records began to be kept lowest unemployment and the other was that the Democrats had moved so far to the left that they were all but socialists put term it any way you want to but big government to the nth degree and now here we sit just weeks later the economy is dead I saw an estimate from one of the analysts in New York that GDP would be down at an annual rate this quarter of 25 percent and as you noted more than 20 million people are out of work all right so that big claim is gone it's just not true anymore it mean it may not be his fault you and I would certainly argue it isn't his fault he can't make that argument anymore and then every Republican in the Senate voted for a 2.2 trillion dollar bailout package and you know those are numbers is that are in the range of what Bernie Sanders was talking about for health care or Alexandria okay zo Cortes was talking about we has a down payment on the green New Deal so suddenly Republicans are signing up to vast expansions of government spending I can't quote he can't accuse the Democrats of socialism in the same way that he was able to so the question is what is your run on here's the way what Walter Russell Mead argued in The Wall Street Journal this is a couple of days ago this week with the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country making the election a referendum on China is perhaps mr. Trump's only chance to extend his White House tenure close quote Victor well he has two chances but you're absolutely right because whether it was fair or or whether it was moral or ethical we knew given this present status of the Progressive Party that this crisis was going to be interpreted as being able to do something that Robert Mueller and Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler could not that is destroy the trump presidency or at least and and everything is weaponized so they've created as you say this lose-lose paradox if Trump on May 1st unlocks the economy and we go back to us partial normality then if something breaks out in Louisiana and we have a hot spot then Trump put money over lives and he killed us and he's got blood on his hand if on the other hand nothing happens or no things will happen but more or less it was wise thing to follow the Swedish model that economy it's gonna be a real question whether it's gonna recover and so it's going to be the Democrats are running against Herbert Hoover who ruined the economy and put you out of work so he's going to lose either way so how does he get reelected there's only two chances as I see it one is he's going to have to change the narrative and say I warned and get clips and say people I warned you about Chinese perfidy I warned you about their mercantile system I warned you they couldn't be trusted I warned you that they were causing trouble all over the world and this is the I had a travel ban early on you could and that's Walter Russell means right but there's another issue that he didn't mention Donald Trump is not running on a popularity contest it is true that the Democrats are gonna try to have on the ballot down Trump versus the disaster of the coronavirus right no we're running the coronavirus against him but that's not going to be viable they're running Joe Biden against him so Joe Biden was worn out after a year of campaigning so the Democratic narrative was we're gonna go put good old Joe from Scranton in a comfortable fireside environment and he's gonna do fireside chats like FDR everyday he's going to voice some words of wisdom unite us let's have the war production board let's do this and it's going be a great situation meanwhile he's promised us a diversity vice-president and people would be traipsing in and he would be interviewing people of color and all and this would be wonderful you and what happened no sooner that that's narrative start then and I'm trying to be as nice as I can because we're all gonna be 77 but hopefully not quite 77 in the way that don't that Joe Biden is I'd rather be 77 the way that Bernie Sanders has been the sensitives much more hail but the point is he thought he could be extemporaneous it didn't work so then they said use the telephone it didn't work and then they said use both neither work and then they said don't even get on TV and it was almost as if like whatever his ailing him is not through progressing in our arithmetic rate it's geometric and the more rest and the more relaxation he gets the worse he he performs so what we've had now is this really Orwellian situation where it's like the 1944 election when everybody knew that FDR would not be able right to perform and whoever the vice president was and it was Henry Wallace a socialist was going to be President and so what happened is they fought oh my gosh we got to get this guy off the ticket and they did at the convention and put on Harry Truman and of course that happened to me he was dead and I'm not saying suggesting that Joe Biden is dead but what we said what we're witnessing now is if we just take away the veil there is an audition for the next what they think will be present the United States and so everybody is trying to say Joe Biden is not capable of running an effective campaign he will not be an effective president so we'll point our cabinet in advance have them spread out and do the campaigning and then we have to get a vice president that we can all agree on could do the job but yet he's already boxed himself in they seemed for some reason to be enamored with Andrew Cuomo over though he's reigning over a state that has the worst fatality to caseload and all most in the world and yet they wanted on that ticket and yet they can't put him on the ticket because he didn't campaign and he's not a woman or minority or both and so they got a lot of problems and I think that's it from the greatest greatest asset right now if she would take thing if she would take the post with Michelle Obama transform Joe Biden's Jen would she reassemble the of the Obama coalition and just and defeat Trump in a landslide well she would be there's two things that we don't know she her argument would be that even though you may be sexist voter I don't really care because we Kanade Barack's coming back for 16 he'll have a sixteen year term that's what the subtext would be but the other thing is why does everybody like Michelle Obama why is she pulled so high why does her memoir it's because she's not a Michelle Obama the real Michelle Obama appeared in 2008 the way she always was and what did she do she came out and said she had never been proud of this country she said this is a darn right mean country she said they always raise the bar on people this is a woman who's making the third of the million dollars playing offer and then they said Michelle you're not running for everything you're not a community organized or anymore you're not the point man to the chicawa just shut the blank up and smile and be a first lady like Nancy Reagan and have a pet project nutrition tri nutrition and she did and she turned out to be brilliant at it and everybody loved Michelle so she's gonna go back now on the campaign trail and she's going to be Michelle Obama in 2008 and she's gonna have to campaign and go into a big time wrestling we party with Donald Trump I don't think that's gonna be the same Michelle that we have such fond memories oh I really don't so there's some problems there and I think we'll see what happens but it all hinges on right now Peter to two issues and that is if the economy is snapped back in May will it be in the ascendant in October that is after losing 10% GDP Willoughby's well the the third quarter come out and say it was either zero or it was on the way up and then people say you know Trump didn't cause that it's restored and are we going to see Joe Biden not be able to pronounce words not know where he is and people are going to say you know I like good old Joe but I'd rather have Trump at least in in you know I'll i'd rather have a compos mentis Trump then Biden and we don't know the answer to that yet and remember when you remember it from your own political career when George HW Bush in 1988 left the Republican convention Mike Dukakis with 17 points ahead of 17 points I remember that very well and you remember that Ronald Reagan at one point was nine points behind Jimmy Carter then the economy took off and had a twelvemonth 7 7 percent GDP increase and blew Carter out of the world so anything can happen now and we know one thing with Donald Trump is you cannot trust the polls because people feel that if they say to an anonymous caller that they're for Trump or an anonymous texture that information will be aggregated in some nefarious way against them so they're they're not going to say but he's right around now on the Real Clear Politics he goes between 45 and 47 he won at 46% before 2016 Victor last question three figures from the classical world this is an exam get ready three figures from the classical world augustus after the assassination of Julius Caesar the Civil War of the triumvirate augustus restores order rome goes on to new heights the Augustan age lasts over a century constantine he moves the capital from Rome to Constantinople the Roman Empire continues but it's not the same it's just not the same it never achieves anything like its former morale and splendor and Agustin who from his vantage point hippo in North Africa watches the sack of Rome and the definitive fall Rome continues but in some form but he sees a definitive fall of the civilisation that he loved something basic was over Augustus who rebuilds and Rome goes on to new heights Constantine who holds it together but it's never the same and Agustin who watches it fall which of those three figures best represents our present moment well that's a revealing question because it requires me to be answer either what I would like to be true or what I think is true you go ahead and give us both you being you I'll take as much of my reach out and give you a third alternative and that's the Emperor Justinian after things that collapse because I think a lot of ways America's collapsed if I look at a lot of indications for as far as school test scores or harmony between people or red state blue state divides or infrastructure etc but something like that had happened and everybody thought the Rome was over with and it was in the West and then that this nut who spoke Latin became Emperor Justinian and first of all he gave me the year roughly is right around five thirty thirty-five 40s so then ad so then what did he do he's he said we've got to have all of Roman law over the last thousand years aggregating he created the Justinian code which the basis for modern European law and then he said we've got to restore the East the Empire so he was sent out a brilliant guy named Bella Soros and they did reconstruct the eastern empire and then he said we've got to restore the West and he almost did he had old North Africa he had all of the Balkans he had most of Italy had parts of Spain of course the bubonic plague that we talked about earlier wiped out 500,000 but my point is then he said we need a matte majestic Testim to Christianity and he built Hagia Sophia Santa Sophia Saint Sophia Cathedral it was the largest dome in the world until the Saint Peter's at the Vatican what I'm getting at that lasted a thousand years and it created a it saved the Balkans and it saved Mediterranean culture and it did it saved classical thought because in the West during the collapse we wouldn't have had two manuscripts of Thucydides or Herodotus a lot of Aristotle or Plato it was saved not as the politically correct decision says in the Arabic were only 2% won most of it was saved by Byzantine scholars and that was written no they knew Greek people in the West had forgotten what I'm getting at is that I think what we're trying to do right now is go back to basics and say you don't have a postmodern sophisticated cool society as Hollywood depicts or or TVs prepare or mute popular music does or snapchat or Twitter because that's not a good indication of how healthy you are every society has to go back to the existential foundations do we have fuel I was really worried when we had to deal with corrupt Middle East regimes somebody brilliant people figured out how to horizontally drill and frack and convinced us to do it and we have less carbon emissions and we've ever had and we're the world's largest producer of natural gas and or somebody and I'm looking out the window and I snow a lot of these people said you know what just let us go we can we can take an almond orchard 30 years ago that produce a thousand pounds and we can produce 3,200 pounds with one tenth of the number of pesticides and one-fifth the amount of Labor and then somebody said you know our universities are sick the undergraduate curriculum czar sick but don't let us contaminate science and math and engineering and so I look at the rating of universities in the world the top 2817 are in the United States Caltech MIT Stanford and it's not because of their you know ethnic studies women's studies leisure studies Peace Studies programs it's what counts they're good at they're better that they're not just good at it they're better than anybody in the world I'm not a big fan of the people who run Silicon Valley but I have enormous admiration for creating an American industry better than anything and when I look at a lot of people in this country about half the country are patriotic and they're confident and what they've done is in the last 20 years they've made the United States the biggest and safest food producer the biggest and face the safest energy producer the biggest and best professional education producer and we have they're still even though it's been as under salt we have the best constitution in the world and we're not even for all of the tragic abortions and the child missing us and living in your basement - you're 30 the fertility rate is still higher than most of postmodern societies including China's and South Korea's in Japan so well I just looked at I say throughout history over 2,500 years food fuel education children all of these things are important and we're doing pretty well in them and we could be posed with the right leadership after this thing is over to be in a much stronger position the countries that are really hurting right now I think or North Korea Iran China Russia Russia's being wiped out with this energy war and falling prices and world for all of our self-criticism and bickering and he did that no you did that we're much better position if we'll just be calm and remember we can say to ourselves let's call this the corona project we did the Manhattan Project we did the b-29 project we did the space race project man on the moon project and let's just get a little bit more upbeat and we can do it rather than oh my gosh there's one out of a thousand chance I'm gonna die I can't go on and I think we'd make it Victor Davis Hanson the author of one book after another most recently the case for Trump speaking to us today from his ranch in the San Joaquin Valley of California thank you thank you for having me Peter for uncommon knowledge the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation I'm Peter Robinson [Music] you
