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 · last 12 months

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

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show · Overexposed: The Truth and Troubles of Left Politics · 25 Feb 2025 podcast

Yeah.

My grandmother was Irish, so I have no ethnic... No, but they're twisted.

They're running almost a $230 million surplus, and Germany alone is $60 or $70 billion. I should say billion, excuse me, $20 or $30 billion surplus. Germany alone is $70 or $80 billion. When you start looking in depth at the asymmetrical tariffs, depending on the particular commodity, electronics, pharmaceuticals, cars, food, it's about double R's. In other words, they charge us 5%.

We charge them either 0% to 2%. And then we're defending them. And by the way, everybody, don't tell me that we all, well, Victor, we only pay 16% of, 17, maybe a 20% of NATO budget. We don't pay half. That's not quite true. They're all under our nuclear shield, number one. Number two, they wouldn't be able to import oil, believe me, from the Middle East.

They would not be able to ship stuff to China if the U.S. Navy did not patrol. They wouldn't even get through the Red Sea if it wasn't for the U.S. Navy. They couldn't even go through the Suez Canal. So we underwrite all of that. And then they don't even follow the Western tradition of free expression. And they hate us.

We'll get into Donald Trump in a minute, but I don't think they know what... They kind of remind me of the Democratic Party right now.

They think they're doing something that every... When they get Jasmine Crockett on TV and she starts screaming and yelling and racial epithets and horrible stuff, and they think, or you get Schumer out there and he does that, or that shrill Elizabeth Warren, or that Jamie Raskin. They think that's going to generate... You know, popular support. Well, the same thing about the Europeans.

When they start attacking Trump and the United States and this, and then you say, fine, just don't.

There's an election coming up, we'll see. I think the Christian Democrats and the socialists in Germany are doing all they can to get elected the AFD because... Almost every day there is an illegal alien who goes and runs over someone or knifes someone or kills someone. And this was Angela Merkel. Yes, we can do this program. Remember that? Yes, we can do it. Yeah, you did it all right, Angela.

She was the worst chancellor in the history of Germany except for Hitler. She really was. She destroyed that country. Schroeder was bad, but not as bad as she was. She hated, she didn't like any conservative. She was an East German brought up under communism. And that country is in bad, bad shape. And we'll see. And then when this Ukraine, we'll talk about the Ukrainian settlement, but...

When Donald Trump says, this is a problem on your border, it's been going on for three years, you have no solutions. There is no Ukraine now. It's lost a quarter of its population. It's been destroyed. And you want to just fuel it just enough so you can kill about 100,000 people a year. But you don't have any positive strategic goals because you don't want to win and you don't want to lose.

You just want to keep it going. And you bragged and bragged after Linsky was the rock star of 2022 with his T-shirt, ex-comedian, that we're going to send over all – and you didn't send over all that stuff. And now, you know – You're free.

If we had a problem with Mexico or Canada, I don't think the Europeans would butt in and say, we're going to help you with that border with Mexico and those cartels. You can't handle it, America. No, no, no, no. It's right in your backyard, and we have tried to help for three years, and we're nowhere. And there has to be some kind of solution. We can talk about that.

When I was a little boy, my grandmother, who grew up in New Mexico, very poor, with a ranching family, and her father had spent his whole life looking for the Adams diggings. They made a movie about McKenna's gold. You remember that? Oh, really? The mystical. It's supposed to be on the rocket range somewhere. But anyway, he...

Her brother was shot in a saloon and murdered, and her father sold what little cattle they had and went out to look for the desperado. And then he went out in the frontier mountains. They caught the guy and brought him back. And then... He looked for this mystical treasure. But every once in a while, one of her brothers or somebody would send back a little bit of gold dust in the mail.

So my grandmother, when I was a little boy in this house, I'm sitting and would say, look at this. It's worth $32 an ounce. Can you believe that, Victor? And there was like an eighth of an ounce. And my point is, before Nixon got us off the gold standard, The price of gold was set by the government. And the currency, in theory, I think they stopped that in the 30s.

And I know a lot of economists are going to correct me. But there was a time in America that anybody could take their dollars in to a bank and get gold in return at a set government price.

Yes, you could do that. It was a redeemable. Printed money was not currency. It was a certificate for redemption. It was just a way of not having to carry gold around. And there's a lot of people, I've talked to a lot of people, not nuts at all, who want to bring back the gold standard.

They lost everything. They lost everything. They had gone to find the murderer. Her name, their maiden name was Johnston. They were a distant, distant, distant relative of the Confederate General Joe Johnston. And that was kind of a sticking point because my grandfather was a Welshman maternal from Missouri.

And his great, his grandmother, Lucy Anna Davis, they came from Missouri because they were northerners. And he fought on the northern side, but they lived in the southern part of Missouri. So after the war was over, there was a family... saga that he was in a fight with someone and he fled. They decided that southern Missouri was not safe for Yankees. So they fled to California in 1870.

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