SPECIAL—The Author Spotlight--August 2023, Part 2

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to the Theory to Action podcast and our continuation of the author's spotlight Author's spotlight for August 2023. That author's spotlight is focused on one of the hardest working and living American treasures, victor Davis Hansen. Now, last time I said, victor Davis Hansen is not just a historian or a military historian or a classicist. In fact, he's better than that. He's a storyteller, a thinker and, most importantly, an inspire. His work serves as a bridge between the past and the present, reminding us of the enduring relevance of history. So in this episode we will feature his latest three books. There are the Second World Wars, written in 2017, the Case for Trump, written in 2019, and the Dying Citizen, written in 2021. Now, I believe these last three books is some of Victor's greatest writing and his greatest analysis, and I'd love to share that with you. So first let's go to the Second World Wars, because right away you will get a flavor of Hansen as the classicist versus Hansen just as the historian. So with that, let's start with our first two quotes to give you this great example. Go on to the book. British failures had lowered Ramel to conduct a counteroffensive that faltered for lack of supplies. Now he was forced to give up taking Tobruk and began to undertake a long retreat all the way back to El Halligaya where he had to start his original offensive the prior march. By New Year's Eve, 1942, ramel's forces were smaller than when he had begun and the British, despite their losses, had far more men, tanks, planes than before the arrival of Ramel. Most generals would have resigned in desperation and written the entire past year off as another failure, not as a prelude to a bitter, as a prelude to a bitter retirement. Not Ramel. With some modest resupply and growing Luftwaffe presence under Field Marshal Albert Kesserelling, he steadily reclaimed all that he had lost. Ramel soon enjoyed almost mythical status among his Africa Corps troops, bringing to mind Virgil's most famous comment on improbable achievement they can because they think they can, and needed 5.231. Perhaps Ramel, the erstwhile battalion commander responsible for Hitler's personal safety, won for a time without adequate logistical support because he made his troops assume that they were not just invincible but also professional soldiers who were more of a throwback to the German Imperial Army than to Hitler's Wehrmacht. So there is one excellent quote, and you can see the ined reference going back to the classicist in Victor Davis Hansen. But there's more going back to the book. When the second year of the Russian offensive began in the spring of 1942, hitler had faced a reckoning. His armies had suffered enormous losses in 1941. Over 1.1 million casualties, with 35% of the original army that entered Russia in June 1941 now gone. Such attrition was not fully replaced by mid-1942. German forces were now half a million men fewer in number than the force that began Operation Barbarossa. In the first six months of Barbarossa the Germans only added 100,000 troops to the army on the Eastern Front. The Soviets, in contrast, increased their military by well over 3 million. The German army at times was capable of killing Red Army soldiers at unimaginable rates of seven or eight, but not thirty to one. By early 1943, much of the Germans cobbled together. Motor transport had been destroyed or worn out and the majority of its horses were dead. At a time when the Allies were beginning to rush shipments of thousands of trucks to motorize the Red Army, the once backwater Italian effort in North Africa had grown into an open German soar that siphoned off vital resources from Russia to the Africa Corps in a doomed effort to prevent the loss of North Africa. As the disaster of Stalingrad ended, soviet munitions production increased, even as diversions of German air power from the Eastern Front spiked to protect the homeland. Yet while the Sixth Army stalled to the north of Stalingrad and orphaned, army Group B of some fifty divisions, led by General Maximilian Von Weweb-Weichs, reached the Volga. Its twin Army Group A under Fjord Marshal William List got close to Grozny, some of its soldiers on August 21, 1942, climbing Mount Elborus, the highest peak in the Caucasus. By October 1942 the Luftwaffe was sporadically bombing some of the oil fields around Grozny. A strategy that had begun earlier might have done far more damage to the Soviet oil production. The subsequent campaign at Stalingrad doomed all that effort, and some Blitzkrieg dying at Stalingrad in 1942 would soon be entombed in 1943. Both Gehring and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, in their post-surrender broadcast, tried immediately to invoke history s glorious last stands to romanticize the catastrophe, as if Stalingrad, as an official Nazi communique put it, was one of the most treasured possessions in German history. General Manstein s invocation of the last stand of the Spartan defenders at the pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC was pathetic and mendacious, as if the Sixth Army was battling for freedom and consensual government on its home ground rather than National Socialism abroad. But in the end the proper classical illusion is Thucydian. Indeed, stalingrad proved to be Germany s fatal wound, in the manner of the Athenians Empires disastrous defeat in far off Sicily in 415 BC, so famously summed up in the Peloponnesian War quote, at once most glorious to the victors and most calamitous to the conquered. They were beaten at all points and all together, all that they suffered was great. They were destroyed, as the saying is, with total destruction. Their fleet, their army, everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. And there we have again, vdh, victor Davis Hansen at his best, from the quote on the Aeneid and quoting Virgil to Thesitys in his quote, looking back at the Athenian disaster in the Peloponnesian War, combining and weaving the modern happenings with ancient text to provide the long view of history that is so good, and that is Hansen at his best. Now historians have been writing about the Second World War. Well, frankly, since the war was immediately over, victor Davis Hansen has written in this great work an absolutely original account of what he terms as the quote first, true global conflict. As an example, vdh makes the point that British appeasement, american isolationism and Russian collaboration all figured to drive the Allies to war rather than preventing the war with a structured and more effective diplomacy. And the true story of World War II was that the lack of deterrence on the diplomatic front was almost anywhere and almost everywhere all at the same time, in fact. Let's go to that quote Again from Victor Davis Hansons the Second World Wars. World War II was novel in its industrial barbarity and unprecedented lethal consequences. But it was also a traditional Western conflict in that it broke out when the Allies, in the late 1930s and 1940s, lost a sense of the power of deterrence. The Axis then gambled that they had more to gain than lose in an otherwise unwise aggressive war and that they could defeat or intimidate into submission their stronger enemies before they could unite, rearm and mobilize. The ensuing conflict could only end when the aggressors were beaten in every respect, occupied and humiliated, and they were in fact so defeated due to the brilliant Allied leadership, wise industrial policy, technological ingenuity and the moral of righteously aggrieved peoples. A piece of a sort returned, as it always had in the West, when the fog of death cleared. Deterrence, a balance of power and alliances more or less kept the global post-war calm in a way that supernational bodies tragically could not, as General George Patton publicly lamented during the last days of the war in Europe in his desire to keep the US military well equipped. Quote nobody can prevent another war. There will be wars as long as our great-grandchildren live. The only thing we can do is to produce a longer phase between the wars. The tragedy of World War II a preventable conflict was that 60 million people had to perish to confirm that the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were far stronger than the fascist powers of Germany, japan and Italy After all, a fact that should have been so self-evident and in no need of such a bloody laboratory if not for prior British appeasement, american isolationism and Russian collaboration. I remember somewhere of EDH giving an interview and someone mentioned that it was very hard to talk about the 60 million people that died, especially because they. It was preventable. And yes, hansen said it was very hard to talk about it. But it's even more so that we don't talk about the loss of deterrence which got us in the mess in the first place. We talk about the horrors, we talk about the military blunders here and there, but nobody ever goes back and talks about how to avoid losing deterrence. And that is so true, it's extremely true, and that's why I think Victor Davis Hansen is one of the greatest military historians to ever have written, and if you want to get in the weeds as a military historian, victor Davis Hansen can do that too. Here we're going to see Victor Davis Hansen coming out with some great original thinking that I have not heard anywhere else in all my reading on World War Two. Let's go to the book. For a variety of reasons, hitler's Luftwaffe never could produce in mass heavy bombers similar to the superb American B-17 and later B-24, or even to the first generation British Stirlings and Halifaxes and ultimately the remarkable 810 carrying workhorse Alvaro Lancaster, in a few months after the Norwegian campaign. The shortcoming would prove to be one of the great weaknesses of the Luftwaffe and perhaps ensure that it would never be able to bomb Britain into submission or even much reduced British industrial output. Having impressive medium bombers in 1939 that surprised and terrified outgun neighbors did not mean competence and long-range strategic bombing across the sea or a thousand miles into the Soviet Union. And here's where it gets very good. One industry had introduced the excellent 4-engine Fulcac Wulf FW200 Condor as a civilian airliner in 1937, proving that it could build a 4-engine aircraft with wingspans over 100 feet. Yet the failure to master heavy bomber production was as much tactical as technological and was often later blamed on early Luftwaffe air marshals who for a time were supposedly wedded to the flawed idea that dive bombing capability of medium bombers could substitute for high altitude strategic bombing. German strategists had also assumed that Blitzkrieg resulted inevitably in short wars that precluded the need for long-term strategic pounding a far-off enemy industry. In part, hitler was already thinking of miracle weapons such as guided missiles and jet aircraft that might preclude the need for heavy bombers. Yet paradoxically, the huge investment in 1943 in jets and VF rockets made it difficult to continually fund adequately a heavy bomber program. In part the dead-end experience of the flawed Henkel HE-177, a rather brilliant experimental design using just two knackles for what were in fact two pilot pairs of coupled engines. Perhaps sour designers on the entire idea of pursuing 4-engine aircraft. Few aircraft were as theoretically sophisticated and innovative and yet unworkable as the 177. I mean, that's just fantastic original scholarship there. Why the German Army, or Air Force for that matter, never built a 4-engine bomber is a most relevant question, especially in the two major air campaigns, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of Stalingrad, where they were needed most. Both of those campaigns were extremely, extremely pivotal battles where a 4-engine bomber would have been vital in securing victory for the Germans. But now let's go to the Pacific Theater where VDH's analysis there is also extremely pivotal. Love Carriers proved critical naval assets at the very beginning of the Pacific War. They rapidly ensured the obsolescence of the battleship, which was to all but disappear as a decisive asset by the end of the war. The vast majority of ship losses in World War II were to torpedoes or bombs launched from submarines, planes or destroyers. In comparison, few ships sank due to the thundering broadsides of behemoth battleships or heavy cruisers. Naval and occasionally land-based air power turned the Great Sea battles the fighting near Singapore, the chase of the Bismarck, the Coral Sea Midway, the fight of the Marianas Leyte Gulf and Okinawa mostly into contests of carrier-based aircraft Fighting with impunity any enemy ships, except of like kind. During the entire war only two light carriers and one fleet carrier, the HMS Glorious, were destroyed by surface ships. The vast imbalance between Axis and Allied total carrier production of 16-155 meant that tactical air superiority over the Atlantic Mediterranean Pacific was far easier for the Allies to achieve than for their enemies. Neither the Russians, the Germans nor the Italians deployed aircraft carriers. Their respective moda surface fleets were hampered by ineffective air cover. That absence hurt the Kriegs Marine far more than it did the Soviet military. The Soviet Union remained primarily an infantry power with a land-based air force without obligations abroad, but with two allies in the European theater, with large carrier forces. Axis carriers and naval air pilots were exclusively Japanese, but by the war's end they were dwarfed by the huge production totals of the Anglo-Americans. Allied Germany had always believed that its future wars would be confined to the continent and thus naval air power would be less important, and that the seas of the Baltic and the Atlantic were not conducive for air operations. Admiral Rader, in lunatic fashion, early on, summed up the German appraisal of carriers quote as only gasoline tankers. Yes, admiral Rader was clearly a lunatic and didn't see the future war, but instead was fighting the last war. And that usually happens with the United States Pentagon, but not so in the late 1930s, all the way through the 1940s. Now, if you love military history and want to know the reasons behind the Second World War not just who, not just the who or the what, but the how, how did the allies ultimately beat the Axis powers? There is no better military historian who has written so complete a book of answers than this book, and that is Victor Davis Hansen. So now let's move on to a totally different kind of book that Victor Davis Hansen wrote, called the Case for Trump. Now I will say upfront I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. His record was, at best, super shaky. I didn't think he had any principles and I didn't think he would do anything of what he said he would do, and I took a lot of flack for that from many friends, even friends that had been close to me in my past. So it wasn't until this very book, combined with Trump's economic team of Larry Kudlow and the Trey Guy that I can't think of his name right now oh, robert Lighthizer. So Kudlow, lighthizer and Kevin Hassett between those three and that economic team that they put together, I think roughly in 2017, late 2017, early 2018, that I finally felt that Trump had the varsity group not the JVs, but the varsity group making economic policy and advising him. And I believe that's when we grew as a country to 3% growth of GDP finally, which hadn't happened since, I think, the Bush years, maybe 2005. And then, finally, we had a second solid year of growth across all four quarters. Now I know for sure, looking back, that Obama squandered all eight years with his presidency and talking about socialism and how great it was. So I knew we had not grown above 3% for at least eight years. So I thought Trump at least got the economic team right by early 2018. And they started especially Larry Kudlow was starting to talk about supply side economics, which is the only way to grow a free market capitalist country that we are. Now. Before we go down that rabbit trail, let's get back to the, to Victor Davis Hansen's book the Case for Trump. It was written in 2019, so by 2018, roughly by mid 2018, I could actually watch, but not listen to Donald Trump. Again, I could not watch, but I would watch, but not listen to Donald Trump. I would just watch the captions. I couldn't stay and listen to him give a speech Now. Now I'm going to go back to the book. I'm going to go back to the book. I couldn't stay and listen to him give a speech. Now, our current president, joe Biden, is far, far worse, and Trump's not the greatest speaker of all, but he is far better than Joe Biden, who cannot string together three sentences. Nevertheless, the case for Trump, written in 2019, provided me with a wonderful explanation of what was happening in the minds of those that did vote for Donald Trump, and to me that was fascinating. So let's get to the book and get me out of the way, because by giving you the quotes from the book, we will get to the root of this explanation much better. Going to the book, the Case for Trump, written by Victor Davis Hansen Trump's sins IG multiple bankruptcies, failed product lines, endless lawsuits, creepy sexual scandals, loud public spats, crude language and gratuitous cruelty and contrasts were seen as those of a self-declared multi-billionaire wheeler, dealer and private enterprise. His past totteriness was a regrettable and at times he'd found himself in legal trouble, but Trump had not yet abused the people's trust by acting unethically while in office, even if the default reason was that he had never yet held elected or appointed positions. Voters in 2016 preferred an authentic position in the private sector to the public's disingenuous good girl. Apparently, uncouth authenticity trumped insincere conventionality. Is that not a great summation, right there? Apparently uncouth authenticity trumped insincere conventionality. Donald Trump's agenda also arose as the antithesis to the new Democratic party of Barack Obama. Yes, it did. After 2008, democrats were increasingly candid in voicing socialist bromides, as there were many, including open borders, identity politics, higher taxes, more government regulation, free college tuition, single payer, government run healthcare, taxpayers subsidized green energy, rollbacks of fossil fuel production and a European union-like foreign policy. Progressives talked up these leftist visions among almost among themselves, mostly without much idea of how they sounded to a majority quite unlike themselves. To be called a socialist was now a proud badge of honor, no longer to be written off as a right-wing slur. By late 2018, trump's Democratic critics, fueled by pickups in the 2018 midterm elections, were, in Jacobian fashion, venturing far left beyond the Obama years. They were not shy about calling for the abolition of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and were especially courting openly avowed socialist candidates while advocating reparations, a wealth tax abortion to include permissible and fantaside, a return to 70 to 90% top income tax brackets and the allowance of 16-year-olds and ex-falons to vote. Yet these supposedly populist proposals had always proved an anathema to the traditional working classes of rural America as well to the urban blue collar industrial workers and many of the self-employed. Democrats also advanced them with a cultural disdain for the lower middle classes and rural people in general. 21st century progressivism had become increasingly primitial, perhaps best called oligarchical socialism, with an extremely wealthy advocating for the redistribution for the poor Elites, not subject to the ramifications of their own policies ruled from the top, the subsidized poor answered them from far below, and both barely disguised a shared disdain for the struggle of most of those in between. Now, folks, after reading that last paragraph, I knew Victor Davis Hansel was on to something. He was describing something. There was a core of truth there and in fact, he was describing the Trump paradox, at least the paradox from 2015 to 2020. Something happened to Trump when he got COVID in 2020, but every decision up to then was like Trump had the Midas touch. Everything he did, every policy he made, would turn to gold, and then, after COVID, almost every decision he would make would be terrible. Now we document this in the Academy's book by Scott Atlas, where Trump, as president, got the same information as Florida governor Ron DeSantis did, but yet he chose to stay the course with Dr Fauci, berks and the rest of the administrative state, and I think that will be his downfall. But getting back to Hanson in the book, he correctly nails it. The lower income folks of both Democrat and Republicans were left behind. They were left behind by their parties. And actually there's a great book that I read about the 2016 election right when it was over. It actually describes, county by county, how and why Trump voters and his policies were uber popular in these areas. That book, if you want to check it out, is by Selena Zito. It's called the Great Revolt Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics. I will put that book in the show notes, but here is another set of original thoughts by Victor Davis Hansen. Let's go back to the book the Case for Trump and George Stevens classic 1953 Western Shane. Even the reforming and soft-spoken gunslinger Shane, played by Alan Lodd, understands his own dilemma all too well. He alone possesses the violent skills necessary to free the homesteaders from the insidious threats of the hired guns and murderous cattle barons. But how he got those skills, as in the case of Trump, especially worries those he plans to help. And Shane alone knows that ultimately, the lawless cattle ranchers can only be stopped by the sort of violence in which he excels. Yet by the time of his final resort to lethal violence, Shane has sacrificed all the prior chances of reform and claims on re-entering the civilized world of the stable sod buster community, as Shane tells young Joey after gunning down the three villains of the film and thus saving the small farming community. Quote Can't break the mold. I tried it and it didn't work for me. Joey, there's no living with a killing. There's no going back from one Right or wrong, it's a brand. It's a brand that sticks. There's no going back unquote. Now Trump could not cease entirely his tweeting, nor cease his rallies, nor cease his feuding, nor cease his nonstop motion and unbridled and often vicious speech, even his fast and loose relationship with the truth. Even if you wish to write a wrong, it is the brand that sticks to him. Such overbearing made Trump, for good or for evil, what he is. His rank restness can be managed, perhaps mitigated, for a time. Thus the effective but short lived 10 tenure of his sober cabinet choices and his chief of staff, the X Marine General no nonsense, john Kelly, but they can't be eliminated. Trump's blunt views cannot really thrive, and indeed can scarcely survive, in the nuanced complexity and ambiguity of Washington. Tragic heroes do not necessarily intend to be heroic. Sometimes their motives for confronting dangers or solving crises can be easily self centered or arise from a desire for personal vengeance or fantasies of self redemption, or just an endless need for adulation. Again, they care for their reputations and their sidekicks more than they do the law, so portraying Donald Trump as the tragic hero. When I read this in 2019, I actually understood it and I didn't read it, but I actually crushed it on audible and roughly about a week. I remember telling friends at the time that it was such good content, such originally good stuff, that people who were both Trump lovers and people who hated Trump. I told them both they had to read this book. I just thought it was classic, brilliant. Victor Davis hands in analysis, again, completely original thinking. But 2019 Trump is not the same as the 2020 Trump or the post COVID Trump. A lot has changed my thoughts on the case for Trump between this book and the economic team that Trump had assembled. I thought his record for governing was becoming quite good and, on the plus side, he was doing some great stuff on the foreign policy side. He was staying out of wars, which no president had done since Ronald Reagan, and he was doing the good work in the Middle East and actually moving the ball forward. And he would get many peace agreements In the form of the Abraham Accords, and I was super pleased with that. So, for all the reasons, I didn't support Trump in 2016,. He had proved me wrong by 2020. Now let me just say I'm not a fan of his in 2023. I will support, however, whoever the Republican nominee will be. I don't think Trump can win. I don't think he can win a general election. I think his ceiling is 45 or 46% If the election is a truthful and honest election, not like in 2020. And most likely, the only guy that can win is the Florida governor, rhonda Santis, and I spell that most out in the governor's book, the Courage to Be Free, which we covered in the Mojo Academy earlier this year. Now getting back to Victor Davis Hansen and his series of books that we're covering here, the last and most excellent book is the Dying Citizen, which was written in 2021. Now, first of all, the Dying Citizen. How Progressive Elites, tribalism and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America is a tough book to get through. It is super dense, but again, it's Victor Davis Hansen at his most brilliant. Everything is completely original thinking, and it's not often that an author can write three straight books in a row and have all three of them be absolutely stellar. But that is the greatness of Victor Davis Hansen. So we're going to cover several quotes here to show you the breath of the book and the analysis of the book by one of the greatest historians ever to have written. Born of the book. Today, only a little more than half of the world's seven billion people are citizens of fully consensual governments enjoying constantly constitutionally protected freedoms. They are almost all Western, or at least they reside in nations that have become quote Westernized. These realities explain why millions from North Africa risk drowning in the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe and why millions more uproot from Mexico and Latin America to cross the southern border of the United States Call their exodus from their homelands a desperate quest for greater income, freedom or security, or simply for a chance to be an unfamiliar citizen somewhere else, rather than a certain surf non citizen or subject at home. Yes, despite all of America's faults and its plummishes, victor Davis Hansen gets this one exactly right too. We've heard all about America's problems. We've heard all about every problem from the socialist and the communist. We've heard from the Howard Zins and the other liars of American history. And despite all the lies that are told about America, still they come. The immigrants come because I believe they know in their heart of hearts that's all rubbish. They believe they will get an opportunity in America and they want that opportunity. America is the land of opportunity. Now this book is divided into two parts pre-citizens and post-citizens. In fact, let's jump to the pre-citizens part of the book for our next poll. Quote All citizens should give up their own ethnic, racial and tribal primary identities. Only through such a brutal bargain of assimilation can they sustain a common culture in a century in which superficial racial and tribal differences, the fuel for many of history's wars, are becoming no longer incidental but recalibrated as essential to the American character? In the absence of a collective civic sense of self, the inclusive idea of an American citizen wanes and fragments. Until the late 20th century, the country suffered only sporadic episodes of blood and soil exclusivity and instead, usually through intermarriage and assimilation, made the idea of racial and ethnic purity inert. Once any nation goes tribal, however, eventually even those without any easily identifiable ethnic ancestries or tribal affinities seek to reconstruct or in fact invent them, if for no other reason than to protect themselves from the inevitable violence and factionalism on the horizon. Once a man owes more loyalty to his first cousin than to his fellow citizen, a constitutional republic cannot exist. How powerful is that? Now here we are. We are some 50 years after the civil rights movement and we find the United States retribalizing, retribalizing itself, as if Martin Luther King's speech meant nothing. The content of our character was more important than the color of our skin. It's as if everybody has forgotten that. And where does this tribalism eventually lead? Well, we know where it leads. History tells us it leads to blood and soil violence. It leads to incompetency that we're seeing everywhere. It leads to the destruction of meritocracy and it leads to a Rwanda, a Rwanda we found in the 1990s that was absolutely in another civil war. We cannot afford that in the United States. Now let's move on to the post-citizen portion of the book and the title of that. This chapter is called the Unelected. Let's go to the book how an unelected federal bureaucracy has absorbed much of the power of the US Congress, yearly creating more laws and regulations than the House and the Senate together could debate, pass and send to the President for signing. The permanent bureaucracy has overwhelmed even the office of the presidency. That all powerful office often lacks sufficient knowledge to control the permanent legions deeply embedded within the state. Elected officials come and go. They proverbially rant about the deep state, but the bureaucracy outlasts all it knows best, and so it grows and breeds, often at the expense of the citizen. We are reaching a point similar to the rise of a fictive robotic terminator that destroys its two human creatures, as the bureaucratic elite believes that it can and should preempt any elected official who it deems dangerous. If the citizen cannot elect officials to audit, control and remove the unelected, then he has lost his sovereign power. Now I'm reminded of President Eisenhower's charge at the end of his presidency. His charge was all about the administrative state and the military industrial complex. In fact, let's go to that quote President Eisenhower speaking in 1961 at the conclusion of his presidency, in his farewell dress quote a vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be might, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. American makers of plow shares could, with time and as required, make swords as well, but now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. In the councils of government we must stand guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exist and will persist. Now Victor Davis Hansen thinks and I think he is right in saying this that perhaps we need to beware of the military, industrial and intelligence and investigative complexes to encompass all of these vast, vast bureaucracies, and that is where the citizen is dying. The citizen no longer has a say, no longer has a say in its political government anymore. So the stakes of the American Republic is on a precipice. We will see what happens in 2024. But for this author spotlight, I thought Victor Davis Hansen was just the person to give us perspective, because, after all, like I said, he is a storyteller, a thinker and an inspire, and he does work to serve as a bridge between the past and the present. That's the reason we chose Victor Davis Hansen as our August 2023 author in the spotlight. Now we encourage you to delve into Hansen's extensive body of work and in doing so, you will gain a richer understanding of our world and its roots to the ancient past. And for me, simply put, victor Davis Hansen is the most deserving of the title of the hardest working living historian in the world. His commitment to the craft and his passion for sharing the lessons of history Make him a true asset to the field and to a treasure and American treasure to us all. So we hope you enjoyed this author in the spotlight 2023, victor Davis Hansen. Now keep reading those good books out there to find those nuggets of wisdom. And let's go mojo.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at team mojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.