Victor Davis Hanson LIVE Q&A: The Greatest Threats to America and ‘The End of Everything’ New Book

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In turbulent times, classicist and military historian Victor Davis Hanson is always a voice of reason.

To make sense of the Trump trials, the stunning recent protests on college campuses, and where the 2024 election is headed, I’ll be doing a live Q&A with Mr. Hanson on Wednesday, May 8, at 2 p.m. ET here on EpochTV.

His new book is “The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation,” and there are a lot of lessons to be learned here for America.

Post your burning questions in the live chat or in the comments below, and we’ll see you all there.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Victor, so good to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Victor Davis Hanson:
Thank you for having me on.

Mr. Jekielek:
Victor, I’m going to start with something you wrote, “It cannot happen to us. We see a recurring universally human theme across time and space. The doomed at the brink of civilizational destruction have an attitude partly born of hubris and partly born of naivete, perhaps best summed up as, ‘It cannot happen to us.’” Let’s start here.

Mr. Hanson:
When one side loses a war the typical follow-up is that they surrender either with conditions or unconditionally and they’re usually not annihilated. Even during World War II, given the existential nature of our war, they were allowed to recalibrate. They had to change their governments, but by and large, 97 percent of the population survived and they are very dynamic countries today. But every once in a while in history that doesn’t happen.

I was curious to see why it didn’t happen and when it didn’t happen
and how it didn’t happen, in these very few instances. I selected four of the maybe 20 that are known. In all of these cases there was an air of disbelief. These had been very prominent countries or states or city states or empires, like the case of classical Thebes, that had been around for 1100 years and Carthage for 800-plus years. It was Constantinople for almost 1200 years and Tenochtitlan we don’t quite know about.

They were considered indomitable with very impressive defenses. The seven gated Thebes, the mythical city of Oedipus, and Carthage’s walls had never been breached. They were the largest in the ancient world on any continent at that time. Then there were the Theodosian walls which are still there at Constantinople. They had never been breached in over a millennium. Even the fourth Crusaders who came in on the seaside couldn’t break through. Tenochtitlan was sort of like Venice. It had a very sophisticated method of locks and causeways that could be interrupted, so they were an island fortress.

They felt that they were invulnerable and that they had been accustomed to being preeminent places. When these existential occasions arose they just felt that they could either finesse it or negotiate it or just win it. They had no real idea of the threat they were in or the degree of decline that had occurred or the nature of the conqueror who would be outside their walls. They had no idea who Alexander the Great was or what he was capable of or Scipio Emilianus, or Hernan Cortes, or Sultan Mehmed the second.

Mr. Jekielek:
You take us into this incredible historical world. Most people don’t grasp the importance of Carthage in history. Then looking at the Aztec Empire, there was the sheer difference in numbers. It was 1,500 conquistadors to 400,000 Aztec warriors.

Mr. Hanson:
Hernán Corneas, in aggregate, had about 2,500, but at any one time he never had more than 1,500 conquistadors. He was dealing with a city-state of a quarter-million that could easily field 100 to 150,000 with its surrounding allies.

Mr. Jekielek:
There were multiple campaigns by Carthage against Rome which turned Rome into a vengeful power. The Carthaginians at some point gave up and said, “We’re going to do everything that you want us to do.” Then the Romans came in and obliterated the place. How can you even get a hint that’s what will happen when you’re conceding everything?

Mr. Hanson:
Yes, that was the largest amphibious force that had taken place since Xerxes’ invasion of Greece. Probably 70 to 80,000 Romans landed at Utica, and they had landed on the prompt of an investigatory committee that had been sent by the Roman city. Carthage, after the Second Punic War, which had transpired over a half century earlier, paid off all their fines and their indemnities. How did they do that?

We’re starting to see Carthaginian mercantile ships all over the Mediterranean. We hear from our Numidian allies that they’ve got an army. They sent a group of inspectors, and they saw that the city had 500,000 people, and that it was wealthy and bustling. They went back to the Senate and the elder Cato said, “Carthage must be destroyed.”

They sent this huge fleet, and it gave them an ultimatum. It said, “You’re going to have to give up all your weaponry. You’re going to have to destroy your city and move it inland 10 or 12 miles,” and they were willing. It was a two-stage demand. The first stage was to give up their weapons, and they did that. They talked to the Carthaginian Senate, and the people were okay with that.

Then they were summoned back by the two consuls and were told that wasn’t enough. They had to destroy the city and move it inland at the same distance as Rome was from Ostia. They refused to do that. At that point, they killed their governor and had a mob riot.

They picked not the famous Hasdrubal, but perhaps a relative of his. He was a firebrand, he reorganized the defenses, and from 149 to 146, for three years, they sustained them. They would have sustained them longer if the Romans had not discovered the adopted grandson of the famous Scipio Africanus, Scipio Melianus. He was an authentic military genius.

Once he was made commander of the entire Roman siege force it was just a matter of time for the Carthaginians. Because he understood how to defeat them like pruning a tree or a bush. He just made circuits around the city and all of the outlying villages that had been supplying Carthage with food and weapons. He gave them an ultimatum. Either they would be annihilated singularly one after another, or they could join him and join the Romans.

Mr. Jekielek:
It comes back to, “This can’t happen to us, these walls have never been penetrated.” In our society today, we forget about the lessons of history and what they can teach us. There are many lessons from Carthage and the Aztec Empire. What is the biggest lesson from Carthage?

Mr. Hanson:
There are two angles you have to look at. One is understanding the invader. They had no idea that the Romans had global aspirations and they wanted to control the entire Mediterranean and they had controlled the northern half of it since the Second Punic War and most of the West.
They didn’t realize that they were the only obstacle, and no matter what they did, they would be interpreted as an obstacle. That was number one.

They had no idea who Scipio was. He came in as a legate, a minor official. But once he was put in power, they had no idea of his genius, his intelligence, and his agenda. He was a man on the rise in Roman aristocracy. He was accompanied by the historian Polybius, so these conquerors were intellectuals in some sense. They were not like Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, or Attila the Hun.

They were systematic, brilliant, ruthless people. But on the Carthaginian side, they never made a systematic assessment of, “How many ships do we have vs. how many ships do the Romans have? How have we done defeating the Numidians, our rivals, vs. what the Romans do with their opponents on the other side of the Mediterranean? How does Hasrabel, our leader, measure up?”

Because he surely was not a Hannibal Barca of the Second Punic War. They never asked, “To what degree do we have weaponry now that would be able to withstand siege? Where are we in our 800-year history?” No one came forward and said, “My God, we used to control Spain. We had Hannibal outside Rome. We controlled Tunisia and Libya, all the way to the Egyptian border. The Mediterranean was our lake, and we controlled Sicily.”

No one said, “We haven’t done that in 50 years, and we’re never going to do it again because we don’t have the wherewithal, and our opponents are stronger.” All of that taken together, they thought they could reason with the Romans. Whereas, as soon as that fleet had come, they immediately increased their own fleet and their own armament and tried to rally allies. I don’t know if they could have won, but they might’ve had a better chance. There was no way they could negotiate their way out of this in the way they thought they could.

Mr. Jekielek:
They said, “We agree to everything.’ They convinced the population to agree to everything. They said, “Now, we should be good.”

Mr. Hanson:
Yes, the Romans came with the Senate directive. That’s why they came with such a huge force. That’s why they were able to flip the people of Utica, the big port nearby, so they could land there. They felt that that force was there for a purpose, which was to defeat the Carthaginians, who were much weaker than the first and second Punic War Carthaginians, which they had won.

But the Romans were tired of them. Their attitude was, “Every 50 to 60 years, they rearm again. They ran wild in Italy for 19 years and we are sick of them. They’re not part of our agenda. We don’t want to coexist with them. We’re going to land this huge force and we will give them an ultimatum.

It was like Hitler said to Czechoslovakia in 1939, “You have to disarm.” Once they disarmed, the Romans thought, “Now what? They will still have their city. As soon as we leave, they will rearm again.” Then they had further consultations and sent envoys.

The Romans had a renewed demand, “You have to destroy the city so you won’t be able to have a Navy. At least you won’t be able to go into the Mediterranean if you’re way inland.” They couldn’t do that. At that point there was a riot and they killed some of the leaders who had acquiesced to the initial Roman demand.

They felt they had a pretty good chance to survive. They had 500,000 people. They were larger than Rome was at the time. They were probably as wealthy as the city of Rome. They felt they were still better at sea than Rome was. They could rebuild their fleet and they could rebuild catapults and armor and they had tributary allies..

But they had no idea of what Rome’s intentions were. All of the power of the Roman Republic, which was quickly on the way to becoming an empire, would be directed at Carthage, and they never had lost a war. They’d had setbacks in Spain. They’d had setbacks in Gaul, but they had never lost a war.

They were always like Russia. Russia has terrible setbacks. It’s initially incompetent, whether it’s with Charles XI, Charles XII, Napoleon, or Hitler, but eventually they win. That’s the way Rome was. They didn’t understand that at all, and they had made very bad choices at this point. It was a 50-year process where they thought they could turn themselves into a mercantile Singapore and they wouldn’t pose a threat. They would no longer be an imperial military power.

But once they did that, they quickly discovered that they had interests in North Africa that were being preyed upon by the Numidians who were allies to the Romans. Then they had to rearm and protect their interests. As soon as they did that, they were violating the terms of the Second Punic War peace.

If they had just said, “We’re going to be a trading port and we’re going to disarm. We’re going to be allied to the Roman Empire and become a tributary state,” they may have been able to do that. But they were in the position of countries in 1939 like Poland and the Czech Republic. There was no way that Hitler was not going to absorb them. France was just seen as an obstacle to his greater agenda. But they didn’t understand this type of thinking, so they had not prepared themselves for that moment. They should have been rearming. If they wanted to resist, they should have been rearming and prepared to form alliances a long time prior to that.

Mr. Jekielek:
Things have been good, you’ve been effective, you’ve been a power, you’ve been successful, and you’re facing some difficult odds in the distance, but you still think you can continue. You think, “Nothing bad can happen to us.”

Mr. Hanson:
Yes. You could now look at the United States as a declining power, and China as an ascending power. We think, “We won two world wars, we created the post-war order, we spend the most money on defense of any country. When we want to win, we can, and therefore we should downplay China. It’s not going to do anything. They couldn’t hurt us. Maybe they have regional interests.”

If you were Carthage, you would think that way. If you were analytical today, you would say to yourself, “Wait a minute. We’re $36 trillion in debt. We’re borrowing $1 trillion every 100 days. We are 45,000 people short in the military. The military is being torn apart by DEI. We’re alienating the demographic that dies at twice its numbers in Afghanistan and Iraq than the general population.

Our blue state model is collapsing and people are fleeing. Our cities are full of crime. As we’re seeing, our campuses are no longer preeminent. We have to be very careful because China has an agenda. We think Xi is a nice guy, but if you look at what he said and his new alliance with Russia and Iran and North Korea, he would like to emasculate the United States.

They’re building nuclear weapons much faster and ships much faster than we are. They have nearly five times the population of the United States. That would be a realistic assessment right now, but we don’t hear about that. We just hear, “We’re the United States, we’re the cultural capital of the world, and we’re the wealthiest of anybody.”

But look at the fundamentals. What about our energy sector? Are we the greatest producer of gasoline?” We could be. With our food sector, are we supporting farm and food production? We could do that. With MIT and Caltech and Stanford and Harvard and Yale, are they the most empirical, disinterested, rational places in the world? They could be.

This decline is self-inflicted. Joe Biden said that China is our friend. But if a president said, “These people want to destroy us and that’s their agenda, and we better rearm as fast as possible,” nobody would believe that. They would think he was crazy or just a warmonger.

Mr. Jekielek:
Now, we have Xi Jinping saying, “We are waging a people’s war against America.” It can’t be any more clear than that, and it’s very public. The entire Chinese public knows this because it’s constantly replayed in the propaganda. But somehow we’re not aware.

Mr. Hanson:
That’s exactly the same thing with the Aztecs. When Cortes set foot in that city, Montezuma’s brother said, “He’s a killer. He’s not a god. He’s a killer. He bleeds, he eats, he defecates. He likes to have sex. These people are killers and they will destroy us.” But he was not listened to.

The emperor of Constantinople, the last Byzantine emperor, looked at the situation and said, “The Sultan is not like his father. He wants to destroy us. He feels that we’re an irritant and we’re in decline.” A lot of people didn’t believe him. He tried to marshal help from the West. In the United States today you could say, “Nobody in the Cold War killed 100,000 Americans.” China, by providing fentanyl precursors and knowing it will be processed by cartels and walked across an open border, can kill 100,000 Americans. These are not suicidal drug addicts. In many cases, these are kids that go to a party and they take Ativan or Valium disguised as fentanyl. It’s killing 100,000 people.

It has been a half-century since Reagan talked about Star Wars. American technology has been very successful in creating the iron dome systems in Israel and the Patriot missile batteries. You would think in this dangerous world, we would spend a portion of the defense budget with a complete dome over the United States and our territories. We have Hawaii, we have Alaska, we have islands off the coast. We could protect the continental United States from an attack, but you don’t hear about that. They say it would be provocative or a waste of money. It’s the same kind of laxity.

There are 300,000-plus Chinese students studying here. If just 1 percent were involved in espionage, that’s 3000 people. They’re wholesale taking technology and bringing it back to the mainland. We know that. We had a professor at Stanford University, a neuroscientist, who was a member of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. We know all of this.

We know that we have over 150,000 Middle East students. Many of them are actively promoting the Hamas/Hezbollah line. They’re here in the United States. We have no idea about the 10 million illegal immigrants. The historian Libby said that the proposed medicine, when you think about it, could be worse than the disease, and that’s when a society reaches paralysis.

They just can’t marshal the will. They know what they have to do, but they don’t want to be called a racist. They don’t want to be called a xenophobe. They don’t want to be mocked by the EU. The International Criminal Court might think something about them. They don’t want to be made fun of like Reagan and his Star Wars. All of that stops people from doing what they know has to be done.

Mr. Jekielek:
I think about the sheer scale of human sacrifice happening in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec when Cortes came on the ground. It was a very nihilistic ideology, because they were killing incredible amounts of people.

Mr. Hanson:
It is. I never understood some of the academic and elite of Mexico who migrate here, the Mexican-Americans. When you say there’s documented evidence that they had a systematic methodology of killing anywhere from 25,000 to 50,000 of their allies and tearing their hearts out and rolling them down temple major shrines and having people eat them, they get very angry. You would say, “You should get angry. You’re the ancestors of the Tlaxcaltecs more likely, because the Aztecs were eliminated. The Tlaxcaltecs really outdid the Spanish in killing them, but your ancestors were liberators.”

But they don’t see that because of the monumental architecture and the astronomy of the Aztecs. But they created everything in their society that promoted human sacrifice. Their whole way of fighting flower wars was not western in the sense that you see the enemy, you go collide with the enemy, you try to kill or wound as many so that you can break up the enemy formation and annex ground and get your political objective.

Their idea was you see the enemy and there are certain rules. It’s called a flower war and there are standards on each side. You go through individual warriors without tactical knowledge who just individually roam around and knock people over. Then they bind their feet and attendants drag them back carrying a big standard and the warrior who gets the most of them is considered preeminent.

Then during the peace those conquered people are taken and stripped naked and treated like gods for a day or two. Then they are painted and marched to the top of the pyramid at the shrine, put on a stone slab, and have their heart taken out. The priest holds it up still beating, and then they throw the carcass down. Then people carve it up and give the entrails to animals. That’s how they envision war.

They see these people coming that are white and have new, unfamiliar things. They themselves don’t have metal, but then they see this Toledo steel breastplate. They look at these Toledo steel swords, which were the best in Europe. Spanish Gladius swords came from Spain and Spanish steel ore was the best in the world.

Flint was very sharp, but after three or four blows, it dulled, but the Spanish steel did not. They had little chihuahua dogs, but they saw these mastiffs that were like Great Danes that were vicious. They saw horses and they had never seen a horse before. They thought the man and the horse were connected as if they were centaurs.

They heard gunpowder, and they had arquebuses, and they had crossbows. They just thought the Spaniards were divine. Cortez was interested in converting them to Christianity and getting all the gold they could get to ship back to Charles V in Spain. This was the apex of the Spanish Empire, and they were warriors against Islam, and they were warriors against Protestant apostates.

They were going to achieve those goals for Charles V by A; getting as much gold as they could to enrich the Spanish so that they could field on, and B; save and gain as many Catholic souls as possible so that the Protestant and Islamic threats would not overwhelm Orthodox Christianity.

The poor Aztecs, when they started to talk to them, thought they were gods and let them into the city. They treated them like kings. Then when they started to see that they urinated, they had sex, they ate, and they were men, people started to say, “They’ve stayed too long.” They surrounded them, but the Spaniards took Montezuma as a hostage.

When they tried to get out of the city on the infamous Noche Triste, 500 of them were slain. They were almost wiped out to the man, but about 600 survived. As I mentioned in the book, it was an unfortunate experience that these were not like a New England tribe that was meeting the pilgrims or religious persecution exiles from Europe. These were the toughest people in Europe and they were mostly male. To the degree they were female, Maria Estrada was just as tough as a man.

They had been fighting Protestants and fighting in North Africa against Muslims. In 1492, a mere 30 years earlier, they had freed themselves in the Reconquista from all Muslim control. They had discovered the great wealth, the gold and silver, was not in North America at this time. It was in Central and Latin America and South America.

They were becoming very wealthy and they were very fierce people. Cortez was a minor official, but like Alexander the Great or Scipio, he was an authentic military genius. Without him, they couldn’t have done it, but he was completely ruthless as well.

The Aztecs had nothing in their experience that would tell them what an existential danger they were in. They didn’t know what gunpowder would do. They didn’t know what horses could do. They didn’t know what steel could do. They didn’t know how to fight like that. They didn’t think the purpose of war was to kill and slaughter people and then win a political objective.

Mr. Jekielek:
The CCP was very effective during the Cultural Revolution in getting rid of traditional culture. But the warfare culture they didn’t get rid of they actually learned from, like winning war without firing a shot. Now, they are waging war on America with economic warfare, this drug war, and all these different hybrid asymmetrical warfare tactics that are being used. But we still don’t get it because we still imagine it’s the old way of military warfare.

Mr. Hanson:
Cortez was very brilliant. On one hand, he showed them gunpowder and lances. He had a complete fanatic in Pedro Alvarado, one of the great conquistadors of the world. Look at what mounted men with lances could do. A Toledo blade in the hand of a conquistador you could cut a man in half with one swipe. A mastiff dog was a huge vicious dog and they had a lot of them. They had some of the best crossbow shooters in the world.

He showed them how difficult it would be to defeat a small number like this. But at the same time he was passive-aggressive. He said, “We want to live with you. All we need is some gold. By the way, I wish you wouldn’t make salsa out of human blood and wear the skins of people. This is against Christ.” They got mixed messages from him.

This isn’t an apt description of the Chinese. They’ve got a third-of-a-million people almost over here to appropriate technology and learn about American technology, law, medicine, our military academies. The whole effort is to Xerox it, but it’s never packaged that way. They say, “This is our sign of friendship. We’re worried that our PhDs will stay in America.” At the same time, they’ve got Confucius Institutes that are actively recruiting, communist Chinese former citizens that are residents here in the United States to work with them.

With the Covid thing, they were using gain-of-function research. It probably went wild, but they got a lot of help from the United States. They said, “We want to come to you. We know it’s against the law in the United States. If you give us instrumentation and expertise and some money at our lab, then you can share in the results.” That lab very soon was under the control of the People’s Liberation Army.

I think it was an accidental escape, but much of the impetus for that Covid-19 virus was from the military to create a bioweapon. Right near where I live, 12 miles away in Reedley, California, they found a lab full of dangerous Chinese pathogens from bizarre things like chlamydia and malaria and Covid and even HIV that were just scattered all over by a person with connections to the Chinese government.

But Xi always smiles, and we have all these Chinese students here. The more they get to know Americans, we’re corrupting them in a sense, because then they don’t want to go back. But Americans are very naive about this threat.

When the world started to issue warnings about Covid, the Chinese had some of the most sophisticated propaganda. They controlled the WHO and then warped it. They were telling us, “You’re racist.” This is typical of the great 19th century racist scare and the exclusionary laws that say we’re all victims. They say, “No, we don’t have a million Uyghurs in camps as you accuse us of. No, we don’t go after religious groups. How dare you say that?”

Meanwhile, it’s insidious. All of a sudden there’s the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. They go to each of our allies, the Australians, the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, and Japan and say, “Look, the Philippines and the United States are setting. We’re rising. You’re not really under their nuclear shield. We’re not asking to be allies. We’re just asking you to be fair.”

They’re trying to undermine our alliances. They’re dumping products. They violate copyright laws. They violate patents. They always say, “We’re just catching up. We’re friends. We’re just being taught by you to be good members of the community.”

The whole purpose of all of this is to suddenly say at one point, “We’re your enemies. This is the new world order and this is what we’re going to do with Taiwan. This is what we’re going to do with Japan. This is what we’re going to do internationally from the Panama Canal all the way to your access to the South China Sea.”

Nobody believes this would happen here. I do believe that if they had nuclear superiority right now, they would use it according to their doctrine. They’re an autocratic government like Iran. They do have existentialist ambitions to destroy other rivals like Rome did. But we’re very naive about all this.

Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s talk about the protests on campus and also the Trump trials. Before that, in your book, you talk about the current nuclear bluster and what that really means. There are engagements right now that could possibly end horrifically in annihilation. Are you seeing that?

Mr. Hanson:
We know that for the last 20 years, Iran has leveled threats to Israel.
Mr. Rafsanjani denied it, but he’s on the record saying that Israel was a one bomb state. The logic being that they appreciated that probably most of the observant Jews are in Israel and that made it easier to destroy them all with one or two nuclear weapons. It’s a very densely populated country of 11 million. While Iran is trying to get a bomb, if they do not have one already, they have unleashed their China clients.

They’ve got Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas. Their job is to destroy the morale of the Israelis and keep them all in a garrison state. Now, for the first time, Iran has attacked the homeland of Israel. We forget that those 320 ballistic and drone projectiles were the largest ever seen in one time since WWII. That’s still the largest drone attack ever.

Many of them were destroyed on launch, many of them in the air, but six did make it through. That’s kind of worrisome for Iran, because if they were nuclear tipped, they might have blown up on their own launch pad or on the way through Jordan or Saudi Arabia. But six got through. If they had been nuclear, they would have done a lot of damage and maybe destroyed Israel.

At the same time this is going on, we’ve had about 18 or 19 incidents where the Russian media, the Russian military, and Mr. Putin himself said, “Ukraine doesn’t exist. It’s a bastard child of the breakup of the former Soviet Union. We’re going to take over the areas that are majority Russian speaking, but Ukraine doesn’t exist. If the West keeps trying to take it away from us and put it on our border as an armed Western power, we’re going to use nuclear weapons to stop it.”

Everybody said, “Don’t fall for that bluster.” I say that 99 percent of that bluster is actually false. But you don’t know what the 1 percent is. When you make 100 of those threats, one might happen. At the same time, Erdoğan in Turkey, is really not so much a NATO member, but a belligerent. He said to the Athenians, “You’re going to wake up one morning and see our new Turkish missiles fill the skies of Athens and blow you up.”

This was in relation to eight ancient islands off the Turkish coast that have always been Greek; Rhodes, Samles, and Lesbos. But Erdoğan thinks they belong to him. They just ethnically cleansed 200,000 Armenians at Karabakh last year. He said that Azerbaijan, a Turkish-speaking ally, has to get rid of all of them. He said that the Azerbaijanis themselves have a solution, which is, “Our grandfather’s solution,” and we know what that was.

At the same time, we have Kim Jong Un threatening to destroy Japan or South Korea or even Seattle, because he has 10 or 15 nuclear-tipped missiles. We’ve had Erdogan threaten the Kurds. A line in my book mentions a Chinese general that said that they were capable of nuking Japan for past crimes against China.

They said, “The South China Sea is ours, and Taiwan is a historical mistake. It’s not really an entity at all and it’s just a process. It’s a province of China. There is no such thing as a Taiwanese dialect, a Taiwanese religion, or a Taiwanese culture. It will be reabsorbed back to where it belongs.” Everybody sort of laughs about that, but the Chinese don’t.

I had done very well in China with my book, “The Dying Citizens,” The part about the Second World Wars was especially popular. But when I put that line in this current book, my publisher got a letter from the Chinese publisher. He called me and said, “All you have to do is take out that one sentence, and the Chinese translation will go through. But if you don’t, they’re going to cancel it. We’re not going to tell you what to do, but we should be aware that you’re going to lose that market.”

I didn’t take the line out, of course, so they canceled the translation. It’s never going to appear in China. The Chinese wouldn’t be that sensitive unless people were starting to notice they were continually threatening Taiwan and people were getting angry that they were doing that.

Here is one of the scariest things Mr. Erdogan said during the failed coup six years ago in Turkey. He said he cut off all the power to the American Air Force base at Incirlik. We have about 50 huge, dirty bombs, kind of ossified 1960, one megaton, or two hundred kiloton big bombs, and he cut off access to them.

Then he said that they should not be removed because they had been in Turkey so long that he felt the Turkish government had proprietary rights to them. This is a time when he is very close to Iran and Russia. We know that Russia is arming Iran with very sophisticated missile defenses to give it a first strike capability if it wants to go after Israel.

There are a lot of things going on in the world right now, and there’s a lot of naivete in Europe and the United States. Europe and the United States are not armed sufficiently and they are not united. Their economies are servicing enormous debts. The interest on the national debt is larger now than our defense budget. The money that we do spend is not spent well. It’s spent on very exotic platforms rather than weapons, as we’ve talked about earlier.

Yes, I’m worried. There were people in Carthage and in Constantinople and in Thebes that got very angry when Constantine or Hasdrubal said, “You’ve got to be very careful. These people are killers and we’re not properly prepared.” Then the people said, “Do you want to cause a war? Is that what you want to do? No, we can talk to them. We can deal with them.”

It’s the same thing in the United States. When you talk about missile defense, people say, “That would be so provocative. The Chinese would consider that an act of war.” If we expelled half of the Chinese students and said, “There are too many Chinese students here,” They would say, “That’s racist.” We are like these ancient societies who were paralyzed by fear and inaction.

Mr. Jekielek:
Our producers have collected questions from the audience during this live Q&A. The first question is, “Trump has stated that if reelected, the U.S. will have the largest deportation of illegals in American history. Will this actually be doable? How will it be executed?”

Mr. Hanson:
That was misinterpreted because he was referring to the 10 million who had come in under Biden’s watch. The other problem is the 20 million who have now been here for a number of years. When he was president, prior to this recent influx, Trump said, “We’re going to stop this by building a wall and stopping catch and release and forcing Mexico to cooperate by threatening them economically with either sanctions or remittances we’re going to tax. On a case by case basis, we will deal with the illegal aliens who are already here.”

This is prior to 2021. The questions were, “Have they committed a felony? Are they employed?” Trump was willing to give a green card to those who were working and had no criminal record. But the next 10 million who just came in through the open border, I think he will deport them. That is not as hard as it sounds.

You don’t go around in a van looking for them. You just notify state and federal agencies, and you can do that. You can say to the 600 sanctuary cities, “If you want to shield illegal aliens that’s fine, but you’re not going to get any federal funds for infrastructure or law enforcement—it’s just not going to happen. We’re not going to allow your neo-Confederate, 1850-style nullification of federal law.”

Then Trump could say, “Anytime somebody comes in contact with an agency, and it turns out he just arrived here within the last three years, we’re going to deport them. We can tell President Obrador not to let them come up to the wall again, because if they do, we’re going to tax the $60 billion he received from remittances at 20 percent. We might want $12 billion from him for our own border defense and make the wall pay for itself.” He can do that.

I live in an area flooded by illegal aliens. When you go to the supermarket and see somebody who does not speak a word of English. In some cases, they don’t speak Spanish. If they’re from Oaxaca or Michoacan or China or Nigeria or Somalia, you can tell very quickly.

They have to register with the authorities, because they want free housing, free education, free food, free food shelter. All you have to say is, “Unfortunately for you, you got the wrong idea. The prior administration was culpable and didn’t enforce the law. It was the nullification administration. We’re going to follow the law. We have nothing against you, but we suggest you go back home and try it again legally.”

Mr. Jekielek:
Next question, “Victor, would you please be so brave as to
publish an official VDH Western civilization canon, i.e. required reading for classical literacy from the ancient Greeks forward?”

Mr. Hanson:
There is a project in association with Hillsdale College and
Encounter Books. Larry Arnn and Roger Kimball are doing an entire series on Western civilization textbooks from the beginning of the Greeks to the modern era with workbooks and a textbook for high school and early first and second year college students. They have names like Allen Guelzo, the great Civil War historian, as well as Harvard scholars, and Wilford
McClay, who wrote, “Land of Hope,” on American history.

They’ve got a very good team and it’s going to come out within a year. I’ve already proofread them for Encounter Books, and it’s very well written. There is going to be access to the questionnaire. The student is going to be able to find just what they need in that text.

Mr. Jekielek:
Excellent, I’ll be looking forward to that. The next question is, “Who is the greatest threat to the Republic, foreign enemies or domestic enemies?

Mr. Hanson:
Domestic. The greatest threat is somebody with an advanced graduate degree in the media, in high tech, or in government who has utopian impulses and feels that they are morally or intellectually superior to the rest of us. Therefore, they think that any methods are permissible in order to reach their dream. What do I mean? Who would that be?

It would be Anthony Fauci who believes that he does not have to follow the law that says gain-of-function research is forbidden. In his infinite wisdom, he should be the arbiter of what is permissible. Through EcoHealth, he collaborated with the Chinese. Then we had people like James Comey or Andrew McCabe. Andrew McCabe lied four times under oath. James Baker, his legal assistant, worked with Twitter to suppress information. James Clapper and John Brennan lied on their oath because they felt they were immune, and indeed they turned out to be immune.

Now, people in jurisprudence on the Left say, “Trump is such an existential threat. We have decided that we are allowed to try to get him off the ballot. If he can’t get him off the ballot in particular states, then we’re going to use local and state and federal prosecutors to tie him up, even if these charges have never had a parallel, and we’ve never done this to a presidential candidate.”

“We’ve never done this to any other candidate as far as supposedly overvaluing real estate assets or bootstrapping a supposed federal campaign violation onto a state law. It’s going to be necessary because we can exhaust him financially, physically, and psychologically. We can get him off the campaign trail and we can use the courts to destroy him.”

We’ve had some very prominent generals who said, “Yes, I know it’s against Article 88 of the Military Code of Justice that says you shall not disparage a commander-in-chief if they are either active or retired. But this man is such an existential threat that I have a right to do this. I’m going to call him Hitler, Mussolini, and an Auschwitz-type of person.”

These are actually the people who are dangerous. They’re kind of messianic. They use the FBI, the CIA, and the DOJ in a way that was never intended. Yes, Joe Biden did take files out like Donald Trump did. Yes, he took them longer, for 30 years. Yes, he had no presidential authority to declassify them like Trump had. Yes, he put them in even a more insecure place—a rickety garage.

Yes, he discussed them openly with his ghostwriter who had no classification clearance. Yes, the ghostwriter destroyed that evidence that was under subpoena. He did not want to give it to the special prosecutor. Yes, all of that was true, and the special prosecutor said that he violated the law.

However, the special prosecutor said, “He is of such mental decline that a jury would be sympathetic to his plight and would not convict him of the charges that we think he’s guilty of, and therefore we are not going to charge him.” That type of thinking is very dangerous, because it erodes respect for the law. All of our institutions are under assault by messianic people who believe they have better education and better zip codes. They’re wealthier and more virtuous, therefore they deserve exemptions from the law.

Mr. Jekielek:
What about the threats from the foreign side?

Mr. Hanson:
There are two existential threats to the United States, and one is radical Islam. We saw that on 9/11, and we’ve done pretty well to nullify it abroad, despite the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. We did get rid of ISIS, but we now have a problem at home. We have too many people from the Middle East who have hijacked our university administrators and students, and people like Robert Malley in the government, whose interests are not our own.

The result of that is Iran does not fear us. Iran feels that it has sympathetic administrations with Obama and Biden, which is a necessary foil against illiberal Sunni Gulf monarchies or Israel. That type of thinking is very dangerous.

The other existential threat is China. They’re very sophisticated in how they understand the American mind, and they’re insidious. The Chinese feel that the more students they have here, the more they contract out with Hollywood to censor movies and authors, the more they have sports franchises like the NBA, the more that they have an open border and can send in fentanyl, they don’t have to go to war with us.

They’re already killing 100,000 Americans a year. They’re scaring us with bioweapons. They have a propaganda channel where they can control the content of movies. If an NBA sports figure says, “China is crooked,” they’ll just kick him out of the Final Four. They feel they have that clout within America, and they’re doing it increasingly.

When somebody gets caught openly, they don’t care. Of course, it’s all asymmetrical. If there were 400,000 Americans at Chinese universities and they were rioting, they would be shot. If they were appropriating Chinese technology, they would be shot. If they were trying to determine the content of films or Chinese writers, they would be deported immediately. It’s so asymmetrical.

Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s another question, “What does Victor Davis Hanson tell his family to do? What practical solutions does he have?”

Mr. Hanson:
I tell them to be proactive first, because I believe you have to work within the system. You can’t go to a monastery, whether that’s a physical monastery or it’s a monastery of your mind. I know so many people who said, “Victor, I moved to Tennessee. I couldn’t take California anymore.” I don’t know. I haven’t seen a Hollywood movie in 10 years.”

“I homeschool my kids. I wrote off the public school and I could care less what Stanford or Harvard does. I don’t buy Disney stuff, but if that’s what they want to do, that’s their business.I don’t watch the NBA. I don’t watch the Tonys. I don’t watch the Grammys. I don’t watch the Oscars. I checked out. I can’t stand the Kardashians. I’m just out of all this.”

I can understand that and I feel the same way. But that’s not enough. Because you’re ceding all of these institutions that don’t belong to the Left to the Left. Who said the Left gets to control Hollywood and the Oscars? Who gets to say that the NBA under Michael Jordan had 30 million viewers and now they have 4 million at the playoff time? Who says that they get to do that?

Who says that Stanford, who was founded by all of these classic liberals, gets to be controlled by Jacobins or Harvard? We’re making a big mistake by ceding the public schools, the corporate boardroom, Silicon Valley, the universities, K-12 education, and all of the foundations to the Left. We need to fight for them and not just become hermits or isolationists.

I tell them, “You have to vote. You have to give money according to your station to candidates. You have to speak up among your friends. You’ve got to be an active citizen in order to stop the madness. But then you have to protect yourself, because we can fail.”

I always tell my own children, “You have to monitor what they’re teaching your children. Be careful. If they’re in the Santa Cruz school system and they’re getting an ideology, then get them out. If you think Santa Cruz is lost and you can’t fight it, maybe you can be more effective from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Don’t just isolate yourself, but you also have to take care of yourself.”

I try to tell people to be very vigilant. When I walk on the Stanford campus from my apartment to my office, I just have it in my mind that when I go by the Gaza camp or the demonstrations to be very alert, because I think these people are capable of anything. When I write something, I am aware of that. That Stanford faculty Senate who asked Neil Ferguson and Scott Atlas and I to appear and were trying to censor us for our free expression. I expect them to do that again at any time. I expect it all the time.

I don’t ever want to get into a situation where I say, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.” You need to be proactive and you need to be aware and you’ve got to have a reply. You have to be preemptive. You have to have a plan for what you are going to do.

I always sit down with my wife and I say, “OK, we do a podcast. I write columns. I write articles for journals. I have a paywall and a private subscription to the website. I have my job at the Hoover Institution. I write books.”

This year, one of those is going to dry up. They’re either going to go bankrupt or I’m going to be given an ultimatum that I can’t do it and I can’t sign, so we need to have a backup. This has been absolutely true. This magazine will go completely crazy and I won’t be able to write for it. This one will make demands and will want to censor.

Everybody has to have this attitude, and I do as well. Almost every year I say to myself, “What new avenue can I explore? Because I expect these challenges. I had a podcast that was associated with Hoover and I couldn’t maintain it because they told me there were certain parameters I couldn’t operate on. It was the same thing with National Review.

But you have to see that as an opportunity and not get angry and fight with them. Just say to yourself, “Maybe this is a good idea.” If you’re going to be independent and autonomous, then protect yourself and always think of how you can protect your family when the unexpected comes, because it will come.

If you had told me five years ago that somebody in the Faculty Senate at Stanford University would say that I was on Tucker Carlson and had said things he didn’t agree with that were inflammatory, and the next thing I knew I had a whole transcript of all my appearances that I had to go through word by word, and then people would attack you in the Stanford Daily, I wouldn’t have believed it.

But this happened. It happened to Scott Atlas. It happened to Neil Ferguson. It happened to me. You have to be aware that is going to happen. You have to be aware when you question this dogma of DEI, or woke, or climate change, these people don’t take prisoners. They have mechanisms to try to hurt you, but you can’t let them hurt you. That’s my advice.

Mr. Jekielek:
The next question is, “Why is the GOP pushing election-rigging tactics, such as Bank Your Vote and early voting, which could cause Trump to lose in November 2024?” Victor, there are a whole number of assumptions in this question that you may want to dig into.

Mr. Hanson:
In 2020, in March, April, May, and June, there was a systematic effort funded by foundations, the Soros people, and the Tides Foundation called voter integrity. Under the veneer of Covid, they went to the state legislators in the key swing states of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In most cases, they were able to change the voting laws by either suing that it would be impossible to enforce the existing laws because of Covid, or because they were racist, or because they were discriminatory.

What do I mean by changing the voting laws? You can mail in a ballot and it can arrive 10 days late. You can mail in a ballot and it can only have your first name. You can mail in the ballot that has an improper address. You can mail in a ballot that doesn’t match the register’s list.

You can have somebody come to your home as a third party and harvest your ballot. They can call you up and ask, “Are you registered? Under same day registration, we can register you.” You were given a registration form when you went to the DMV.

They will come to your house and wait there and get you registered on the same day. They will come back the next day with a ballot and let you vote. The purpose was that the Left did not want the traditional 70 percent to show up on election day. Many states have to show an ID like they do for a check and they didn’t want that.

The Trump administration was very naive and they allowed that to happen that time around. Now, they are saying, “We are going to stop that. We are going to get as many states as we can to stop ballot harvesting. We are going to stop the curing of ballots that are invalid, where you can call up the particular candidate and say, ‘This guy voted for you, but he didn’t have the right name. You have 24 hours to contact him and straighten out the ballot.’” There were things like missing ballots. Your kid has been out of college for five years and suddenly his ballot arrives in the mail.

This time they said, “We will stop this at the state legislature. We will make it impossible to do this. We will try to revoke this, but we are not going to be successful in all these places. Until we are successful, we will do exactly what the other side does. We will instruct people that have not registered. We will send people out to their homes. We are not going to leave it there.”

“We will take that registration and come right back and get a mail-in ballot. We are going to sit there and wait to be handed the mail-in ballot, to the extent we can do that legally. Then we will tell people. ‘If you don’t want to vote mail-in, just vote now with an early ballot. Vote 60 days or 30 days ahead.’”

“We are going to hammer them. More importantly, we have got 30 to 60 days to call them up every single day like the Left does, rather than waiting until the last week.” The GOP is emulating the dastardly tactics of the Left, whether you agree with them or not, until we can hold the elections the way they should be run. We are not going to cede the government again to the Left again

Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s a question related to the current campus protests, “Could there ever be a revolution in the U.S.? Do you think the military would stop it or go against the woke generals in the Pentagon?” Again, Victor, there are some assumptions being made here.

Mr. Hanson:
The military is not going to stop it. We have red and blue states, and I have warned against that. We are self-selecting. But within blue states, there are red people, and within red states, there are blue people. We have families.

I have two siblings and two first cousins that we more or less adopted. All four of them disagree with what I feel in a marked way. I don’t have any animus towards them and I try to be as friendly as I can. Even though it tends to be that the Left is more animated than the Right. The person on the Right is more reclusive and will say, “I worry about my church, my community, and my family. I am not going to get into politics.”

But the Left is going 24/7, with lidless eyes, so to speak. But I do think that one side is going to be more in a war. If you are accused of illegal parading on January 6th, but you went nowhere inside the capitol and were just on the periphery, they are going to get a voice or facial recognition on you and put you in jail for illegal parading for a year or two. They are not going to do that to the people in Portland, Oregon, who torched a police precinct.

They are going to say that 30 years ago Donald Trump manhandled Jean Carroll, but she can’t remember on what day. About the same time, Joe Biden supposedly manhandled Tara Reade, but they are not going to pursue that. There is a war going on waged by the left, asymmetrically. They believe they can get things enacted by using the bureaucracy in institutions and in government now.

We are in a cultural war, but it is mostly being fought by the Left. I think that is a fair statement. I don’t see a Republican secretary of state in Wyoming say, “Joe Biden raised money here.There is a bank here that is connected to a bank where he got the money, so I am taking him off the ballot in Wyoming.” I don’t see a local prosecutor in Utah saying, “There was a company where the Bidens overvalued their assets, and there was an affiliate in Utah, so I am going to indict them.”

In states like Arizona I don’t see Biden’s name off all the ballots. I just don’t. As soon as Joe Biden lost the majority in the House in his first term, I didn’t see the Republicans impeaching him the way the Democrats did to Trump almost immediately. I don’t see retired generals coming out of the woodwork right now saying, “Given what Joe Biden did in Afghanistan when he left $50 billion to terrorists and he got 13 people killed because of crazy rules and allowed us to be spied on for 14 days—given all that, he is Mussolini and he is a Nazi.”

I don’t see any of that. The generals who were on the Left did that and violated the uniform code. It seems to me that they are waging a war, but we are not, although I don’t think we should use the tactics they are using.

Mr. Jekielek:
We have another question here, “If President Trump wins the election and Congress does not certify him, what do you see happening?”

Mr. Hanson:
That’s entirely possible, because when the Left was making all of these charges that the January 6 people were trying to disrupt what the electors had already decided—they forgot to mention that in 2004, Barbara Boxer and 30 some House members were trying to stop the certification of Ohio on the bogus claim that the computers were inexact, and therefore John Kerry would have won Ohio, and with it the 2004 election.

In 2016, before the electors voted in December, but after the popular votes, and when it was clear that Donald Trump won the electoral college, night after night we saw the DNC and these foundations fund these B-list actors who said, “Electors, please, it’s for the country in order to save America. Do not vote according to the popular vote in your state. Reflect the national popular vote. Do not vote for Donald Trump.” That was an insurrectionary act. It was unconstitutional, and the Left tried to do that.

Had they been successful and installed these faithless electors, they would have won the election for Hillary. Hillary Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Hakeem Jeffries, the list is long, all said that Donald Trump was an illegitimate president, so they have been engaged in election denialism. But if that were to happen I don’t know where we would be.

It has happened before where there were disputed elections in the House of Representatives. It would depend on who had the majority in the House. I say that with the fear that the Republicans are cannibalizing their seven seat margin down to a one seat margin. They’re trying to go after the Speaker and commit collective suicide.

I don’t know if we have a majority in the House If you’re speaking about the Republican side. But they would ultimately be the adjudicators, unless the other side could flip enough faithless electors.

As a footnote, the Left is trying to pass the national voter compact where they’re getting state legislatures in blue states to say that their electors will not reflect their constitutional duties and vote according to their state tallies, but will only vote according to who wins the popular vote. I think they are about eight votes short.
All they need is enough votes to get 270 and they will have destroyed the electoral college. I think it will be declared unconstitutional. But that’s a more likely scenario to play out in November.

Mr. Jekielek:
Victor, concerning the current campus protests, here is an interesting question, “Is there any common cause between MAGA and the campus protesters? Is there anything that unites them?

Mr. Hanson:
I don’t know how many are from outside the campus. We were told that of the people who were arrested, 50 or 60 percent of them are not U.S. citizens and not enrolled in campus. We have a lot of Middle Eastern students who have a very different agenda than ours. They want to see Israel destroyed and Hamas in control of Gaza and they want radical Islamic, anti-American governments. They feel that they’re coming to the United States to gain the expertise, the technology, and the wherewithal to further that agenda. They have nothing in common with us.

As far as the students go, a lot of them are naive. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you go to a campus as I have and you ask them a series of questions, “River to the sea, what does it mean? Intifada, what does it mean? What’s the Yom Kippur war? What’s the Six-Day War? What’s the green line,” they have no idea. I’m not exaggerating. I don’t know that I have a lot in common with them. They are fellow Americans and they mean well, but they are useful idiots.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is a video of protesters and counter-protesters chanting things against the current administration.

Mr. Hanson:
That shows you what happens when you’re a weak leader and you try to please both sides, when one side is more culpable than the other.

Mr. Jekielek:
The next question is, “Who is behind the riots and who is funding them on campuses?”

Mr. Hanson:
That’s a good question. Preliminary investigations show us that most of the money is coming from foundational grants to particular activist groups; Students for Justice for Palestine, Justice for the Palestinians, and Save Gaza. These groups are all 401(c)3 non-profits and supposedly politically disinterested.

Also, very wealthy people on the Left in the United States give money to them. You can see that when they have tents that are all the same. When they have umbrellas, they seem to be all the same. The scarves look all the same. It’s like somebody is going to REI or Target or Amazon and just buying all of this stuff. I saw a video the other day where everybody had a little white plastic helmet. They were all uniform and they looked like soldiers. The money is coming from various groups.

The Middle Eastern departments in the universities are all recipients of billions of dollars. It’s money from the Gulf, maybe $10 billion in aggregate.You can generally assume that $7 million buys you an endowed professor. That is, the interest on the $7 million will pay salary and benefits. That’s what universities ask if they’re going to endow it.

You’re talking about 13 professors for every $100 million. You’re talking about 130 professors for $1 billion. If they give $10 billion, they’ve got over 1300 Middle East professors who have loyalties and allegiance and debts to their funding Gulf sponsor. That’s pretty much where we are today.

Mr. Jekielek:
Here’s the next question, “Should Americans vote for Donald Trump if he is incarcerated on voting day?”

Mr. Hanson:
It depends on what the evidence is, if you think Donal Trump has committed a felony. He’s been convicted in Letitia James’s court and fined. For the first time in the history of New York she said it was a crime to overvalue your real estate to get a loan which you paid back on time with interest to the profit of the lender. The banks, especially Deutsche Bank, said that they wanted to do it again. There was no crime and there was no criminal. The valuation of Mar-a-Lago was probably accurate. I don’t think that suit was valid.

The Jean Carroll suit about sexual harassment was only tried because an anti-Trump legislator waved the statute of limitations. She couldn’t remember the year. Was it 1995, 1996, or 1997? She said she could remember because she had a certain designer dress, but that designer dress didn’t exist at the time. In fact the whole supposed scenario at the Bergdorf clothing store was identical to an episode of Law and Order, almost to the tee. I would not hold that ruling against him.

Now, he’s facing a criminal charge, but I don’t think it’s a crime to have a non-disclosure form. The federal attorneys who looked at that said it was not a campaign violation. But if Donald Trump had said these were not legal expenses and they were campaign donations, they would have got him on that.

Hillary Clinton was fined over $100,000 for hiring Christopher Steele through three paywalls. Then she said that that was a campaign expense. They said it wasn’t a legal expense or a campaign expense and they fined her for it, but they didn’t put her in jail.

That leaves Jack Smith. If he gets convicted in that case, then we’ve just found out that Jack Smith lied. His office lied and said that the pictures and photos of the so-called classified files that the FBI got were in the same order that Trump had given them. Now, we realize they reordered them to make them look sloppy. They lied about that. They lied to such a degree that the judge put the trial off indefinitely.

Then there’s a question of symmetry under the law. Joe Biden has been found to be guilty of removing files, but given exemption because he’s not fit to stand trial. According to that logic, If Donald Trump has a stroke and says, “I don’t know where I am,” would that mean he would be exempt? I don’t know if they would drop it.

Now, we’re down to Fani Willis and Nathan Wade. We learned this morning that there will be an appeal to remove her from that case. If that case is taken out of Fulton County, no other prosecutor would dare retry that case. She lied under oath about her expenses and the cash. Nathan Wade lied when he said that he had no sexual relationship with her.

I don’t see any merit with any of these cases. Maybe Trump will be in jail, but it’s not going to affect my vote. I can’t tell you what to do. But what if he had committed a real crime? No, I wouldn’t vote for him if he was a felon, but not under the perversion of the law, as we know it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Victor, do you have any final thoughts as we finish this live Q&A?

Mr. Hanson:
I would advise everybody that this is a great experiment that we’re in right now. We are doing things we have never done before in this country.
We have never impeached a president twice. The Founders were very adamant that that should not happen when you lose the House your first term. We’ve never done that in a presidential first term since Andrew Johnson. He was only a one-term president, like Trump. But we’ve done it twice. We have never tried a private citizen in the Senate for impeachment after he left office.

We have never had people try to remove a president from the ballot in their state, who was the leading contender, according to polls, for the next election. We’ve never done that before. We have never had statutes of limitations removed with a bill of attainder just for Trump, as it has been done in the Jean Carroll case or the Bragg case.

No one has ever been tried in New York for overvaluing assets to get a successful loan, when there was actually no crime committed. Nobody has ever done that. Nobody has ever had a federal offense on a supposed campaign violation taken over by a state prosecutor. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for a phone call.

I don’t think people realize, but under every election, when it’s close, most candidates have called the register and said, “I know there’s votes there, find them. I know my votes are there.” Usually, they ignore the candidate. That’s all that Donald Trump did.

This is all new territory and we’ll see what happens. But we should be very careful with what we’re doing, because we are destroying the confidence in the law. There’s a lot of business people in New York who say, “I’m leaving because if I get on the wrong side of Eric Adams or Letitia James, they’re going to say that I overvalued my real estate to get that loan.”

There are many people saying, “I’m leaving New York because somebody is going to come out of my past from 30 years ago with a bunch of crazy stories that don’t make sense, but I’m a prominent person on the Right, and they’re going to get $73 million.” A company is going to say, “Letitia James doesn’t like us. We may have to pay $450 million.” A lot of candidates are going to say, “I’m not going to get near Atlanta because that’s a dangerous place to be.”

We are really destroying integrity. For those of us who are on the conservative side, it’s very sad. My mother was the second appellate court judge in the state of California. She went to Stanford University Law School in 1949 and she was the second superior court judge of our county. She said, “You do not ever criticize a judge. You do not criticize a district attorney.”

She had the utmost integrity for judges and she would not get involved in politics. She would not give money to a political side. She lectured us every day, “You do not get in trouble at school. You do not drink beer with an open container. You don’t do any of this.” I grew up with a lot of respect for the judiciary, but I don’t have it anymore after watching all this.

My father was a decorated veteran with 40 missions over Tokyo. He had to ditch twice at Iwo Jima. I’m named after my father, Victor Hanson. Some of my family was killed on Okinawa.

I see what they did at the Pentagon when they drummed out 8500 people that didn’t get the vax. I see that Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin said that they were going to hunt down white supremacists and white privileged people in the military. Then two years later, they quietly said we didn’t find any. The military is 45 000 recruits short right now.

Then I looked at what all the generals have said about the commander-in-chief, and I started to lose respect for the military. I don’t want to be that way. I’m looking for ways I can restore my confidence in the American judicial system, the American DOJ, the American CIA, the American FBI, and the American Pentagon. I want to regain that.

But I don’t have it now, so that’s my problem. We’re in new territory and this has never happened before where our agencies and our institutions have become so warped they are plotting for short-term political gain. The irony of it is that the people who are doing this say, “Democracy dies in darkness.”

They’ve created a whole vocabulary; irredeemable, deplorable, chumps, dregs, clingers, and ultra-MAGA, semi-fascists for the people that they are attacking. That is them projecting, “You people are trying to destroy democracy,” as they themselves actively destroy it.

That’s where we are, so everybody’s got to get active. Register to vote, help people get to the polls, donate to candidates, speak up, write to your local paper or online journal, volunteer to observe the election, and do whatever you can to be engaged.

Mr. Jekielek:
Victor Davis Hanson, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Mr. Hanson:
Thank you for having me. Thanks everybody for listening.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.