On this episode of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler take aim at the six congressional Democrats who called on military members to defy “illegal” orders from the Commander-in-Chief.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to VDH’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.
JACK FOWLER: These six Democrat congress members. One of the most interesting, odd examples of political performance art. They concocted this video encouraging, warning, urging members of the military not to follow illegal orders. Wow, Victor, it was just so weird. Your thoughts on it.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: So, we have 1.3 million soldiers on active duty, and there are representatives, six of them Congress people and senators, say on this video, and they all say, we have served, we’re veterans, and you don’t have to obey an unlawful order, OK? And it’s in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
The idea is that Donald Trump is issuing unlawful orders. They don’t cite one, not one. So really the message then becomes, “Hey, you 1.3 million soldiers, you all are lawyers. So, when your commanding officer says, ‘Get in the helicopter, fly through the fog and look for the downed pilot’ you say that’s an unlawful order. I’m not going to.”
That is the message. If the message is, “Wink, nod, Donald Trump has been giving unlawful orders, but we don’t want to specify which ones,” there’s a reason why that. And we’ve heard that it’s unlawful to use military force abroad without a congressional authorization. False. Barack Obama killed dozens of people with Predator drones, including a U.S. citizen. He joked about it at the White House Correspondents Dinner when he said, “If you want to date my daughter, it’s called Predator, P-R-E-D-A-T-O-R.” OK.
George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Harry Truman, they’ve all used it. If it’s you can’t send federal troops into a city that’s under siege, [Secretary of State] Colin Powell begged to use 5,000 Marines for the Rodney King [riots], he did. And we’ve had, I think, seven instances where presidents have sent troops in: World War I veterans, Civil War draft, you name it.
So, they can’t list one thing. And then they say, Uniform Code of Military Justice. OK, Mr. Left-wing Representatives, go look at Article 90 and 92. And it does say you can obey, but then it has lawful and unlawful orders. And you go look at the instances when you can, it’s almost impossible. You have to be absolutely sure that you are being told what … if you read that thing, what an unlawful order is, it’s something like shoot the prisoner, something like that. It’s not what they’re imagining.
And that is highly ironic because in the first term—we have Article 88, since they want to quote the Uniform Code of Military Justice, it says generals, admirals, high ranking officers shall not disparage, demean, basically smear the commander in chief, the vice president, cabinet people. And this applies, it says whether they’re active or retired and subject to recall. We had, I think it was eight or nine four-star admirals who said he was a liar, he was Mussolini, he acted as if he was Hitler, he was a comparable, I think that was General [Michael] Hayden who flashed pictures of Auschwitz, said that Trump was doing the same thing on the border. I could go on.
So they’re not being honest. But what’s even worse is—very quickly, and Sami and I talked to some others about it, this insurrectionary idea that Gen. [Mark] Milley, for example, because Trump is so evil, can diagnose him as unstable, then call his Chinese counterpart in the People’s Liberation Army and warn him that he will be contacted if he has any order, Milley, any order, or he can break the chain of command, which he’s not supposed to do, and interfere between theater commanders and the Department of Defense’s secretary, which he did. And he told them all to consult him first.
Or you have Rosa Brooks 11 days after Donald Trump was inaugurated saying we’ve got to get rid of this guy. There’s three ways to do it. We either have the 25th amendment or we impeach him—too slow—or you can have a military coup. Military coup, she said.
And then we had two lieutenant colonels, one was very decorated, Lt. Nagl and said, Gen. Milley, you’re gonna have to remove him. He won’t leave. And he has his little green men. And I tell you what, man, when the 82nd Airborne goes and confronts Trump. he’ll back down. So he’s basically calling for an OK Corral shootout between the Secret Service or somebody in the 82nd. So what I’m getting at, Jack, is this is not new.
And when you add this to the 600 sanctuary cities where they’re defying federal law, it’s like Fort Sumter. Or you have Nancy Pelosi saying, we’re going to arrest any ICE officer in our state that we think breaks one of our laws. They don’t know what the Constitution says; that the superiority lies with the federal government when it is enforcing federal law anywhere in the 50 states.
And yet they keep doing it. And they don’t even believe it, what they’re saying. Because when Jan Brewer was the governor of Arizona, and Obama would not, would not, would not do his federal responsibility and close the border, she tried to. And they sued her. And our liberal judges then said, no, Gov. Brewer. That’s state’s rights. You can’t interfere. And she said, well, he’s not doing his job. It doesn’t matter. Immigration is federal. Those same judges are now saying, yes, we can interfere because before the federal government could not be challenged by the state because it didn’t want to enforce the law. It was derelict and that was wonderful. Now when the federal government is dutiful and wants to enforce the law, yes, you can interfere.
I don’t know who their heroes are. Jefferson Davis, John Calhoun, George Wallace, Gen. Scott, [played by] Burt Lancaster in “Seven Days in May.” I don’t know. But it’s one of those. They’re insurrectionists. And we’re going to get a situation—Mark my words. We’re going to get a situation next year as the midterms and everything heats up when some crazy blue state governor or mayor is going to tell his local police force to stop an ICE officer. Whether the ICE officer is in the process of arresting somebody or chasing somebody through the woods as we saw in that tape. And you’re going to have a confrontation. And then we’re going to be Bleeding Kansas 1853 or 1854.
And I don’t know how it’s going to end, but this is really dangerous. And the Left keeps pushing the insurrection button. And these people who are telling soldiers to disobey commands if they feel and they’re considered opinion that they can is really bizarre, but it has a precedent. If the chairman of the Joint Chief says that as Dr. Mark Milley with my sophisticated background in psychiatry, I telediagnosed our commander in chief is unstable, then that gives me a right to disobey any order that he gives and beyond that to contact the Communist Party in China and warn them that we might attack them. And I give them advanced warning.
And that theory is the same thing.
You soldiers can diagnose your commanding officer as crazy, and he gave you a wrong order. So just disobey it. And then they cloak that in patriotism and their service. I’m a veteran. I’m getting really tired of that too. I really like veterans. I grew up in a family of veterans and I think it’s a wonderful thing to serve. Everybody I met in the military is wonderful. But when these people say that they’re going to hide behind being a veteran. That’d be like me saying you can’t talk about food policy, Mr. Senator. Have you ever been on a 285 Massey for 12 hours? Have you? Have you ever sprayed dimethoate for six hours in a field? You don’t know anything about farming. You have no right to talk about food policy.
Everybody has a right to talk about military policy, especially when the military veterans set themselves up to be advocating civil disobedience, which is what they’re doing. They really are, or actually military disobedience.
FOWLER: I’m glad you mentioned “Seven Days in May,” Victor. I saw it recently. It is a terrific movie, even though it’s a liberal movie. No question it was made from a liberal perspective. But you wait 60 years, and it’s an indictment of the current liberal sense.
HANSON: It is, it is, it is. Everybody, I want to be very clear: The Left is not principled. They don’t have a position on states’ rights or federal superiority in a constitutional sense. They don’t have a position on sanctuary cities. That is just for the moment because it’s conducive to their larger agenda of acquiring and expanding their power.
And I’ve said this before, but if you’re some guy and you’re a developer, let’s say in Salt Lake City, and you want to build a condo and you see a three-winged blackbird and you say, that blank-blank blackbird nest is right in the way of my bulldozers. And then somebody says, “Well, you know, it’s on the endangered species list.” “I don’t care. The federal government has no jurisdiction here in Utah.”
Or you’re in Wyoming, you get your cowboy boots stereotype you go in and they say, “We can’t sell you that .45.” “Well, I don’t follow the federal gun laws. This is the state of Wyoming. It’s a sanctuary gun city.” They would go ballistic, ballistic. “This is insurrection. You have to follow federal law.” They just pick and choose because they have no principle. Everybody needs to know that. When they get up, like Gavin Newsom, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this about sanctuary cities, if you’re here illegally.
And then you have Karen Bass and Los Angeles officials deliberately creating apps and trying to work with illegal aliens to resist the rule of law as practiced by federal ICE agents. But believe me, sometimes a federal government is good when the protester is conservative, and that’s very rarely that happens.
And so that’s what’s really scary about these people. They’re French Revolutionary Jacobins. They’ll do anything and say anything at any time. And I was really angry about that video. I thought, wow.
You hide behind your service and then you, for cheap political purposes, you get up there and you send this message to over a million soldiers that there’s going to come an occasion where they’re going to get an illegal order, and they’re going to have the constitutional right to resist it when you don’t tell people, “This is how many orders were resisted in the military the last five years per year, and this is what happens to people who resisted that order.”
Why don’t they give that information out?
FOWLER: Resist and you’ll be a hero but don’t have a vaccine and we’ll can you. It’s amazing.
HANSON: 8,500 people.
FOWLER: Hey Victor, we’re gonna come back and talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jasmine Crockett we’re gonna do that right after these important messages.
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