Victor Davis Hanson

speaker

2,022 appearances 16 recordings 5 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 23 Mar

Victor Davis Hanson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Charlie Kirk Show · Victor Davis Hanson Helps Make Sense of a Confusing World · 3 Apr 2025 podcast

And then the two blue coasts were going to be, were all Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, federal government, big banks, corporate headquarters, Silicon Valley. These were going to be leading the United States and we were going to kind of be the tail or the drag force. you know, farming, mining, getting your hands dirty, extraction, production, assembly, manufacturing.

It wasn't really necessary. And then, of course, we started to notice things, Charlie, that we were producing one warship a year and the China was a month and they were producing over 200. And we, during COVID, we looked for our pharmaceuticals, masks, all these things we thought were mundane and trivial. And suddenly these countries were saying, well, we don't know if we're going to

ship it to you this week or not. And so we realized that our grandfathers were not stupid, that they wanted to be self-sufficient in the stuff of civilization, food, energy, housing, materials, ships, military equipment.

And so I think we're kind of... We're questioning in that, that we thought we were so wealthy that the financial sectors and the globalization was going to carry us, and now suddenly... we're $37 trillion in debt. And people are saying, well, maybe our grandfathers were not that bad off because they were producing the stuff that civilization and life needs.

It is because you see that it's not just a bunch of people mindlessly on an assembly line putting widgets together. It requires the most sophisticated robotics, artificial intelligence. And those are areas that we excel in. So when you start to see these people building these huge power plants, mostly by natural gas and AI plants, that technology can be married with assembly.

So even though we have a fossilized 1.6 fertility rate, you can get an American and marry him with machines in assembly, in manufacturing, even in things like housing now, where you see entire walls made in factories, you know, the studs and everything, and then brought to the site and they're pre-assembled. And so we're very innovative and it's time that we could do both very well. And

It's kind of interesting what Trump is doing. He's kind of emulating very quickly the War Production Board. You know, we were the 17th largest army in the world. At the end of 1945, we had 12 million people, almost the size of the Soviet Union's army, and we had the largest navy in the world. But it was the largest navy ever. in the sense of greater than all the navies put together.

We build 140 aircraft carriers of various classifications. And what I'm getting at is what Roosevelt did, the socialist, he said, I'm not going to be a socialist anymore during the war. You, Henry Ford, you, Henry Kaiser, you, William Knudsen, you go out and make bombers and liberty ships. And make a profit, but you've got to have the United States' interest.

And I think that's what Trump's doing with Andreessen and David Sachs and even to a degree Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. He said, I will protect you when the Europeans go after you or the Chinese cheat on you. But I want you to invest here and I want your abilities to be in service of America. And I want your rockets and your Facebook and your investments and anything you make, create jobs here first.

And it's kind of an appeal to a nationals patriotic element. I think a lot of the billionaire entrepreneurs are starting to react to it.

Yeah, I've been there for 21 years in the fall, and I'm going to give the graduation speech in May, May 10th. So I'm looking forward to it. It's a wonderful place. First day I got there, I noticed two things that nobody locked their bike up. And there wasn't one book in the bookstore that had a dash studies, no environmental studies, gender studies, race studies.

It was all regular courses of the old style, math, science, literature, history, philosophy.

Yeah, I came back and wrote a column and said, I think he's going to win. That's right. I remember this. I saw them everywhere. And I saw a guy painting the side of his barn. I got off and I thought somebody was vandalizing it. I didn't see the Trump, just part of the T. I ran over there and he was very nice. He just said, I can do whatever I want to my blank, blank barn.

And I said, well, what are you doing? I'm curious. He said, I'm painting the word Trump. So that was... I thought he had a chance. I really did, and I wrote that.

And here where I live in the San Joaquin Valley, a lot of Hispanic males, especially, even as early as 2016, I was just stunned that so many of them in building, construction, agriculture were going to vote Trump for a variety of reasons.

Well, I think the way to look at it is long-term and short-term. Almost every country that we export with, we're running a deficit with. I mean, in terms of now as a farmer and, say, almonds with India, and they have tariffs, and they're very tough people. So if they retaliate, the easiest thing they're going to do is say, we're not going to allow almonds in without a 40%.

And they already have tariffs, but not that high. But long term, if you were able to achieve parity and we took a short term hit and you were able to tell India and China and the Europeans, we're not going to let in this, this, this, unless you let our soybeans or almonds or cheese in at the same rate that we let yours. And it would be it would be kind of fantastic. It really would.

And then I don't know to the degree which he is going to retaliate by putting tariffs on imported foodstuffs. The United States, it's not the largest producer of export food in volume, but it is in value. That's pretty amazing when you think we only have $335 million, $40 million, and China's got $1.4 billion.

But so what I'm getting at is half of everything we produce, we sell abroad and it's very pricey. It's things like high volume pistachios that are worth a lot of money or walnuts or processed cheese, things like that. It's not just grain, which is essential, corn or sorghum. But we have a lot of really specialty crops that the world likes.

And people are paranoid about that, especially because you can live without almonds and you can live without pistachios.

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