Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Back to school means food changes, early breakfast, school lunches, after school snacks, and let's not even talk about dinner. Oli's here to help you cover all the wellness spaces, from making sure your kids get their daily vitamins with Kids Multis, or balancing your gut health with Oli Probiotics. We're here to help you do wellness on your terms. Find us at a Walmart or Target near you, or at Oli.com. That's O-L-L-Y dot com. Oli!
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
It's one of the wrinkles of history that this guy who was a billionaire who can be very crude and callous has a natural affinity for working people. And he's blunt and they admire his authenticity and he's genuine and he can be crude. If Donald Trump were to win 21, 22% of the black vote and close the border and go back to an energy-first world,
paradigm and then use the DOJ to stop the cartels and interstate coordination of all this crime and restore deterrence. I think he could heal the country very quickly. I really do. By success.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished classicist, military historian, and prolific commentator on contemporary geopolitics. He's Professor Emeritus of Classics at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist whose commentary has been published in nearly every major media news outlet in America.
Hansen is also currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where his work is often characterized by a natural integration of historical narrative and modern issues, as well as an appreciation for Western civilization's heritage. His deep family roots in California's Central Valley often inform his criticism of American immigration policy, agricultural policy, and the far left.
Hansen has authored or edited 26 books on matters ranging from the nature of citizenship to ancient warfare. His latest work, The End of Everything, How Wars Descend Into Annihilation, delves into the unsettling parallels between the conflicts of antiquity and our modern symptoms of decline. In today's episode, we explore the ideological origins and historical analogies for our current political moment.
From the reverberations of war in the Middle East to the merits of federalism and the consequences of a possible Trump victory, this is a conversation you don't want to miss. As we navigate an era marked by rapid change and global uncertainty, Victor Davis Hanson's insights prove the enduring relevance of classical wisdom in today's world. Stay tuned and welcome back to another episode of The Sunday Special. ♪
Professor Hanson, thanks so much for joining us and spending the time. Really appreciate it. So we are recording this pretty close to the aftermath of the Biden Trump debate number one. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask for your takeaways on sort of the state of the race and where we are as a country. Donald Trump really didn't have to do anything. He obviously didn't prepare. He winged it. He had no notes.
If they get a new candidate, he'll have to up his game a little bit. But I think everybody's remarked, I don't know what people in Gaza or Russia or China, North Korea or Iran are thinking, but let's hope they don't feel they have a window of opportunity to do something stupid.
because this president, we don't know who's running the country now, whether it's the Obama third term people or no one at all. Yeah, it might be Dr. Jill, who seems to be the most enthusiastic person in the room about Joe Biden's run in true Edith Wilson fashion. So this does bring us to the topic of your latest book, The End of Everything, How Wars Ascend Into Annihilation. I mean, I
I'd been pointing out for months that I thought there was a significant possibility that this race would break open in June, July, August, that President Trump would start to gain a significant enough lead that dictators all over the world would see that window of opportunity you're talking about. That window of opportunity is now open, regardless of what you think happens with the election. Because even if you think that Biden's going to get reelected, that just opens the window of opportunity further for nefarious forces, because there's obviously a vacancy at the top of the American government and foreign policy is
done almost entirely from the executive branch these days. So when you look at the world scene, how dangerous are things and where are the chief lines of danger? Well, you know, in the book, I looked at four historical examples of complete civilizational erasure, and there were common themes. One is that a society that
that is targeted or vulnerable has no idea that it is. It keeps reassuring itself that its grandeur is still there, it's still powerful. That has eerie similarities to the United States. They have no idea about the people who are attacking them. They don't know who Alexander the Great is or what he's capable of or Scipio.
And we see that today when we're assured that Putin would never, never, never use a tactical weapon, although he said again and again that he would, that Iran would never, never, never get the bomb and use it as a first strike. And yet, for the first time in the history of the Jewish state, they sent over 320 rockets and missiles. We've had Mr. Erdogan in Turkey threatened to send missiles into Athens, send missiles into Israel, send missiles into Armenia. We have Kim Jong-un,
acting up again with flights. China has made a video talking about destroying Japan if it were to intervene. And all of this is dismissed as rhetoric. And 99% of it may be, but
We're getting to a point now where the United States is the keeper of deterrence worldwide is no longer there for a variety of reasons. We don't have the economic clout with 36 trillion in debt. We're borrowing a trillion every 90 days. We're short 45,000 soldiers. People don't remark at all that those are the soldiers of the white male rural demographic that died at two times their numbers in the general populations in god-awful places like Afghanistan.
And Iraq, 75% of those fatalities came from that demographic that only represents about 34%. Yet we alienated them, Millie, Austin, calling them names, white supremacy, white privilege. So I'm very worried. And then with the Ukraine and Israel, I don't understand the strategy behind
at all. Ukraine is an ally, but it's not an ally like Israel. And yet we tell the Israelis, you have to be proportionate. Ukraine, you've got to seek disproportionality. Israel, you have to have a ceasefire. Ukraine, you've got to keep fighting to the bitter end. Israel, you've got to have a coalition government. You've got to have elections. We don't trust Zolensky.
We don't have a problem with outlawing political parties, habeas corpus, and elections. Collateral damage, Israel, you've got to text people that you're going to might hit somebody. When Ukraine sends missiles into the Donbass or Crimea, nobody says, did you hit civilians? So I don't know quite what explains that disconnect other than
We have a large segment of the Democratic Party that is committed to overthrowing the Netanyahu government for some reason and doesn't like Israel in general and tries to, I guess, show daylight so that these actors, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran can...
can get in between us and Israel. And they've done a good job of that. We'll get to more on this in a moment. First, getting into credit card debt is really easy, but getting out, well, the system is set up so you really can't. If you're struggling with credit cards, personal loans, collections, or medical bills, you need to check out PDS Debt. PDS provides a service to match you with debt solutions tailored to your financial situation. If you're making payments every month on your debt and your balances aren't going down, PDS has solutions for you. Everyone with $10,000 or more in eligible debt
qualifies that there is no minimum credit score required. Bad and fair credit is accepted. Again, when people get behind that eight ball, it becomes almost impossible to get out without the help of PDS Debt. PDS Debt has customized options for anyone struggling with credit cards, personal loans, collections, or medical bills.
They strive to understand your specific scenario and they can help provide alternative solutions to becoming debt-free. Save more while paying off your debt in a fraction of the time. Stop waiting, start saving. Get a free debt analysis right now at pdsdebt.com slash sunday. It takes only 30 seconds. That's pdsdebt.com slash sunday right now. pdsdebt.com slash sunday.
You know, ideologically, the case that I've made for why the left particularly despises Israel is because Israel is just an extraordinary example of how the victim-victimizer mentality that they've promoted is just a lie. And they hate domestically. It's why anti-Semitism has been rising at the same time domestically in Europe and in the United States also, is because the entire victim-victimizer binary, which is false, and the intersectional theory, which is false, which is that basically we can determine that if your group is economically unsuccessful, that is due to some
evil system of white supremacy. And if your group is economically successful, they must be the people who are the designers and beneficiaries of the system. And so if you have a disproportionate number of Jews who are doing economically well in the United States, this means that they are the victimizers in a zero-sum game with regard to other minorities. But they also happen to be in this weird area where it's very difficult to call Jews victimizers, considering that
According to the hate crime statistics, they're the most victimized group in the United States. And the same thing holds true when you go to the Middle East, where you have wildly, disproportionately successful Israel with its $57,000 per year GDP per capita, taking on the Hamas-dominated Islamic Jihad, Palestinian Authority-dominated Palestinians who've made nothing but horrific choices for the last 70 to 80 years, impoverishing themselves, impoverishing their children, spending every aid dollar on building terror tunnels and stocking up with rockets.
But the left-wing mentality says the Jews must be successful there because they're victimizing somebody. And so it must be that they are the actual bad guys over there. So I think that the hatred for Israel, the hatred for Jews, it crosses streams with the intersectional hatred for, say, white America in the left of the West. And they actually would like Israel to lose. They believe that Israel is an emissary of a Western colonialist white supremacy. And so Israel is actually...
in the wrong for existing in that way. Yeah, I think they managed that. That was difficult because traditionally Jews had suffered anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States.
And of course, the Holocaust, and that was an obstacle for the intersectional, woke, Marxist binary people. But they were able to say, well, the Jews have high per capita income, they're privileged, and we don't really care about the Holocaust. And they even played it down, and they're white. And then when they transferred that paradigm in the Middle East,
They didn't look at the reality. There's 500 million Muslims in the Middle East, and there's tiny little Israel, the only consensual society there, and they're surrounded by a sea of enemies that want to destroy them. Instead, they just looked at Israel versus this terrorist clique, Hamas or Hezbollah, and said, well, they're the overdog, they're the settlers. But
They had to think away or erase the idea that Israel is the underdog, given the wider realities of the Middle East. But they pulled all that off. And the question is, why did they do that? And, you know, there's a long history, recent history of the left of being anti-Semitism. I can't think of a major woke leader who hasn't said something like,
derogatory about the Jews. We started with Jesse Jackson, Hymie Town, Al Sharpton, "Put on your arm rock and come over here." Black Lives Matter with the glider posters that they issued. Ilan Omar, The Benjamin's Baby, all of AOC with a map with "No Israel" on it. So every one of these leaders of this woke movement
has revealed that they're very anti-Semitic in general, and they hate Israel in particular. And the more that—there's other things going on, though, very quickly. There's a quarter million Middle East students here in the United States. There's no audit of them at all. There's $10 to $20 billion in endowed funding of these Middle East programs. And every time I look at their curriculum, at these programs, they're not Middle East historical, philological programs.
coursework. It's all anti-Israel for the most part. And so another thing I think it's explaining the campus, and people forget that is at Stanford, just to take one example, we let in 9% of the incoming class of 2100 were white males and 20% whites in general. And we got rid of the SAT. That's pretty much true of Yale.
Harvard, Princeton, all of these elite campuses. So what you're really seeing is, and that 9% of males does not, it's not enough for athletes and legacies and the kids of administrators and donors. And so what you've seen on these elite campuses that used to be meritocratic, the Jewish population has gone from about 25 to 30% down to 7 to 10%, while the Middle East and the foreign student body from China and the Middle East have just soared to almost
30, 40% of the student body. And then when you add that disparity, then you have your useful idiot, pretty poorly educated students. And they say, wow,
The majority on campus doesn't like Jews, they don't like Israel, there's not very many Jews, there's no downside. So we go into the president's office, we burglarize it, we deface these historic sandstone columns at San... There's no downside at all. And so we can do this. And then they look at the Jewish students, they're very small, they follow the rules, they don't cause trouble.
And they say, you know what, the locus or the power or the focus, they put their finger in the wind and said, it's with the Middle East. That's where the woke powers, that's where the faculty is, that's where the administration is, that's where the majority of the students are. And then you add the final focus.
And I think people have missed this. For the last three years, there has been no SAT and there has been no comparative ranking of high school GPAs by the caliber of their high school education. So you have thousands of students at these campuses
who were very insecure. The campuses themselves said, "We had these standards that ensured we were going to be elite because of the rigor of the curriculum." And then when they destroyed the entrance requirements, all of a sudden the rigorous curriculum was impossible.
covertly and without much media attention, they either have inflated the grades 65% A's at Stanford, 80% at Yale, or they've watered down their curriculum, or they've added new courses. So a lot of the anger of these Middle East students and DEI students is that they're not able to do the work and they feel very insecure. They're at these universities. And one of the ways that they square that circle is to be very active politically and suggest that they're victims
of white oppression on campus. And I don't know how we're going to solve this other than to tax the endowments, get out of the student loan business, require an exit test, something really drastic like that.
So, you know, one of the things that you talk about when you're talking about military policy and military history is, you know, what the future of the United States looks like. Obviously, we have military shortcomings. We've been pursuing the policy of technological advancement, but no actual restocking of the things that you need to do to make war, which, again, is actually not unique to the United States. It seems like a lot of Western powers are doing this. It's a major problem for Israel. I was just there for a couple of weeks, and I was speaking with members of the military, and they had been so reliant on technology that they didn't actually have many of the basics.
Whereas if you look over in Ukraine, the Russians are well-stocked with World War II-era armaments. And so long as you don't care about how many civilians you kill, you can do precisely what you want as long as you have an endless supply of mortars from 1957. But I think this is one of the major disconnects that the West has experienced in terms of war. And I wanted to get your take on this. And that is...
I don't think that the West understands what it means to win a war anymore. Since World War II, when the West basically said that was the war to end all wars, we're not going to fight a war anymore in order to win. And the West really has not won a significant conflict in the post-war era. Vietnam was a loss. North Korea was treated as a win, but it's actually a stalemate. And
there hasn't been a significant victory. The Gulf War was a temporary victory, obviously, that turned into a long-term quagmire. But a lot of that has to do with this baseline perception by members of the West that in the post-war era, everybody thinks the same. And it's a cardinal error. It's a massive error. And so there's this idea that you hear constantly, and you mentioned it with regard to Israel, you know, Israel has to be humanitarian in how it approaches the problem of the Gaza Strip. And that's why Israel has to
be really, really targeted in doing these strikes, not recognizing that that actually is the incentive structure that's being promoted by Israel's enemies, meaning that they will use whatever weapons at their disposal, including their own children, in order to maximize pressure on Israel. And that's not just true for Israel. That's true for the United States and Iraq. It's true for the United States and Afghanistan. It turns out that war is cruel and bloody and terrible, which is why we should be hesitant to enter it.
But because we have bought into this idea that everybody thinks the same, we all love our children the same amount, we all want the same kind of world, we just have different approaches to get to it. Instead, we have basically decided that war can be clean and antiseptic, because everybody in the end wants human rights, of course. And if it's clean and antiseptic, that means that it's easier for us to get into a war and almost impossible for us to win one.
As far as winning, the laws of war don't change. The only way you win is you use a disproportionate level of force and you destroy the enemy's ability, either psychological or actual, to make war against you. And then you submit them to terms that you impose on them. And when you do that, you get peace. And the funny thing is you get more respect. I once asked my father who flew 40 missions in a B-29, I said, well,
What happened when the war was over? And he said, the day the war ended, we landed on a Japanese airstrip in Tokyo. And I said, was there guerrillas? Was there snipers? He said, no, they greeted us with flowers. And I said, how is that possible?
And he said, we had dropped 20,000 pounds of incendiaries for nine months before the atomic bombs. And we were told if one person shoots at the planes, don't touch down, just go around and go back to Tinian, resupply and start bombing. And so the point was that
We have peace today with Italy and Germany and Japan because we used a disproportionate level of force and they knew that if they continued to make war or if they didn't submit to terms, it was going to be the annihilation of their regimes.
And then in our affluence and leisure, we think, well, we're beyond that. We've evolved beyond. Human nature has changed, and it hasn't. And our adversaries haven't changed at all. Many of them are pre-modern. The funny thing is they have a lot more respect, let's say, for Israel when Israel is unpredictable, when Israel uses overwhelming force, when Israel doesn't really worry about the UN attack.
And when Israel is very close, usually to a conservative administration, but the moment you get the left in and they widen that gap and they start to apply symmetrical criticism or they single out Israel more than they do Hamas,
And all these opportunistic actors, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, they jump in, the Middle East, Jordan, Egypt, all these, the Gulf, they start to triangulate. Europe doesn't see it. But if you would just let, if we had just had a different administration and they had said to Israel, what do you need?
Here's the weapons. We only have one requirement if we're going to get you have to destroy Hamas in five weeks Do whatever you have to have to do don't be inhumane, but destroy Hamas if you destroy Hamas Hezbollah will cease and then you will turn your attention to Hezbollah We will give you all the wherewithal and we wouldn't be having this conversation now I think if they had done that and I think a lot of them wanted to do that
I think Hezbollah and Hamas wouldn't be capable of fighting right now. And yet, it's very frustrating. And I don't know what's going to happen with Israel, but they've got 100,000 people who can't live on their northern border. They're engaged in house-to-house fighting in Gaza. We're cutting off bombs to them.
We warned Iran about the nature of the Israeli counter-strike. So it's in shambles. And that was in the debate, you know, you could argue that Donald Trump should have brought in more detail and he had opportunities
to at each point to give facts and data. He did very well in some cases, but mostly it was just this guy is the worst president in history. He's destroying the country. And you have to sympathize with him because it is frustrating. It's been a 360-degree destructive four years. And I don't know how… Sometimes I almost think they get in a room and they say,
Well, yeah, we let in 10 million people. There's borders open. And how are you going to stop that? The remedy will be worse than the malady that we caused. Or, yeah, Israel's weak now and it's surrounded. And that's your problem when you take over and see if you like it. And inflation is high. But you know what? You're going to have to raise taxes on the people who deserve to be taxed. It's almost that the nihilism was intentional.
And they knew that people wouldn't like what they did, but they thought they were going to hand off a revolutionary system, a Jacobin system. And then the effort to undo it would be catastrophic. We'll get to more of this in just one moment. First, you know, last time my kids were sick,
It was actually kind of a pain in the butt to get them their medication. We had to get the prescription. Then we had to go on over to our local CVS. It turns out that for some reason that CVS was closed, which was really rare and weird. But here's the thing. We should all be prepared with a medical emergency kit from the wellness company. I have one.
And it's wonderful. First of all, it's not a simple first aid kit. It contains essential life-saving medications that are often in short supply, like amoxicillin, a Z-Pak, ivermectin, and more. It's like having an urgent care in your home. The medical emergency kit includes eight doctor-prescribed medications and a comprehensive guidebook for safely treating over 30 illnesses and infections, like COVID, strep throat, pneumonia, bronchitis, tick bites, UTIs, and more. No doctor visits, no pharmacies, no copay. Every home should have at least one medical emergency kit.
Go to UrgentCareKit.com slash Ben. Answer a few questions online. Your kit will be delivered directly to your door. Use promo code Ben to get $45 off right now. That's UrgentCareKit.com slash Ben. Enter promo code Ben to get started. That's UrgentCareKit.com slash Ben.
So I want to talk about, in terms of war, the imbalance that now exists between defense and offense. So it used to be that the idea generally was that defense is easier than offense. Somebody has to come after you. You can defend your territory. But when you're talking about very high-tech powers and very low-tech powers, it turns out that actually offense is much easier than defense in a lot of these cases. A good example of this
because it's an ongoing military conflict, is what's happening between Hezbollah and Israel or Hamas and Israel versus what's happening, say, with the Houthis in the United States and
and shipping. It turns out that we're having to spend tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of dollars to defend against incredibly low-tech weaponry that is dumb. So every time Hamas would shoot a $50 rocket, Israel would have to shoot a $50,000 projectile from Iron Dome in order to take it down. And again, I wonder how much of that goes to the underlying message that I was mentioning before about the West priding itself so much on its own view of human rights and its belief that that
is somehow mirrored on the other side. And we've geared everybody in the West, all of our weaponry toward exactitude, toward exact defense, toward high tech. And meanwhile, our enemies who don't give any dams at all about civilian life, their own or enemy's,
It gives them a real advantage in being able to do things like knock out massive ships that are going through the Red Sea and shut down entire shipping lanes that used to be considered crucial and are still crucial, actually, to the world economy. Yeah. Well, defense and offense go through all... They're completely cyclical. You know, when the tank emerged, then it rained for about a year and a half, and then Panzerfaust, et cetera, anti-tank rockets. It goes back and forth. But you're right. In this particular cycle that we're in,
that the Iron Dome is very expensive to knock down cheap rockets, the Houthis you mentioned, but that's only because we've self-imposed these conventions on us. If we were going to be imaginative, we could reverse that very easily. We could make their defense much more expensive than our offense. And I'll give you a couple examples. So if we had an American cargo ship come through and the Red Sea and the Houthis attacked it,
And we had a couple of frigates. We would just tell the Houthis, if you do it again, we're going to take out on day one your entire electrical grid. We could do that very quickly. If you do it again, we're going to take out your water supply. If you do it again, we're going to take out all of your harbors. And then we're just going to sit there for a while and see how you like it. And we could easily tell, Israel could easily tell Hezbollah, if you continue to do this,
we're going to take out the main power grid for Beirut, and we don't really care about the consequences. If you continue to do that, we're going to block the harbors of Beirut. And that would be far cheaper than their offensive weapons. I mean, it would be, you could do it very easily. But we have self-imposed restrictions because as you mentioned,
rightly infer would be two seconds and global CNN or MSNBC would have a reporter with a microphone in a mother's face saying that they're freezing to death and they have no power. And yet it would require a leader to say, war is hell. And this is, you know, General Sherman said, if you do not
Give up. I'm going to go through Georgia and I'm going to burn every plantation I see. I'm not going to kill people. I'm just going to burn the plantation and destroy a 50-mile swath and free all the slaves. They called him all sorts of names. They said he was a terrorist, a killer. He destroyed the interior of the South in two marches through the Carolinas and Georgia. And then after the war, people said, oh, my God, he was a genius. Grant lost 100,000 men fighting in Georgia.
between Washington and Virginia in that horrible summer of 1864. And Sherman won the war without losing anybody. And it's what Machiavelli said, people hate you far more if you destroy their inheritance than if you kill them. And that tells you something, that we have the ability, if we really want to, to make the Houthis pay a terrible price. And we could do that. And I don't know why we don't. I
And that was something about Trump was very successful about that because they did, you know, under George Bush, they went into Georgia and Alsatia, the Russians. Under Obama, they went into Donbass and Crimea. Under Biden, they went after Kiev. They didn't do any of that because they thought Trump was slightly crazy, unpredictable and might do something.
And that's an advantage in strategic poker. - Trump knows this, by the way. This is the thing about foreign policy. It's always funny because people who consider themselves sophisticates on an intellectual level, they like to focus in on foreign policy.
The nuances are really what matters. And then when it comes to domestic policy, that's simple stuff. And it turns out that it's usually quite the reverse. It turns out that foreign policy is a fifth grade playground. If you're the biggest kid on the fifth grade playground, then force or threat of force, credible threat of force, is what goes a very, very long way. And that's something that Donald Trump innately understands, like on a gut level. Remember, I did a fundraiser for him out here in Florida. And
this is exactly what he was saying. My favorite anecdote that he was telling was he was saying, you want to know the reason why Russia never went into Ukraine? It's because I told Vlad, I said, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of you. And Vlad said, no, you won't, Mr. President. And I said, well, I might. And that's right. I mean, well, I might is a pretty good answer when you're leading the world's most powerful military. And, you know, the fact that we're so shy about all of that, the fact that this is considered unsophisticated, it
It's it's incredible and stupid and it's and it's also counterproductive. And again, I think it goes to a deeper ideological malaise that set in in the West, which is that we do not think that we are different or special in any way whatsoever. And if we are different or special, it's because we're worse. We're meaner. We're more terrible. And and and the proof of this is that when we're and what that means, again, it's that that victim victimizer equation of success is.
with evil. And so the more we succeed, the more evil we are. And if we've won a war in the past, well, that's only because we're an evil nation and evil civilization. And what's weird is that I'm starting to see this kind of horseshoe around, weirdly. You're starting to see it in parts of the right as well. I mean, there are prominent commentators on the right now who are saying, you know, how evil is the United States for having used the atomic bomb at the end of World War II?
And that to me is, it's historically imbecilic. I mean, there can be open debate over the necessity of the atomic bomb, but the reality is that the Japanese military was preparing to kill a million Americans
when they got onto the aisles of Japan. I mean, they already had killed tens of thousands of Americans on tiny atolls all throughout the Pacific. They showed no inclination to give up the fight before the end of the war. Even when we dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan, there was an attempted coup inside the Japanese base
palace to stop a recording of the emperor from going out surrendering. So this kind of notion that if only the United States had been a lot nicer during World War II, things would have been a lot better. I don't know where that's coming from other than a perverse view of the United States' role in the world. Yeah, I think it might even be worse than that. I think our problem is that we're culturally arrogant and we're full of ubiquitous. And we think everybody wants to be like us. And
When we were in Kabul, right before the humiliation, when we lost these 13 Marines, $50 billion in weaponry, we just handed over $300 million retrofitted airbase. And then what did we do? I mean, we had a pride flag from the embassy. We had a gender studies program at the University of Kabul. We had George Floyd murals on the streets of Kabul. It was almost like British imperialism, but without the force behind it.
At least they ended, you know, they ended Suti in India and they had the force to back it up. But a lot of people look at this and they say, well, we don't see any connection from your wealth and your power with your values. So we reject your values. And there is a connection between democracy and freedom and technology and success, but they don't see that.
And the more that we try to appease them and say to them, we're Americans and we want to help you and we're going to go in and we're going to go kill Saddam Hussein in the Bathys, but we're going to build a park at the same time. That doesn't appeal to them. They interpret that magnanimity as weakness to be exploited rather than kindness to be reciprocated. And they don't like the West. They feel that, well, you didn't earn it.
and you were given it or you exploited us. So I think you have to be humane in the sense you don't want to be Hitlerian in war and you don't want to kill people gratuitously. But every time that we have pulled back
and try to reason with people and try to show how magnanimous we are. They hated us and more people got killed. That happened in Iraq, it happened in Korea, it happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Vietnam. And that, unfortunately, we've imposed those values on the IDF.
We'll get to more on this in just one second. First, there's only one cell phone company that gives you free premium access to the media you actually care about. That's Pure Talk. This might be the best offer Pure Talk has ever come out with. Listen to this. When you switch your cell phone service to Pure Talk on a qualifying plan, you get a free one-year insider subscription to Daily Wire+. That's correct. Take advantage of unlimited talk, unlimited text, 15 gigs of data, and mobile hotspot on America's most dependable 5G network for just $35 a month. And you get one year free of Daily Wire+.
The DailyWare Plus Insider Plan gets you access to our entire library of movies, series, and documentaries, including Lady Ballers, What is a Woman, Mr. Bertram, Run, Hide, Fight, and more. Plus, you get all our daily shows uncensored and ad-free. The only way you can get that special offer is by going to puretalk.com slash Shapiro. I've been telling you to stop overpaying for your cell phone plan for, you know, years at this point. If you haven't made the switch over to Pure Talk yet,
Well, now would be the time. Go to puretalk.com slash Shapiro today. Switch to a qualifying plan. Get one year free of Daily Wire plus Insider. Again, that's puretalk.com slash Shapiro today for the best deal of the year. puretalk.com slash Shapiro. And this is one of the things I think that's also kind of hilarious about how we in America perceive ourselves. I think that most Americans, they are willing to acknowledge the reality, which is that the things when it comes to foreign policy, we don't
We don't love gratuitously ugly images on our TV. But the notion that America is deeply invested in human rights abuses just everywhere we see them around the world is obviously untrue. It's clearly and obviously untrue. And the rest of the world takes our rhetoric seriously, but...
In reality, I'm not sure that they should. In other words, there are a lot of countries that are sort of trying to play up to what they perceive to be America's stated interests, Israel being the most obvious, where Israel says, well, you know, you guys keep saying that you want human rights, you want human rights, so we're being really, really exact with drone strikes and we're hitting one guy in the car, but now
The other guy in the car will show you the tape of it. And we're shipping in 3200 calories per person per day into the Gaza Strip. We're trying to facilitate this humanitarian aid. And for that, for their trouble, they're getting clocked across the head by the Biden administration. When in reality, it turns out the American people don't really care all that much. What the American people want and have always wanted is quick victory because that's a very human thing to want.
It's actually, in many cases, the right thing to want, because it turns out that slow bleeds are far worse for a civilization than a quick victory. It's much better for a civilization to win a quick victory in the long term. I mean, the reality is that if the United States had drawn out, say, World War II rather than dropping two atomic bombs, not only does that end with probably a million dead Americans on the shores of Japan, it also probably ends with millions of more dead Japanese and the...
half-century-long occupation of half of Japan by the Russians who are coming from the north at the same time. Turns out the quick victory sometimes is a virtue. It is. And it is human nature. I work in the Bay Area, and if the San Francisco 49ers are 10-0, all of a sudden it's sold out. When they're 1-9, no one wants to go. Even the same players, they have their individual likes. They like to see good football. But if they're losing, nobody wants to go. And that's kind of a...
a human sin, but it's undeniable. And most people have no ideology. That's sad too. It's 20% maybe on one side, 20% on the others. And the other 60 or 70% put their finger in the air and they said, I have to be on the winning side. And that's an instinctual primeval human trait. And so they look at a war and they think who is going to win?
And if I think the site is going to win, I want to ally themselves with it. That's what's so dangerous of what's going on with Israel and Ukraine, because with this new alliance of China and Iran and Russia and North Korea,
And maybe, you know, bad actors like Turkey, they're going around to the area and they're going to Australia, they're going to the Philippines, they're going to Taiwan, they're going to South Korea, and they're going to Eastern Europe. And they're saying, look, the United States will not protect you. Look what they did in Afghanistan. Look what they're doing to Israel. You may not like us, but we're the rising sun and they're setting. And if you're smart, you'll make the necessary adjustments. We're not asking you to be overt. We're not asking you to renounce them, but just, you
you know, gradually distance yourself. They've made this argument to India especially. And we on the other side don't seem to fathom that. And so that was what was tragic about the Gaza war. It had Israel. Israel was really doing the United States the biggest favor
possible, much more than Ukraine even, because if it had destroyed Hamas very quickly and Hezbollah, Iran would be completely humiliated and wouldn't isolate it. And we would have had a new, I think,
there would have been pressure to cut, once it was weakened, there would have been pressure to cut the oil and re-institute these sanctions. But when you don't act decisively, then people feel you're weak and they get afraid for themselves. And they think, you know what, there is no such thing as the indomitable IDF anymore. Look at this.
And they start treating Hamas as if it's a quasi-state. It's an equal interlocutor. It's not just a bunch of terrorist murderers. And that is very dangerous, what we've done. And so Netanyahu, I feel for him, but he's going to have to somehow have enough weapons to destroy Hamas and Hezbollah.
and then not listen to this administration. And that's very hard to do, given their purse strings and the hatred they have within the administration, particular people to Israel. So, you know, to go back to your book, and you mentioned one of the factors in how empires collapse and how wars descend into annihilation. And you said one of them is just people can't see it coming. And as you said, that's very obviously true in the United States. We're spending like there's no tomorrow in the assumption that there, of course, is a tomorrow and that no matter what, we will always succeed.
This is what modern monetary theory also suggested, is that no matter how much money we spent, there would never be an inflationary cycle. And then within three years, there was a massive inflationary cycle. It turns out that everything that goes up comes down. So what are some of the other factors when you're looking at inflation?
Empires that collapse or countries that are overtaken by new empires. What are some of the other factors that you see present in the United States? Finance. We mentioned finance, but you can't underscore that. Carthage that was destroyed was not the Carthage of Hannibal a half century later in terms of financial power and trade. Another is that as a society gets weaker,
and starts a decline, they put more interest in and I know this is counterintuitive, but they want to have more allies. So let's say take Constantinople and the Byzantines. The more they were unable to hold back Mehmed and the Sultan and his announced plan to destroy Constantinople, take it over, the more they said the Genovese are going to come.
the Venetians will sail up the Dardanelles and save us. The Florentines have always liked us. Maybe we can unite with Western Christianity, but nobody will allow the greatest city in Christendom to fall. And that never happens. And the Thebans kept saying,
well, we revolted, where are the Spartans? I hear they're marching up for the—they marched up to the Peloponnesian—up the Peloponnesian when they saw the actual disparity in forces and the nature of Alexander the Great, they just turned around and went home. And so, I think in the case of the United States, we keep talking—I mean, it's very important to have allies, but we keep talking about NATO this and NATO that and our allies, but
In some ways, it's an admission that the United States is no longer preeminent and will not lead. And what we should be saying is we want all the allies we can, but if we don't have the allies, we still have the power to fulfill our foreign policy agendas. We've got the best military, the best economy in the world, the best tech, the
But as you start to weaken, you keep talking about coalitions and they never pan out because you see intrinsically somebody says to themselves, well, I'm a NATO partner of the United States, but when the United States starts to look weak,
then the NATO partner doesn't say, I'm going to step up and help them in their hour of need. The NATO partner says, well, I'm on the front ranks with Russia. I got to cut a deal with them or China has trade with us or something. And it's just the opposite. The more powerful you are and the more you take care of your own business, the more allies gravitate to you. The more you do not, the more you seek out allies. And when you seek them out,
they tend to be fickle and want to know why you're doing that. And they never really show up in extremeness. And that was very tragic. When I was writing the chapter on Constantinople and I was reading all of these first-hand Italian and Byzantine Greek accounts,
And it was just sad. Gia Susiani, the Genovese mercenary, kept saying, "I know people are going to be on the horizon. They're going to come up right from the Aegean in the nick of time." And Constantine said, "Well, we have all these Greek-speaking communities that are still alive. They're on the Black Sea shores. They're going to come through the Bosporus." And you looked at the evidence, you think, "No, they were never going to come. They weren't going to send help to a dying civilization."
They were going to hold out on their own and they all were destroyed separately, but they were not going to come. And so that's what's kind of pathetic about the Sullivan-Blinken-Biden axis. They keep talking about allies and we're going to do this and coalitions, but people won't join us if they think you're weak economically, culturally, socially, and militarily, you know, and that's the problem.
So when you look at sort of the future of the country, it's very difficult to imagine because America's never experienced it, the possibility of
like an actual split country. I shouldn't say that. We almost experienced it during the Civil War, obviously, but since the Civil War, we've not really experienced the possibility of a serious split country or a real foreign invasion since 1812. And so what exactly would a decline of America look like? I mean, you can see how America would decline economically. That would be very easy to foresee. You could see the freedom of the seas that essentially the U.S. Navy guarantees going away as the world fragments.
You could see the sort of issues that we've seen in the Red Sea, but expanded into the Taiwan Straits. You could see a breakdown in global economics if China were to blockade Taiwan and interrupt the superconductor market or get Taiwan to pass over the more sophisticated microchips to China, thus upgrading their military. In other words, world fragmentation you can see. But what does that look like in terms of America domestically? How does that exacerbate internal divisions domestically?
150 years from now when people are writing the history of the United States and they say, well, here's what they should have seen coming. It was inevitable. Here's what it was looking like. What do you see? Yeah. Well, right now, does anybody believe that the U.S. Navy has the power or the confidence to sail into some of the major waterways? I don't think that we're going to send a fleet through the Red Sea.
I think we feel it's off limits. I think the eastern Mediterranean coast off Lebanon, we don't want to get near. I think this administration does not want to put a fleet in the Straits of Hormuz. No one would dare go up into the Black Sea and sail around. It would be too dangerous. So already there's areas that our enemies have said, if you come in here, you would be attacked or it would be too, and you're too risk averse. And we're going to provide enough risk so you'll be averse to taking them.
And when you look at the finance, I mean, Israel has an iron dome. Trump talks about we need an iron dome, and we do need a sophisticated, but do we have the money even to do it? And that gets back to Libby's warning that when the medicine is worse than the malady, you're in permanent decline. I mean, can you really imagine people either raising taxes or cutting entitlements so that we can build a sophisticated economy
air defense system against, say, North Korea or Iran that sent this. I can't. I think people would say you're either heartless or you can't do that. And one of the things that starts always what happens is with decline, it happened in Rome across the Danube and the Rhine, is that you have this idea that you're in decline and there are vigorous people
on the other side of the border. And maybe if you just destroyed the border and they came in and they had got a whiff of your superior culture, or in the case of late Rome, Christianity, then they would become kind of an infusion of dynamism. That's kind of the American creed about legal immigration. But it depends on assimilation, integration, and
And that can't happen unless the numbers are very small and the host is very confident. So when we let in 10 to 12 million people,
And we think that they're going to work really hard or they're going to make us compete with them. And they came from the poorest, most god-awful place. I don't think that's going to happen. I think what happens at this late stage, they get on entitlements or they commit crimes. And they have no respect for any society that would let them in.
And that's a good sign of a decline, that you don't have a defensible border. And the reason that you don't is you have the wherewithal, but you think that you need an infusion of dynamism because you're a static, inert, ossified, calcified society. And that happened a lot in antiquity in the Middle Ages. The other thing is...
There is this growth of a, I know it's a tired word, administrative state. But if you look at the number of people who were permanently occupied at Versailles in the last years of the Bourbons, 15,000 are under Philip II at the apex. And then the quick decline of the Spanish at the Escarole, 7,000 people. You look at the Kremlin and the Soviet Union, 10,000 people.
And we have these judge, jury, and executioner people, whether it's Francis Collin, Fauci, or Mayork, all these unelected people. And they're exercising a degree of power that vastly exceeds a congressperson or a senator's. And their only allegiance is to the ideology that created the administrative state and perpetuates it. And it's almost as if it's like a coup that's taken over.
And it involves the media and academia, Hollywood and entertainment. And so you wonder how the citizen is going to get back, the dying citizen is going to get back the preeminence of the citizen to say, you know what?
we want to get rid of this Department of Homeland Security or Department of Energy or Department of Education just because you're too powerful and you do too much harm. And they can't do it. And that happened to Rome especially. You can't afford it. They can't do it. So just to sum up, when a society knows what it has to do and what's killing it, but it's afraid that the remedy would be too controversial or too difficult for the patient to handle, it does nothing.
And then the malady or the disease progresses. And I think that's where we are now. Every single person in politics knows we have to start. We could go back tomorrow to Simpson-Bowles paradigm that would have had us with a balanced budget and no deficit, you know,
15 years if we hadn't adopted it. We all know what we have to do with the Pentagon. We all know what we have to do with the border. We all know what we have to do with crime. And yet we can't do it because we're afraid of being labeled a racist or xenophobe or sexist or transphobe or ill-divorced or a MAGA, semi-fascist, clinger or deplorable or redeemable, drags, chumps, all of those things.
pejoratives that have been used. So we're kind of ossified right now and existing on the fumes of the past. Another thing is very strange about these societies in decline
They don't have a romantic version of the past. You would think that because they think they have extended the glory and they're still Constantinople, they're still Justinian city, or they're still a Pamanondas of Thebes, but they don't really honor the past. They don't really say we have to live up to what these people did. They have a, I guess it's a modernist idea that
We apply the standards of the modern age to the past and find it wanting because they surely, when they talk about rejuvenation or restoration, they don't really articulate that we want to be Hannibal City again. When you look at, say, a map of the United States, so usually when you look at an empire decline, the map starts to change pretty radically. You see the...
Roman Empire shrinking, and then you see it breaking into two. You see the Soviet Empire breaking, and the map changes. When you look at the United States, it's difficult to imagine how the map changes, per se, in the same sort of way. Obviously, we're very lucky. God has blessed us with
extraordinary geography. We have autarkic economic power and a lower level of economic development, obviously, but we have dominance across an entire continent. We have Canadians in our north who are no external threat to us. We have Mexicans in our south who don't seem to have... They may have
power in some of the Southwest particularly, but now across the nation, thanks to the drug cartels shipping people across the border. But do you foresee the possibility of a change to the map of America in the same way that there was a change to the map of, say, the British Empire or the Roman Empire or anything else? Well, it had been conventional wisdom that the salvation of the United States was the federalist system, the idea that we were not America, we were the United States.
and that we had a system, and the left of course hates that system, where the House was popularly elected and represented the people and the Senate represented the states. So that, you know, they had six years of a term, they had to be older. And, you know, Wyoming, every senator represents 250,000, California, it's 20 million. And that was okay because the senators represented the state and their congressional representatives represented the people.
and that would allow the states, if you didn't like something in one state, you could go to another state. There was commonalities, but there was enough respect for state autonomy that each state was experimenting in various degrees with consensual government: more freedom, less freedom, less taxes, more regulation, etc., etc. And then that was a safety valve so that the nation didn't explode. However,
The problem with federalism is that when people conglomerate in one geographical area, that becomes a force multiplier and you create two alternative systems. We saw that in the 1850s with the rise of the idea that even though 1% of the southern population
owned slaves, the other people, and most people suffered from it, both black and white, black certainly, but also white, poor. Nevertheless, there was a larger paradigm that they accepted, that the holy ground of the Confederacy, we don't want to pay for internal improvements, tariffs or killings, all of that stuff. And they created a subculture, the red states, Mason-Dixon south of it.
And that was the only time that it really happened. But today, when we look at things, everybody is self-selecting. And so I think 10, I saw a statistics, 10 to 12 million Californians have left in the last 30 years. One right here. And they go to places that are, yes, they go to Nevada, they go to Arizona, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, Texas, California.
Even now, we've got a lot of people going to Alabama, and they do that because the societies work. They don't have deficits. They don't have huge pension programs. The police are trying to fight crime. There's a lot more liberty as far as opening a business, less regulations, etc. And the blue paradigm is not working, and it's collapsing.
And yet it inherited the bi-coastal media, the bi-coastal universities. It has a lot of the CEOs and corporate headquarters. And so when you ask that question, it's kind of scary because under our federal system, it only happened once. But we're starting to see two different societies. When I go to Florida or Tennessee or Texas, I come back to California or Washington, I
it's a very different place. I mean, you say to somebody in, I don't know, Arizona, do you watch the NBA? No. Do you watch the Oscars? Never heard of it. Do you ever watch the Tonys or Emmys? Nope. Do you watch NBC, ABC, Network Nerves? Nope. Do you go to a first-run Hollywood movie? Nope. Do you watch late-night comedy on TV? Nope.
And they, do you, what do you know about transgenderism? I don't know anything about it. It's just a monastery of the mind where a whole half of the country is culturally, socially disconnecting. The thing is that the North always from the Civil War days had all of the advantages.
They had the industry. They had the capital. They had Wall Street. They had Harvard and Yale. And then they had the West Coast and Oregon. And so you thought that that wouldn't be possible. And yet what's happening is you're seeing a red state antithesis that is draining the blue states of all the talent and using the old blue state model
in red states and the red states in some way are more like the north of the 1850s and the blue states are more like the Confederacy in the sense they're obsessed with one drop racism in the wokeness. They love to nullify federal laws like sanctuary cities, like they hate the Supreme Court. And I'm very worried about it because all these are force multipliers of differences.
And I don't know what, so far, we have these common military, common media, but even that is bifurcating. And I can see a point, and if something doesn't done, the white male rural soldier will not join the military anymore. And if something is not done, there will be two entirely separate medias. There will be no intersection between them at all.
And if something is not done, I think there's going to be an implosion of Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York. They're not sustainable in the present. So, yes, we're going to be in a very dangerous position unless we get a unifying type of administration in Congress.
And one of the things that would be fascinating about what you're talking about is that unlike the Civil War, where one side was insisting on the power of union and the other side wanted to break away. And what we're looking at right now, when I talk to left-wingers from California, they're
They they're saying to Floridians and Texans, go with God. And if you're in Florida or Texas, you're putting up lawn signs saying, don't New York, my Florida. And so there is this sort of mutual belief that we're better off without one another that seems to be growing rather than minimizing. And in truth, the only thing that has historically ever papered over differences like that are success.
It turns out that in success and prosperity, people are willing to pay over a hell of a lot of differences. But when things start to fail, then all of the fissures come to the surface. This is a point that Neil Ferguson makes in The War of the World, is that when you have economic turmoil, when you have ethnic tensions,
when you have declining empires, the combination of those three usually ends up with some of the worst things in human history, ranging from tremendous violence and war to actual genocide as people begin to target one another. And it feels like those factors are quickly building up as we refuse to face up to serious problems both foreign and domestic, as we undermine our economy, as we rack up the national debt,
as we demonize one another to the point where in that Biden-Trump debate, and what I thought was by far the most overlooked point of the debate, there was a point where Jake Tapper asked the sitting presidents of the United States if the millions of people who will vote for Donald Trump are enemies of democracy if they vote for Donald Trump. And Biden says, as they find out more about Trump, yes. Meaning that if you know about Trump and you vote for Trump,
then this means that you are now a traitor. I mean, he's been doing this throughout, but that was the most explicit statement of it. It wasn't even an attempt to sort of brand it as the ultra MAGA, super MAGA, super duper MAGA. It was like, you vote for Trump, you're the enemy now. Well, you start thinking that way and it's very difficult to see how we share a country together. Yeah, I have one, maybe I should end on a note of optimism. Trump and the people around him
are light years ahead of 2016 and 2020. They're just more professional. But more importantly, he's hit on a paradigm of unity where he's trying to substitute class concerns and solidarity for race. So he's doing, for all the vituperation about he's racist and polarizing, what he's doing by going to Black areas and Latino areas
and appealing because he has a natural empathy for working people. He is basically saying to them, you have more in common if you're in Bakersfield, California, or you're in inner Chicago with the people of East Palestine than you do with Joy Reid and Oprah. Because your Black and Latino bi-coastal elite in the media, in Colleen Gray, in the universities, they're just, they have the same relationship to you
that the people at Harvard or Yale do to East Palestine, the white elite. And you need to unite and make the majority. And we can...
And then he gives them an agenda, and the agenda is, we're going to close the border for you. And we're going to very quickly, and we can, mine rare earths, build nuclear plants, be the greatest gas producer and oil producer in the world. And that's going to help you in a miserable, that's going to give us national strength. And we're going to get back the military because we're going to get all of these people of the middle class, and we're not going to emphasize race in the military anymore.
And that's a radical idea. And I never thought that a Paul Ryan or a Mitt Romney or John McCain who were claimed to be so sober and judicious, they never attempted that. They never did at all. All Paul Ryan talked about was capital gains cuts, which I'm for, but it was just a...
that Republican Party had no ability to do that. And yet, it's one of the wrinkles of history that this guy who was a billionaire who can be very crude and callous has a natural affinity for working people. And he's blunt, and they admire his authenticity, and he's genuine, and he can be crude. And they're starting to form this nationalist worker solidarity. And I think
If Donald Trump were to win 21, 22% of the black vote, that wouldn't require probably 30 or 40% of the black male, or 45 to 50 of the Latino vote, and close the border, and go back to an energy first paradigm, and then use the DOJ to stop this, the cartels and interstate coordination of all this crime.
restore deterrence. I think he could heal the country very quickly. I really do. By success. Success. And he was right about that. So I'm kind of confident because I'll just finish by saying this reminds me a lot of the 1980 race with Carter and Reagan. Carter
Everybody said, well, he gave us stagflation, inflation. The Russians are in Afghanistan. They took hostages. The failed rescue. All he does is scold. He scolds us. He says what we can't do if malaise this. And then...
But on the other hand, Carter's right. Reagan's never held federal office. He's very old. He speaks in platitudes. He never gives detail. George H.W. Bush said he had voodoo economics. How can you do all this? And then suddenly, 15 days before the election, Reagan was polling seven points behind Carter in the Gallup poll. And then he had the debate. There you go again, Mr. President Carter. And people just collectively said, you know what?
I may be a Democrat or an independent, but I don't believe what they're saying about Reagan. I'm done. I'm done with Carter. And I think a lot of people are saying, you know what?
After that debate, and I saw that, and I was coming to that conclusion anyway, I do not want to be told what I can't do and scolded and hectored and have all these unorthodox things mainstream. And whatever Trump is, this is our last chance. And I think you're going to see him blow up the election and win by about nine or ten points.
But it won't be until August, I think. Well, that does put me in a good mood, and that's a good place to stop. Professor Hansen, really appreciate the time, appreciate your insight. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me, Ben. Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp. Associate producers are Jake Pollack and John Crick. Production intern is Sarah Steele. Editing is by Jeff Tomlin. Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina. Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina. Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo. Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.
Executive in charge of production is David Wormis. Executive producer, Justin Siegel. Executive producer, Jeremy Boring. The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production. Copyright Daily Wire 2024.
I am one of many Americans who bought a gun within the last year. While I get to the range as much as I can, I usually go with my wife, and sometimes we put it off because the guns are really loud for her, and sometimes the recoil is a lot for her, and sometimes the recoil can be uncomfortable. Fortunately, this doesn't have to be the case. There's a single accessory that will make going to the range a lot more enjoyable. Silencers make shooting significantly quieter.
and cut out a lot of that recoil and concussion. But obtaining a silencer can be a pain in the neck. There's a ton of paperwork and red tape involved. Fortunately, my friends over at Silencer Shop are here to help. They make getting silencers super simple. Silencer Shop has helped more American gun owners get suppressors than anyone else because they make the process so much easier than anyone else. They offer the largest selection of top brand silencers
and their dedicated team will help you find the perfect fit for your firearm. They handle the hard part. They'll help you submit all your paperwork. You can get your suppressor from the comfort of your home at silencershop.com slash Shapiro. These guys really know what they're doing. They are huge advocates of your Second Amendment rights. Silencer Shop doesn't just support your Second Amendment rights. They fight for them. They spend a lot of time and money aggressively lobbying, fighting lawsuits, and supporting pro-Second Amendment legislation across the nation. You got to check them out. Go to silencershop.com slash Shapiro. Let Silencer Shop help you make your guns better. That's silencershop.com slash Shapiro.