Israel’s Gaza Decision and Dropping the Big One

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

This is our Saturday edition, in which we look at something different in the middle segment.

And since it is August 9th, the day that Nagasaki was bombed, the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, we're going to have a look at both Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and the whole controversy of the atomic bomb in our middle segment.

So stay with us and we'll get to that and some news.

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Victor is the the Martin Ann Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, VictorHanson.com.

The name of the website is The Blade of Perseus, and we'd love everybody to come in and have a look at all the things, especially those that are free.

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So Victor, let's start with some news.

And I'm going to look at Iran and then China and then Israel in the news.

And apparently Wednesday, the Iranians hung a nuclear scientist that they said was helping Mossad with information on the bomb sites that the United States hit, so the United States and Israel.

And apparently, the strange thing about him was he had been arrested 18 months ago, so I'm not sure exactly if he had anything to do with Mossad.

Well, if he was arrested 18 months ago, he didn't really give the updated information that might have been necessary to find out where those 20 nuclear physicists were on bombing days because they were killed and he wouldn't have had the ability to communicate with Mossad.

It also shows you that they're still paranoid, that they have a break in their security.

And it also reminds everybody that the degree to which they will

enhance their efforts to recapture a bomb program will depend entirely on the Israeli and the United States government.

They have no mechanisms to stop a U.S.

or Israeli subsequent attack.

They have no air force.

They have no air defenses.

they have no navy to speak of, and they're completely vulnerable.

Now they're paranoid and they're having all sorts of domestic problems with the new

maximum pressure campaign of Donald Trump on s oil sanctions, etcetera.

If they get a secondary boycott of

all countries that do business with Russia, then there won't be any Iranians going anywhere.

And there's still Iranians coming to the United States, so they won't get any, it'll be really a clampdown.

So I don't see that they're in such a good position.

I think it also reminds us what an authoritarian regime looks like because the reports coming out are that they are torturing people for these types of confessions.

And you have to note that he did confess to communicating with the people.

Isn't it funny how the left hates the West?

And they don't torture people to the same degree, at least, as the non-West that they glorify.

I should say, say, by the way, there's a background noise today because I'm right in the middle of 40 acres of almonds, and they are shaking the trees.

And we have this huge earthquake sound.

And if you see the microphones move, it actually moves things inside.

The shakers are so powerful.

And then, of course,

it's kind of the dust bomb outside.

I think the thing

we should be weary of is that our cameras might might move.

Yeah,

so yeah, absolutely.

All right, Victor, let's then take a second for a look at China.

Trump has called for the Intel, it makes chips for computers.

CEO Lip Boon Tan to resign because he has connections with the Chinese military and Chinese semiconductor companies as well.

And the Intel board has doubled down and said that there there is no national security threat with this particular CEO.

And I think Trump and his crew are very worried about that possibility.

Where are you hoping?

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't think any of us know the degree to which this executive was involved or not involved, but I do know the degree to which China is relying on U.S.

technology.

When you look at their tanks, when you look at their missiles, when you look at their submarines, when you look at their aircraft, they're all appropriated from the United States.

Now, whether that comes from direct espionage or

2% or 3% of the 300,000 Chinese students here, that would be 3,000 or 4,000 people.

Or they're diplomatic consuls or Fang Fang type people, I don't know, but something is happening.

And it's pastime that the United States said

these are the critical industries in which we're not going to share technology with China.

Libertarian economics people, the Wall Street Journal, they all say, oh, you can't stop it.

This is crazy to shut off China.

I've had debates with people on this.

Why don't we haven't really tried?

All I know is that this present system of huge trade surpluses that they're running out, asymmetrical tariffs and technological theft, dumping money market manipulations, currency manipulation, dump all of that has done what?

It's made it the second wealthiest country in the world, the most autocratic, the most totalitarian, the most anti-American, the most powerful of all of our enemies in the last hundred years.

So I don't understand why everybody is so wedded to the status quo.

It hasn't worked.

It's worked for some people.

That is the corporate elite that's heavily invested in China.

And maybe the consumer class that buys stuff at Walmart or Target.

But for the rest of the people, it has not worked out.

Well, Victor,

on Friday, we talked a little bit about Gaza and Israel, but I had something to ask you, and

news to bring up for our audience, and I just forgot about it.

And that news is very important: that Netanyahu has said that Israelis are going to occupy Gaza, and so he's made a decision to go all the way through.

Do you think this is a wise decision?

Well,

no Israeli since 2006 has been in Gaza.

They didn't want to stay there.

Sharon got everybody out.

Nobody wants to occupy it because it's a lose-lose situation.

But what he's saying is, I think by occupying it, we're going to go block by block through the whole country and eliminate Hamas.

I don't think that's possible, though, because

you don't know who they are.

Nobody's going to say, I'm openly a Hamas member.

We have all these Western pollsters who say, oh, the Gazan people don't like Hamas.

There's no evidence that that's true.

The polls don't show that.

Sometimes they say there's dislike, sometimes they say there's not.

But there's two alternatives.

One is to go back, Crete,

October 7th

of 2023,

and that is just to beef up your defenses, build a better wall, and just wall it off and just say,

don't want to be you, you don't want to be me, keep away, or it's to go in and, quote-unquote, occupy it and destroy Hamas.

I don't know which is preferable because they're both bad choices.

But I think that the pre-October 7th,

this is what I don't understand.

Khalil, remember him?

He just said the other day, he's back now, you know, back in the sense he's protesting again.

He just said the other day that there was no alternative to October 7th.

So he was glorifying October 7th.

But prior to October 7th, the times that I'd been there, I think two out of the last three years in Israel, they were very happy that they had solved the Gaza problem, they thought.

They had the kibbutz right near the Gaza crossing points.

That was an area where there were a lot of left-wing Israelis.

liberal Israelis, people who felt that the more poor Gazans experience magnanimity from Israel, high wages, making more, three times more than they could at Gaza, coming across every day to work in agriculture, to work in construction, when they were injured or needed health care, the Israelis would take them to Israeli doctors and hospitals to get, you know, first world care.

And they thought that obviously

they were taking the most radical of Palestinians and winning them over.

What they didn't realize is that's not how it works in the mind of the Gaza

militants.

I shouldn't even say militants.

I mean, there were 6,000 people that crossed the border on October 7th.

The minority of them Hamas.

Once the word got out that you could kill, rape, steal, assault Jews, and there was no IDF there, they all, it was like a free-for-all.

They all wanted to get over there and join.

So

the Gazans interpreted the Israeli magnanimity as weakness to be despised and not to be feared.

Not strength is to be feared.

So I don't know where they go from here.

The first choice didn't work before October 7th.

The second choice of just walling it off with not just an electronic quote-unquote fence, I mean a real wall.

I'm not sure that would work, but I know that going in there and cleansing Hamas out is going to be very difficult.

Yeah, it will be very difficult.

I have a feeling the Israelis can do it.

Let's hope so.

But I think the world is.

I think Trump is right.

He's saying basically that we're in an existential war, Gondor versus Mordor.

And if you're Canada and you are Britain and you're on the side of Hamas and you want to recognize that, then we don't want to deal with you for a while.

That's what he said.

Yeah, I know.

I like Trump's

support of them.

You know what?

Speaking of Trump, he said also that because of the situation of aid going into Gaza and how Hamas is interrupting it, that the United States may have to take over aid.

That was another story I hadn't quite talked to you about.

I don't know if you have any commentary on that.

That's

U.S.

the purveyor of aid to the Gazans in order to solve the famine crisis.

I'm not sure there's a famine crisis.

There's all sorts of...

There's a famine crisis.

There's a crisis of Hamas hijacking food from the United States, Israel or the UN, and then expropriating it and then charging its own hungry people money or allegiance, blackmailing them.

And

if people want to

get food from the United States or Israel, which there's food there, they're going to be

identified, named, and somebody that night is going to knock on their door and beat them up or kill them.

Until that's ended, there's not going to be much hope.

And

I just don't see

much hope.

I really don't.

They apparently do not want to live like the two million Arabs inside Israel who have a first world standard of living and they're treated with freedom of expression.

They have a pretty good economy.

They're not trying to kill all the Jews for the most part.

And

they're happy compared to their counterparts in Palestine or Jordan or Egypt or anywhere in the Arab world other than the Gulf.

Is the U.S.

taking over aid the solution to that?

I'm not dead sure about that.

I don't think the U.S.

should get involved with the Gazans at all.

If anybody listening can tell me, you're wrong.

Every time we've engaged them, like George W.

Bush did, I think we should have open elections.

And if Hamas gets elected, they get elected.

And we'll respect that.

Yeah, we had one election one time

or we need to deal with Arafat and we'll have them at Camp David and we'll make sure that he gets 98% of the whole West Bank for his own Palestinian state and anything that the Israelis want to keep around Jerusalem they'll give them a commiserate part of territory from pre-1947 Israel and they'll and they'll just switch and they'll all be happy.

No, he didn't want to do that.

They want to destroy Israel.

I know that because I walk across the Stanford campus and during this whole post-October 7th, I listened to what the wealthy, upscale Middle East students were saying in their pro-Hamas demonstrations.

It wasn't that they want to have a two-state solution.

It was that they were river to the sea, river to the sea.

To the extent they knew what that meant as well, right?

They don't know.

As I said once in a podcast, I asked them what river and what sea, and they didn't know.

He said, well, I think someone said the Atlantic Ocean.

I said, so you want to take over I said, so you're the Ottomans and you want to take over all of Europe?

They don't even know what the Jordan River is.

No, they don't.

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So, Victor,

let's turn to the United States and ICE.

So, ICE has, as we know, been very busy.

They have 10,000 jobs that they're trying to hire for, and they in fact have 80,000 applications with ICE, which I thought was extraordinary.

But also

an incident in Colorado, five Colorado law enforcement officers are facing unpaid leave demotions and lawsuits for warning ICE about illegal aliens.

And the case is being brought before.

You're not warning illegal aliens about ICE?

No.

Warning, telling ICE we've got illegal

aliens.

Yeah, I understood that.

I didn't know which one it was, because they're happening both times.

Well, the one that I'm talking about is the Colorado Attorney General is bringing this up.

So he's on the side of the illegal alien.

He is on the side.

Somebody, as Tom Holman, said, we've already had an ICE officer shot in New York, and we've had them assaulted.

I think we've had two officers shot, and we've had an ICE facility torched with a firebomb.

And it's going to get worse.

And

everybody says, are we going to have a civil war?

Well, if you look at

what the left is doing, they are trying to obstruct the enforcement of federal law.

I haven't seen that since George Wallace stood.

When I was a kid, I watched CBS News when George Wallace stood in the doorstep of the University of Alabama and said he was not going to let

James Meredith, I think it was James Meredith, maybe it was somebody else, into the University of Alabama and just wasn't going to do it.

And then Bobby Kennedy, who's Attorney General and

his brother, said, we now hereby nationalize the Alabama State Guard and they sent in federal troops.

And they said, you're breaking the law.

And that was it.

They integrated it.

So the point, well, they at least tried to integrate it.

I mean, they did that day.

It was a long process.

But what I'm getting at is that's an insurrectionary act when you tell the federal government that they cannot force federal law when you're a citizen of the United States in the domain of the federal government.

It seems to me insurrectionary.

What I don't understand about the left is they're doing things that we've never really experienced in our lifetime.

We've never really had state and local officials who have announced that we're not going to follow the law.

We're not going to allow people who have been arrested for crimes, in addition to the crime of being here illegally.

We're not going to turn them over to federal enforcement officers,

even though we are going to let them out once we're sure that the federal officers won't be able to find them.

And we don't really care what they do to people, these criminals.

And we've had instances where ICE

people detained under ICE that were let go, killed, maimed, raped, assaulted again.

They don't care.

It's kind of like Mark Milley.

I mean, everybody said, oh, it wasn't that bad.

No, he took a pardon for a reason.

He was an insurrectionist.

He, on his own, called up his Chinese communist counterpart and said,

things are tense.

And if I diagnose Donald Trump, if he seems to me that he's too erratic and we're in a nuclear DEF CON one or two or three situation, I'm going to call you and warn you.

And anybody else who had done that, if some right-wing officer said, you know, I don't trust Barack Obama.

He had a hot Mike Soul conversation with the Russians.

He's too

erratic or unstable.

And if I find out that he gives an order and

I interpret it as dangerous, I'm just going to call my counterparts.

He would be court-martialed.

So the left is really getting...

One of the legacies of Donald Trump won't just be what he did, but what he did to the Democrats.

He created an insanity among them.

And it's really weird because everybody asks, will there be a MAGA

movement after Donald Trump leaves office in 2029, in January 20th?

And people said, will it be Rubio or it will be Vance?

And they'll keep the MAGA flame

alight.

And maybe it will be both of them on the same ticket.

And that's his legacy.

Well, the legacy also is he's kind of replaced himself.

What Donald Trump basically did is I created a new Republican Party that captured the middle class and a high degree percentage of minority, and I made the Democratic Party go nuts.

And they're so crazy they imploded.

So my predecessor won't need me anymore because the Democratic Party is the squad and Jasmine Crockett and Mr.

Mom

Doni, and they're nuts.

And I did that to them.

because they couldn't stand me and I didn't back down and I just said, Give me your worst, I'll give you your best.

And that's one of his legacies.

There is no Democratic Party, as we used to know.

It's very ironic because they always said, I don't recognize the Republican Party.

You can go down the line and see 90% of the MAGA positions are tax cuts, deregulations, deterrent foreign policy, et cetera.

Conservative Supreme Court judges.

You go down the Democratic Party and you think, hate Israel, that's new.

Radical DEI, that's going way beyond affirmative action.

Transgendered

women, they're biological men, we never heard of that.

10,000 illegal aliens a day, that's not what Bill Clinton said in 1992 or 96.

It's the party that has completely metamorphosized.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Just to remind people, if you are on social media, Victor's ex-handle is at VDHanson, and his Facebook page is Hansen's Morning Cup.

So please tap into us there if that's what your outlet for news is.

So Victor, I'm interested to hear.

I know today when this is published is the day that Nagasaki had the atomic bomb dropped on it and so I was wondering your reference.

It's the one issue of World War II where we have the greatest ignorance and the greatest misinformation, mostly because of the left.

So

first question is we dropped a bomb and it was the uranium bomb.

so-called little boy.

And by the way, it was very dangerous.

There was only one of them.

They knew it would work because they had simulated uranium fission.

They weren't sure about the plutonium bomb that was dropped on Magasaki.

They had to try a sample plutonium bomb in New Mexico, Analma,

Gordo, in, I think, July 16th of 1945.

Well, let's just go through it.

What were the bombs?

There were two.

There was a uranium bomb and there was a plutonium bomb.

And why did they have the Manhattan Project?

Because they had gotten word that the Germans were ahead of them in physics, or at least equal to them.

And they had gotten word that the Japanese, although they were way behind, they were exploring it, as were the British.

The British came under the Casablanca Accords, private.

Churchill and Roosevelt shared resources.

They would bring all the physicists they had, and we had, they bring them to New Mexico under Oppenheimer, etc.

And this is very important.

The United States would not choose to use the bomb unless it apprised Churchill.

In this case, it was Clement Attlee, his successor.

But the British government had to give an OK before they could drop the bomb in a military context.

Second thing,

it wasn't just Harry Truman that dropped the bomb.

They had a particular group.

And who was the head of the group?

Oppenheimer.

Very liberal,

plagued guy, conflicted, but very brilliant.

He's a hero to the left.

They had and they'd explored every option.

Why don't we drop one in Tokyo Bay?

And they said, well,

we only have one uranium bomb, and unlike the

plutonium bomb, once we're in the air,

if you get a crash, once it's activated, it will blow up.

And we don't know, we've never dropped it before.

We don't know if it'll work.

So if we say to the Japanese, we're going to drop the uranium bomb right in front of you, and they wanted to save the plutonium bomb in case the Japanese said blank you.

So they knew they had one bomb that would work.

They didn't have any other bombs till the end of August, maybe one or two plutonium bombs.

And they wouldn't have another three or four until the end of the year.

October, November.

So basically, Oppenheimer and these scientists and military officers said, well,

if we

it's going to be tricky to get this 10,000-pound bomb inside a B-29 and fly it 1,600 miles from Tenyon and then hit the target and arm it in the air 30 minutes.

So, you know, 400 planes in World War II didn't make it on takeoff of the Marianas.

They fell off the cliff.

If this thing falls off and it's armed, it'll blow up.

So they only made a safety device late armament, late in the mission progress, maybe a couple months before they dropped it.

Even then, it was tricky to arm the bomb in mid-air.

So the idea was they looked at everything, they said, well, we can drop it, but we don't know if we announce that we're going to drop it right in front of the Japanese, it might not work.

And then

it would be worse than anything.

And then if it did work, they might say, well, do it again.

You didn't kill anybody.

You must be afraid to use it.

And then we only had one bomb, and that's the plutonium bomb.

And maybe after that, they say, do it again.

And the reason I'm saying this is the Japanese themselves, after the war, there was a large number of generals and diplomats that said that

they had sued for peace after Nagasaki because they felt it was the culmination of an earlier firebombing raid that started on March 11th, 9th, 10th, excuse me, of 1945.

By the time they dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 85% of the industrial capacity of Japan was in cinders.

They had, you know, 350 B-29s per raid were systematically burning down the cities of Japan and the industrial quarters.

They dropped over 11 million leaflets and said, get out.

We're going to destroy your cities.

So after the war, a lot of Japanese said, I don't even think it was no big deal.

I mean, it was a big deal.

It was sudden, and that was the whole point.

So when Oppenheimer gave the recommendation to use it, not him, but his task force,

they said that

we probably won't have to invade.

The Army said we're going to invade, and it's going to cost us a million and a half dead and wounded, and two different.

Operation Downfall had Operation Olympic in

Coronet, and it was to go into the main island, the two main islands, 1945 in November, and in the spring of 1946.

And the Army had said,

we've got to look at what happened at the Philippines.

How big was the garrison when we took the Philippines?

And how big was the garrison at Okinawa?

People have to remember that in World War II,

the United States lost 450,000 dead, but we lost a million point two wounded, missing, and dead.

And the worst year of the war for us was not December 41, 42, 43.

It was August of

July of 1944 to July of 1945.

We lost more American soldiers in Europe and the Pacific in that last 12-month period than we did in any other period of the war.

Okinawa was not invaded till April 1st of 1945.

Now, it was officially declared secure not till June 15th.

They killed a three-star general on Okinawa.

And more importantly, a lot of people felt that Okinawa wasn't even secure until mid-July, just three or four weeks before we dropped it.

Why is that important?

The Americans lost 50,000 casualties, 12,000 dead.

The number of ships that were sunk or damaged was over 300.

We lost over 750 airplanes on on Okinawa, and we killed about 100,000 soldiers and 60,000 civilians that were forced by the Japanese government to fight alongside Japanese.

So the point I'm making is, they looked at this and they said, well,

there was about

150,000 total troops on Okinawa and they inflicted 50,000 casualties.

There's 7 million that are going to be armed and ready for us.

And we had about 30 or 150, 400 kamikaze attacks, a little bit more, maybe 1,000.

And they've got 7,000 to 8,000 kamikazes ready for us.

So they used Okinawa's casualties just right before the bombing of Hiroshima.

And they went back to late 44 and the Philippines.

And they came up with an algorithm that this many Japanese results, when you want to go into a Japanese-held island or fortress and

dictate unconditional surrender, this is how many Americans will be killed or wounded.

And they came up with a million and a half.

And so they said, we're not going to do that.

And then Curtis LeMay said, just let me go.

Let me go.

And they said, well, you've already burned out 85%

of the Japanese homeland.

And you've mined all the harbors.

And you've killed probably 150,000, more than the atomic bombs by far.

And LeMay, after the dropping, he didn't know about it.

He was told to set aside a squadron of, I think it was 12 B-29s, the 509s.

My father was in Tenyan,

and he was right, 313, he was right near it.

And everybody was angry at the 509 because they didn't have any combat missions.

Everybody was dying or getting killed in crashes, going 1,600 miles over Japan and back, 3,200 miles per mission.

And these guys were all nice uniforms.

They did practice this and they did this, but they didn't go in combat because they were training for the atomic bomb.

LeMay didn't know what they were training for.

He just was told, leave them alone.

After it was dropped, he got kind of angry.

He said it wasn't necessary.

My boys were already doing it.

And so, what I'm getting at is: everybody said that the Americans dropped it to save a million and a half dead or and wounded by invading Japan.

True.

LeMay said we wouldn't have had to do it anyway because I had another plan.

Okay.

What was the other plan?

The other plan was on recently occupied Okinawa.

They were already building 7,000-foot runways for another 2,000 B-29s.

So LeMay had 2,000 or so B-29s from the Marianas.

They would be going three times a week with firebombs.

They would be joined by people in Okinawa.

That was only half the distance.

They could go five times a week.

So instead of 2,000 B-29s, they were on order eventually to get 4,000, but that was only a quarter of the plan.

The British said, well, wait a minute.

We have Operation Tiger Force.

They said, well, what's that mean?

Well, the war was over on May 9th, and we've got all these Lancasters.

We've got 500 Lancasters.

They can hold almost as much as the B-29, about 15,000 pounds.

We want to get in on the action.

So they said, okay,

how many are you going to transfer?

They were going to transfer 40 squadrons.

And finally, they said, we can't even handle that much.

And remember, when I say they're going to transfer bombers, you're talking about P-47s, but especially P-51s, a couple of thousand fighters as well.

So the British were ready to put over about 400 Lancasters.

Then the 8th Air Force, this was the 20th Air Force in the Pacific, but the 8th Air Force said, well, wait a minute.

The war has been over since May, and we've got 2,000 B-24s and B-17s, and they're just sitting there.

So why don't we transfer some over?

And we'll make Okinawa.

We'll have about 1,000 of them at least.

So what I'm getting at is, and we're not even talking about B-25s and B-26s short term.

So in LeMay's mind, what he was trying to tell people were,

if they had just let me go, I would have probably had under my command, along with my British friends, somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 bombers.

And we would not be flying always 1,600 miles one way.

We would be going only 800 or 900 miles.

And therefore, I could have destroyed the last 15% of Japanese cities and gone back and redone everything.

And you would have never had to set foot.

He's true.

That's true.

Yes, but he's talking about an ungodly bloodbath that would make these two atomic bombs look like nothing.

That is my point that people never bring up.

The only person that's ever really discussed it was a brilliant historian.

He was a good friend of mine, Williamson Murray.

He pointed that out.

I wrote about it in the Second World War,

Operation Tiger Force, and then the American version of it.

And the point I'm making is the atomic bombs, depending on who you read and where you draw the cutoff line, probably killed

120 to 200,000.

That was less than had, they killed 100,000 on one night of the March 9th and 10th raid.

But had LeMay been able to get his way, he would have argued, I'm not going to get any more Americans killed.

There's going to be no more Ibojimas.

There's going to be no more Okinawas.

You guys in the Army, just sit back.

You guys in the Navy, just hold on to your horses, let me do it, and I will burn the whole country to the ground.

And he would have.

And so the bombs ended the war very quickly because

Oppenheimer was right.

He said they need a shock.

So when they saw this big weapon, they said, oh my gosh, it's not just the firebombs.

That might take another two months.

They got a new firebomb.

And then when they dropped the second one on Nagasaki, they bluffed the Japanese into thinking they could do this every three days.

They couldn't.

They couldn't have, maybe they could have done one in three or four weeks.

They were working 24 hours a day to make plutonium bombs, and they were only going to have about, as I said, three or four more, but not until Christmas, probably, or November.

So it had its effect to stop the war and end the killing.

And

I want to say one other thing that's very important.

Everybody has this idea that the United States were war criminals, we shouldn't have done this.

If you look at

the major belligerents and you

Japan, Italy, Germany, the United States, Britain.

We weren't belligerent.

And Russia.

We were.

But I'm talking about belligerents in the neutral sense.

Oh, I mean.

Of a war police.

Yes.

If you look at them and you make a basic central equation, how many people did they lose?

versus how many did they kill.

The Germans, civilians, and military lost somewhere between five and six million.

They probably killed around fifteen to twenty million Russians, Americans, British, and Allies.

The Japanese lost about three million, about half of what Germany did.

They killed about 18 million.

They killed 16 million Chinese.

And they killed another two million Pacific Islanders, Asians, and all sorts of places from Burma to Southeast Asia,

Americans.

And so

that militaristic state was the greatest killer in World War II as far as the ability to kill people and the loss to kill ratio.

And nobody ever talks about that.

You got a little glimpse of it.

Most B-29, I asked my father once, he'd wear a parachute over,

because it was kind of clumsy.

He was a central fire control gunner.

He said, what would be the purpose of it?

You were either going to be beheaded or tortured or you were going to be used in a nefarious way.

When they dropped the bombs, there were B-29 crewmen in a prison.

And I think about 15 of them were just incinerated.

The other eight had been tortured by

in medical experiments.

In other words, they were injecting them with viruses and torturing them.

And then after the war, the Japanese who did it said, no, no, they got killed

by your own, they didn't.

And then there were a few of them that were wounded, and they just took them out of the prison and put them out in front and let people stone them to death.

And they did that all the time.

In the Battle of Midway, any flyer that was in the water that they captured, they killed.

Any prisoner, they killed.

And if they did put you in the Japanese prisoner of war, you had about a ten times more likely chance of dying than if you were in the Nazi prison camps, if you were a flyer or sailor.

As bad as the Nazis were, they did not kill prisoners to the same degree the Japanese did.

So what I'm getting at is, this was a diabolical regime, and it was a killing machine, and it killed innocent Chinese for the most part, and tortured them, and used them for medical experiments.

And so when everybody says, well, you shouldn't have done this, well, you tell me exactly how to stop that machine so we don't have to lose a million Americans trying it.

And I don't know any.

There's only three ways of doing it.

You can invade the island like you did Okinawa and Iwo Jima, but on a magnitude of 100 or 1,000 more, and take every inch and occupy it.

Two,

you can let LeMay burn it to the ground and kill a lot more Japanese, a lot more,

before they would surrender.

Or

you could have a negotiated surrender, which

they wanted, and keep the military government intact.

Just say, well, we didn't mean it,

and we had already announced after Pearl Harbor it was going to be unconditional surrender.

And so I really get a little upset of these people who romanticized that Japanese government.

The Emperor knew exactly what,

Hirohito knew exactly what they were doing.

And I think there's been a conflation that because the Japanese internment in the United States was so unfair,

remember of the thousands of Japanese, half of whom were citizens, the other half were legal residents, not one was ever found guilty.

They were some of the most patriotic citizens in the world.

They thought,

you know, the 442nd and Italy was very...

But that's not Japan.

Those were American.

The people in Japan were diabolical, that government.

And there was not much way to end it.

If you don't believe, you should read E.B.

Sledge with the Old Bree, a first-hand marine account of what happened at Okinawa, how they had to fight, and what it was like.

And so these were efforts by people to stop that machine, killing not just Americans, not just British, not just Australians, but Asians and Chinese.

20,000 a day in 1945 were being killed.

20,000 a day.

And how do you stop it?

The other thing very quickly is

you talk to these students or protesters.

Now you've taught a lot of classes

on World War II and I've had students just say, well, I wouldn't have done that.

That's horrible.

You just went over there and dropped.

No, you didn't just go over there and drop it.

You spent about a billion and a half dollars.

to develop this nefarious weapon.

You had no idea what it was going to do.

When they let off the plutonium bomb in July 16th, you're only talking about a month before, less than a month before they actually dropped.

They didn't know what was going to happen.

Beth, the famous physicist, I guess he was a German, or

I don't know what it was about them.

They had bets on what would happen.

He said the sky would have

a continuous nuclear reaction and blow up.

Everything would blow up.

The entire sky.

Yes, there were no way.

He didn't know.

And then they had a pool about how many kilotons of

dynamite.

And I think the high was 40, and the low was, I think Oppenheimer said, ah,

it couldn't be more than a kiloton.

It was

the uranium bomb was 18 kilotons.

And they had no idea how big.

The one that they let off in the desert was plutonium.

It was 18.

But when they dropped it because of the mountains on Nagasaki,

it was only 16.

But then that was just the billing of the bomb.

Then how did you get it over all the way 6,000 miles to Tenyon?

And the problem was they put it on a cruiser, the Indianapolis, and they delivered the Iranian bomb.

And about a few days later, it took out and it was sunk by a torpedo.

And 600 people died in the water.

Remember Jaws?

The story about how they were all eaten by sharks?

If that had happened on the way over,

who knows what would have happened.

And then when they took took off, they had a brilliant pilot for Hiroshima, Tibbets,

and he went all the way to Hiroshima, 1600, I mean he went all the way from Tenyan to Hiroshima, 150 to 1600 miles, and all the way back without any hitch.

But there was only one Tibbets.

The next guy, Sweeney, in charge of the Nagasaki raid, And it wasn't the Nagasaki raid.

That was the secondary target.

The first target, the Kokura, I can't remember the name, but I think it was.

They got over, and Sweeney was erratic, and they said, you wait for the other planes.

There were going to be five planes.

They're going to check the weather.

They want to take photographs.

They want to do instruments.

They had preliminary planes that come first as decoys.

They had it all planned out.

Perfect.

It worked with Hiroshima.

And they didn't show up in 15 minutes.

At that point, he was supposed to bop the bomb, which he could have done.

They still had visual contact.

He didn't do it.

He waited 45 minutes.

And then it got cloudy, and

they were burning

coal on a plant to the skies.

So they had to go to the secondary target, Nagasaki.

Well, that was a long way.

So then he went to Nagasaki.

Remember, he's 1,600 miles from where he took off.

And now he's got the plutonium bomb, and he's at the secondary target, and it's cloudy.

So he's going around it, and he only had one real chance to drop it.

And for a split second,

it cleared up.

He dropped it through the clouds.

He missed the target by only 800

yards.

And he hit, unfortunately, there was a hospital nearby.

By the way, both of these were military targets.

Hiroshima was an army headquarters.

Nagasaki and Hiroshima were war material places.

They had not been bombed.

Nobody knew why they hadn't been bombed.

Because the order had come to LeMay, do not bomb five or six cities.

Because they wanted to see what would happen if they dropped atomic.

They had to someday in the future.

And people in those cities thought, wow,

you must be special.

Well, you were special, but they didn't understand.

They thought their relatives in America had written letters and said, don't bother my dad or grandpa, or maybe

they couldn't do it, or they thought that there was too many fighters on their city that would be too dangerous.

So he waited too long in the first part.

He got to Nagasaki, Sweeney, and then he, same thing, and then he was supposed to go back to Tenyan, just like Tibbu.

And if he couldn't do it, he was supposed to go halfway and go to Iwo Jima.

He had no gas.

He'd been flying around for an hour and a half on the B-29.

And even worse is when he took off,

excuse me, before he took off,

the ground crew said, we can't transfer over 1,000 gallons of gas from one of the tanks.

The fuel pump is broken.

And he said,

well,

they said, I think you should transfer this to another.

They

had to have a specially made B-29 to handle this thing.

But they had another one.

He said, no, no, we're going to go.

We will just go straight to the target, drop it, and we'll get back.

And we don't need an hour and a half.

Well, he used more than that.

And he couldn't transfer the oil, the gas.

So then they said to him, we can't get back to Tenyon.

And I don't think we can even get halfway back to

Ibojima.

But we can get to Okinawa, which was only 700 miles off the coast.

And he said, but nobody knows we're coming.

And we just took it.

It's only been declared secure about three weeks ago.

In fact, in July, there were still a lot of Japanese soldiers there.

So they didn't even know they were coming.

So he came in fast, and then he said, we've got to come in really.

We've got to really gun it.

We're going to run out of.

This is going to be embarrassing if we crash.

So they didn't even know they were coming.

They came in about 140 miles an hour, slammed on the brakes, almost hit about 10 bombers, almost flipped over, and nobody knew who they were.

Who are you?

Why'd you land here?

This is a war zone.

So what I'm getting at is it didn't work like clockwork because it's almost impossible to take two huge 10,000-pound bombs and fly them 1,600 miles away and drop them on a target when you have no idea what they're going to do or how you do it or what the Japanese are going to do.

And in retrospect, we have this idea, well, we just wanted to kill a bunch of people and scare the Russians.

No, we wanted to save lives.

And there were people in the United States government who did not want to kill Japanese with the fire raids.

They were getting a lot of criticism because they had remembered what they had done in Dresden and Hamburg, and that news was getting out what Bomber Harris had done.

The other thing to remember is that Kyoto had not been touched.

Kyoto was a historical city,

kind of like Munich or Dresden.

but which we bombed and

they didn't know whether to put it on the target list because it was one of the six cities that hadn't been touched.

And Henry Stempson said, he was Secretary of War.

We call it war then.

He said, don't hit it.

I know that city.

I've been there before.

And it's a beautiful city, and we don't want to destroy it just for a culture.

And they said, no, it's a military target.

He said, no, no, you're not going to do it.

So he saved that city.

Final observation is they always said this was racist, it was AI, but it was never intended to be used in the Japanese.

When the first people came to Roosevelt, Einstein wrote that famous letter, it was all about Germany.

There was a lot of emigres from Eastern Europe, people like Teller and others, and

they had been experiencing Nazi.

The whole point was to make sure that Hitler did not get the bomb.

And they were going to.

The B-29 was never designed to bomb Japan, it was designed to bomb from Britain all the way into Eastern Europe, 1,600 miles.

It was only as it started to become viable and the test pilots were actually flying them that it looked like the war was going to wind down and it would be used in the Pacific.

And even then, it didn't work very well.

They went to India, they went to China, they didn't know where to use it.

Finally, they said it's only going to work if you can get an island where we can supply it by cargo ships, oil oil bombs, rather than flying it all the way into India or China.

So, what I mean is it was a very fragile, unknown operation,

and

it saved a lot of lives, as horrific as it was.

And I wish people would just take 10 minutes to just review what the bombs were, why they were created, what they were afraid of at the time, who they were used against and why they were used against it, what the alternatives were.

They were bad choices, all of them.

Well, one of our leaders or viewers

wrote that his father had told him, and he was on the flotilla that was going to have the amphibious invasion, and he said that the excitement among the crowds was, among the soldiers on these flotillas, was just palpable once they had dropped the atomic bomb.

They were so happy.

Well, the liberal writer Paul Fussel,

he had a great essay, Thank God for the Atomic Bomb.

That's what he was going to do.

And I have a lot of

people I know who were scheduled to invade Japan, friends of my father's.

And I know that my father told me that he was right at 40 missions.

And that was the time to go home.

And they were scheduling them.

Nobody was going to go home.

They were going to keep them.

He looked around.

He had 16 planes in the squadron.

And two were from the original squadron, him and one other.

And the replacement planes, I think, were eight, I think, four of them.

They didn't realize it was an experimental plane.

It hadn't hardly any, it was 25,000 movable

parts to it.

The B-29, it was the first pressurized bomber.

It was all experimental.

It was a great plane, but the engines heated up.

They didn't know what to do with it.

They never used it.

And people were dying from crashes.

More

crashed, as I remember, than were shot down.

And they lost about, I think it was 700 or 800 of them.

16 men, 12 men in each one.

11 to 12, depending on the mission.

And so.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about AI and the idea of a new census that's supposed to be taken this year anyway.

So let's stick with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, everybody sort of understands the controversy about AI.

Is it going to be a monster that takes us all over, or is it just an imperfect aid and helper?

And I think on the latter part, I don't know about the former, but the latter, the imperfect helper, we have some examples of that this week in our judiciary.

And I got this story from powerlineblog.com, which is a great place to go for any of you who are wondering, but that judges were using AI to write their briefs and their opinions, and that the AI was inserting into these briefs and opinions

non-existent cases and fabricating quotes from them as well.

So

imperfect helper to be sure.

I don't know why a judge would do that.

What was so hard about writing a brief?

I don't know know much about, but I have been a visiting professor at various places, and I came to this problem late of students using AI papers,

but when I discovered they were doing that,

I could tell in two seconds AI language.

It just wasn't natural, and it didn't fit the particular student in the edition.

Why anybody would rely on that when you could form your own ideas?

I guess it's just to save time.

As I said, I had never really used it before.

And then I talked to people, and I think it was about a month ago, I typed in Grok and what are the main sources of a paminondas in cloud?

And I found four.

It was pretty good, but the rest of it was worthless.

And then I started to experiment.

When you go to Google, it has AI there.

I started to ask

questions that I knew the answer to about World War II or authors or who wrote, did Homer write the Iliad and the Ottoman?

And they're just bum bunal answers because it depends on the people feeding the information into it.

What's scary about it is the AI codes are going to be written from Silicon Valley like people, whether they're in Austin or Research Triangle or Cambridge, Massachusetts, or

there's Silicon Valley.

And I know those people.

And they're mostly left wing.

I see them at coffee shops in Menlo Park and Los Altos and Palo Alto.

When I'm I go over

until my little sinus problem, I was going over every week.

And so I would go have coffee or eat by myself on a cafe and listen to them.

And it wasn't a very enjoyable experience, especially during the election.

All they would talk about was Trump and Hitler.

But my point is: this: that when you look at Wikipedia,

it's all they rush, they swarm.

I mean, I gave up reading my bio.

Some of it has things like he was in an eighth-grade band, and I don't even know how to play one instrument.

Or then they'll say that he was married, and they show like 10 different pictures of my wife.

So they're incompetent and they're biased.

And then when I, as I said before, if I say

2020 mass riots, burning, arson, killing, they'll give me January 6th.

They've got algorithms that are programmed to ignore certain sites that are conservative and the first 20 things you read.

I've been writing this Trump book and when I try to get a source, if I go in and say debanking Trump,

they'll say Trump had unsupported allegations he was debanked.

It won't tell you the truth.

And so those people will be writing AI, and they will have certain utopian ideas how it will be used, and it's not going to be good.

Well, I could give you an example.

Just in producing this podcast, we have AI tools as well.

And most of them either ad work or they don't do a very good job.

So you can transform your voice with AI.

And I think that their model is Don Johnson or something, because when you put the transform on your voice, it gets really super gravelly, like in a way nobody would want to hear it.

Because since your voice is pretty well known, right?

right?

You already have a nice voice though, and so it just distorts it.

It also, you can have it take out spaces and us, but then it always messes up because it can't really figure out, I guess, where the navigation is.

I don't understand about judges and things, so I like to write books, so I don't know what the end what if I have an idea,

I don't know what the conclusions are going to be.

So I'm writing this, just finished the manuscript today of Trump,

the comeback, the fall and rise of Donald Trump and his mega agenda.

But I didn't know what I was going to find at the end.

I really didn't.

I went through his foreign policy, domestic policy, all the lawfare against him, you know, from January 6th till the election, what they did to him.

That was the fall.

campaigns and then the rise, how he recovered.

But my point is it was interesting to find that out.

But why why would you just have, if you were a judge, you'd think if you're going to write an opinion or a ruling, it would be kind of neat to review everything that happened and put it all into words.

Why would you not want to do that?

You just are lazy.

What would you rather do?

Go home and have a martini rather than do that?

Yes, because it's a lot of work to look at volumes.

No, after my mom died, my mom died of a brain tumor too early, 66.

All of her opinions as an appellate court judge were published.

But somebody took them all and bound them.

I think there were 15 volumes of everything she had.

And I, every once in a while, will look at them.

They're beautifully written.

She really wanted to write an engaging opinion.

You know what I mean?

Some of them I disagree with.

Some of them are well beyond my ability to comprehend because they're very intricate.

But she loved writing them.

She wrote them out on longhand and yellow paper, legal pads.

So, why don't I write books, I kind of the most enjoyable part is the last draft where you've got all the research down yourself.

On this one, I get all 500 footnotes.

I had an assistant check my footnotes to make sure they're accurate.

And I had all the arguments, but just reading it one last time to get it perfectly the way you want it, it's a fun thing to do.

And I don't understand why these people

I can remember when Steve Jobs said something about about iPhones.

He had it, remember when you would all dress in black and you get on the stage and everybody copies that now and he held it in his hand.

He said,

this is the knowledge of the world and I'm going to give it to you where you can be walking down the street and anything in the history of our civilization, anything

you can find out.

You've got all.

And he really believed that.

These people were not going to

be looking at porn or Instagram or tweeting 5,000 times a day.

What did you do two seconds ago?

Oh, three seconds ago, I blew my nose.

Oh, four seconds ago, I tied my shoes.

I'm depressed.

That kind of stuff.

And they don't use it at all for what was intended.

At least most people don't.

No, they sure don't.

Or like AOC doing cooking in front of her cell phone.

I mean, she's not claiming that her boyfriend is her husband to get a discount.

And sometimes when she doesn't get a discount, then she lives with him.

It's like Elon Omar.

She's been using her husband as a political consultant before they were married.

They're all grifters, all of them.

Corey Bush, remember her?

Squad member,

hiring her husband as security detail.

What a scandal.

Yeah, they're all scandal.

Yeah, once you say that I'm a socialist, I'm a socialist and

I'm good and I'm better than everybody.

Then you can do whatever you want.

Say I'm like the Soviets.

Yes.

Are you begrudging them their freedom to do whatever they want, Victor?

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So Victor, let's move on to Trump is ordering a new census that will not count illegal aliens.

And as our Constitution has it,

and Amendment 14,

they both say just counting the people in each state.

Neither of them say citizens, although they also, the Constitution says the Commerce Secretary can decide the form and content of the census.

So I was wondering what you thought about.

This is a very important question because

there's 435 congressional districts

and they're they're based on

the

number

of

residents or citizens within a state.

That population then is divided by roughly 750.

To get 435, you divide it into the citizen population.

Then you get the average size of a congressional district.

I think it's around 750,000 to 800,000 people.

And then you carve it up, and you gerrymand it if you're Democrat or Republican.

And by the way, all those people that fled Texas, there's a good chart on, I think it's at Powerline, where

they rate all 50 states and they show how many

people in that state voted Republican or Democrat, and they get a percentage.

And then they apply that percentage to how many congressional seats represent that party's vote.

And it turns out that by a two-to-one margin, blue states have far more

congressional districts

that are gerrymandered.

Yeah, that are far larger than the percentage of those people in the state.

So they have more.

Well, it's not, it's that's just that's determined by your population of the state.

No, but I mean the Democratic Party.

Yes.

So what the Democratic Party does is there's a finite number number of seats, but they carve up the district so that those seats in that particular district or jurisdiction will go Democratic.

So even though Massachusetts was 38%

Republican voted, there's no, not one.

And California was 40%.

I think we have 12 out of 50.

We have about 20%,

half.

So they've gerrymandered so much more, but because they're adolescents, they cry when they don't get their way.

But the point that's really important is:

how do you determine the population to carve up the seats in the states?

So, if you have states that have huge numbers of illegal aliens, i.e., the American Southwest, and you can count them, and then you can gerrymand them, it doesn't really matter if you're blue or red.

If you're blue and you control the

gerrymandering process, then you can put as many illegal aliens, I mean, you have all 10 million illegal aliens came to California.

If you count them as census equivalents to a citizen, then you're going to get more seats in general, but then you have more to work with to gerrymand, because

the supposition is they're going to be left-wing.

So you make those,

you know, you gerryman them to reflect those population centers.

And Trump comes along and says, no, we're only going to count citizens.

And that means all the illegal aliens, and there may have been 20 to 25 million before Joe Biden let in 12 to 10 million.

So the 35 million people are not going to count.

And so we're not going to give you states that have a large percentage of the illegal aliens.

We're not going to give you, you're not going to win traditional or get additional seats.

And that's what they're angry about.

At least not more seats based on where illegal aliens live.

I can already see the articles by the left.

Well, that might be too, but they'll just say, you're so inhuman.

These people are humans too.

And the census is.

I've heard that all my life.

That came up with the three-fifths.

The word black or negro is not mentioned in the Constitution.

One reference is to slaves.

And it says, for purposes of the census, i.e.

determining congressional districts,

a slave will be counted as three-fifths.

That was a compromise to get the southern states which were slave-owning in the 1780s, in the 1787,

they said, well, these people are not going to, you know, Articles of Confederate, they're not going to buy into it unless we give them some representation for their slaves, but that way we'll be rewarding slavery.

So they're hypocritical.

They want us to count a slave for purposes of the congressional census as a full person, but they don't treat them like full persons.

So we don't want to count them.

Not that we don't like slaves, but if we count them, it's perpetuating their slavery.

So then they said, well, what can we do to get the South slave-owning states to buy in so we don't have a European-like continent of a bunch of small little independent countries?

And they said, well, we'll

compromise.

So we'll give them three-fifths representation for each slave as far as getting a congressional district.

And

ever since, people say, well, I'm African American and I was only counted as three-fifths.

No, you were counted as a slave by Southerners, and Northerners tried to give you full representation, and they couldn't without having the United States.

If they did give you full representation, the South would have had a Civil War in 1787 instead of 1861.

So they did the best they could.

You sure did.

Well, the last thing then is that there may be they're considering a federal investigation of the WNBA for the treatment of Caitlin Clark, their premier basketball player, civil rights violations.

And the claim is, or what they're looking at, is not just the prep players roughing her up, we can understand that it's a physical game, but that the refs were letting it go on at an unusual level than they should have been.

Everybody knows what's going on.

The WBA is sort of like the NBA, isn't it?

It's 75% African American, roughly.

I'm just taking numbers out of the air, but they may be 70.

There's a lot of Europeans in the NBA now.

But my point is this, is that so it was black-dominated, and it didn't have, because it's a female sport versus a male sport,

They didn't have the money-making capacity.

So remember they were saying, pay us what we're worth.

You're only worth what you make.

You don't just get the money because you say I'm an NBA or I'm a WBA player.

You get a lot of money if you're an NBA, African-American player.

I'm just taking this one example because you make a lot of money, i.e.

by TV, radio, and attendance.

If you're an African-American WBA or white WBA, you don't make what your white or black counterpart makes in the NBA because you don't earn that much revenue.

So maybe you should address sexism or whatever you feel is a difference.

Maybe you should get half 51% of the population are women.

Why don't you go make the argument to women?

Hey, you guys, don't watch the NBA.

Just watch us.

But they don't.

And so then Caitlin Clark comes

along and she's different.

She's not different because she's white.

She's different because she can shoot nine shots from half court and make them.

And nobody's ever seen that.

And she's tall.

She's not some diminutive guard.

She's a forward.

She's, what, six feet tall?

And she can shoot like she's a 5-7 point guard or shooting guard.

And she's, we've never seen anybody like her, female player like that, black or white.

But she isn't a white minority.

So the idea is if you're playing her, there's two things going on.

One is, I don't think it's race-based, but you intimidate her.

You try to knock her over once in a while.

And then that means that she gets off her game and she gets worried that she might shoot too quick.

That's what they try to do.

But that can't keep going on because they'll call flagrant fouls on you if you have a good referee.

But there's a second thing.

Some of the African-American players are of mixed feelings about her.

On the one hand, she's bringing in a ton of money that they didn't get and revenues for the whole league, and they're going to be beneficiaries of that.

But on the other hand, they feel that it was an African-American signature sport, and this white interloper not only came in, but she dominated it.

And that's not fair.

So they're going to rough her up with the idea that many of the referees will agree with them, and they're not going to call those fouls.

And it's getting so flagrant that they hit her and knock her down that it's pretty racist.

And then they got another white player, Cunningham, I think her name is, and she's sort of big,

6'1, and she's tough.

And her idea is, when you have an enforcer in basketball, their idea is to make sure nobody on your team gets roughed up.

And once you see somebody roughed up, you have plot five foul, you'll go foul somebody so they create deterrence.

So that's what she's trying to do.

But it's getting to be racial.

It's part of this

fixation.

Again, when I looked at what's going on with

the poor doge person that was almost killed and his girlfriend was almost raped and assaulted, or we always see it in Cincinnati, and we see these racially

animated crimes,

it's predictable.

Once you go down the tribal route and you say this particular group is going to be identified by their race, and this one by their race, and this one, and then you're going to self-separate and segregate, then everybody's going to do it.

And if you keep doing that,

what I'm worried about is, if you notice this, I'm speaking directly to you readers now.

If you go to a main news site, and to the degree they cover it, and it's not Fox News or something, and they'll just have this Cincinnati or the Washington or something about the riots of 2020, they will never identify the race

of the assailant unless it's white.

And they will.

But they're so either censored or political, and then the people get so angry if they do have a comment section, and they don't really want to have a comment section anymore because people then comment in a racist fashion in a way I don't think they would if they would just be honest.

So, what we're doing is, on the one hand, the left

is lying about the, as I said last time, three to ten times asymmetry of black on white crime, depending on the crime.

Blacks are between three and ten to twelve times more likely to hurt a white person, murder, rate, kill, assault, than a white person is a black person, which is a phenomenal statistic when there's only 12%

black in general and most of the perpetrators are males.

You're talking about 6% of the population is attacking 70% of the population, more than 70 is attacking 6% to the 6th and 10th degree.

But they don't tell you that.

So then, when you don't do that and you're not honest in an empirical, disinterested fashion, then people get angry.

And they say they hate us, they're racist,

and then they start commenting in a very racist fashion.

So then you have this really weird Orwellian juxtaposition where

the news accounts are completely censored and they're not truthful, and they tell you 40% of what went on.

And then they print the comments that are 110% explicit with no censorship.

And so you look at this and you think, wow, the story is completely biased and distorted.

You would have thought that they're both Norwegians fighting Finns, you know, from the story with no names or descriptions or pictures.

And then you read the comments and you think, where did this come from?

And they're so cynical that they just assume it's black on white, and then they say things that are racist.

And it's only going to get worse.

The only remedy is transparency and honesty, and to deal with it.

Robert Woodson, who I know and whom I like a great deal, has a great Wall Street Journal article, I think, yesterday, and he just said the black community, and he's African-American, has to confront this reality that

the crime rate is out of hand.

And the majority of the victims are not white, they're black.

But because no one really cares if a black person kills a black person

or a black person kills a white person, they only care if a white person kills a black person, that's very rare.

So, what he says is going on in the black community, you have the slaughter of black young men.

The leading cause of death, I think, from 13 to 30 of black men is violence, shooting.

And so, you have this sort of

epidemic of slaughtering black people by black people, and to a lesser extent, black black people hurting white people, and no one cares in the black community, except the rare almost never happens, white people doing that to black people.

And he said this is crazy.

And then more importantly,

he says this

is

alienating the races, and it is,

and it's not truthful.

And it destroys the credibility of black leaders who object to something like George Floyd's death because they're so asymmetrical.

Then you have an article at the same time, and I'll finish with Heather McDonnell, whom I co-authored a book on immigration with, I have a great deal of respect for.

She was writing about the

DEI

subterfuge, that we're still getting DEI everywhere, and they're just changing names.

And so she was talking about the society of black engineers and how they look at

the number of engineers in engineering school and certified engineers, and there's

disproportionately few blacks.

And she says that this group illegally is fixating on black engineers and talking about engineers qua black engineers and trying to say we want more engineers and we demand that you get more blacks in engineering school.

But then she says the reason is if you look at people in high school with mathematics scores

and you look at at first grade, second grade, third, the number of blacks in most of these schools that are meeting the mathematics requirement for a particular grade they're in is about 1%.

So in other words, you have a whole generation of black youth that can't do math and are passed from one grade to the next, and then suddenly when they get into college, their

elite, wealthy, loud representatives say, we're going to put you in engineering school and you're going to get your right, you're going to get to be and they're not ready to do it, and then they just confirm a stereotype, they can't do the work.

Whereas, if you just went back to first or second or third grade and said,

We're going to be very strict about discipline, you're going to wear a uniform, everybody, black, white, everybody, and you're going to learn math, and we're going to expel you if you disrupt, and we're going to teach you.

We're not going to talk about black this and black that and white this and white.

We're just going to get race out of the question, and we're just going to make sure you can.

I reacted to that because just to finish my rant,

1984 I was hired to create a classics program at Cal State Fresno.

McClatchy Foundation funded me for one year.

I don't know if anybody knew that, but they did.

And I was a part-time teacher.

So I had to do something in my in one year I was only part-time.

So I was literally, you know, on a tractor,

you know, furrowing out, driving 30 miles to Fresno State, coming back home, and then irrigating, and then going back the same day.

I did that for two years.

But my point is, the majority of students, even then, were of three types.

They were Southeast Asian, but the majority were Hispanic, Mexican-American.

I shouldn't say Hispanic, they were Mexican-American.

And they're Oklahoma diaspora.

Not all, but they were middle-class to lower-middle-class white kids.

Maybe my students were,

I don't know, 30% poor whites,

50%

Mexican-American, and maybe 10% Hmong, and then 10%

very upper-middle class that didn't want to spend the money to go to UC.

And they were usually in engineering or business or something, because Fresno State had a really good health plan.

So what I'm getting, I had to teach classics.

How can you get somebody to teach Latin and Greek, history of Greece, history of Rome, humanities of the Western world, Homer, to a group that

hasn't ever come.

There was no classics, there was nothing.

And my job depended on.

So what I'm getting at is, I didn't allow anybody to talk about their rates.

I just said, we're going to be better trained than anybody.

If you want to get a minor in classics or a major, I will guarantee you you will get into law school or business school or the teacher education program or the PhD, whatever you want to do.

But you have to do what we tell you.

You have to speak perfect English.

You have to write perfect English.

we will correct it, but you're going to learn Latin and Greek, and you will learn gr English grammar in the process.

I would get Cultural Literacy by E.

D.

Hurts.

She had, I think, five hundred terms that every education edu every educated person would do.

So at the end of every almost every last two weeks, I'd go through them.

What is a Deutsch column?

What is a Pythagorean theory?

You know what I mean?

What is the golden mean?

And then they would memorize that, and I'd put it on the final.

So when they graduated I could if they wanted to go to law school I could write an honest

I would say Ernesto Hernandez is brilliant.

He can read two modern languages.

He speaks Spanish but he also can read French.

And they all got in.

50 of them over 20 years got into the IB League.

They did graduate.

And also poor white kids did too.

And then who were the people who were complaining?

It was always the same cast of characters.

Somebody from the Lawaza Studies or Black Studies would come over and tell me that I was robbing people of their cultural identity.

I was putting too much pressure on

da-da-da.

One time I gave a lecture on Western civilization or a lot of my students went and I had a radical black studies professor tail me as I walked in a car with his friends.

I would walk out and he would go very slow next to me and try to intimidate me and say, You know, you're not, you're,

I don't know what he thought, a white colonial settler.

All I was trying to do was try a different approach:

you're a minority, the world hates you, you have all these grievances against it, you shouldn't have to work as hard as anybody else.

And my message was:

you came from a poor family, I don't care what color you are, but with a little extra help and energy, I can guarantee you I can show you a pathway that you can have an education comparable to Andover or Exeter prep school.

Or

if you graduate out of this program, you will be better educated than someone with a VA from Oberlin or Wellesley.

And it was true.

But people in the ethnic industry hated it.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, and I'd like to ask, I have some questions from a couple of your listeners.

Dr.

John Byrne asks, Had JFK not been killed in 1963 and had he been re-elected in 1964, as was predicted, would he have gotten out of Vietnam?

After all, he got out of Cuba just off the coast of the U.S.

and the entire Vietnam mess would not be a part of our history.

That was the liberal democratic narrative that you had 16,000 troops in Vietnam, and JFK thought that we'd either have to escalate or they would be endangered, and you couldn't stop the North Vietnamese.

After he was killed, people said

JFK wanted to get, unlike Johnson, people wanted to, he wanted to get out.

But there was never, you know what I mean?

It was all hearsay.

And he had the, he had, remember in his inaugural address, we'll pay any price, go anywhere to stop communism.

He was a Cold War fighter.

I mean,

he was the one that inherited the Bay of Pigs plan from the Eisenhower, but he enacted it.

So your assessment is that JFK would have gone into the assessment is this, that he would have escalated and then seeing that it was

not working,

and he probably, unlike Lyndon Johnson, who hated the liberal Bostonian wing of the Democratic Party, and hated the Kennedys, and they made fun of him,

he would have reacted to that New England anti-war quicker.

So I don't think he would have.

We had 550,000 at one point.

He wouldn't have escalated.

All right, Victor, and then just one really quick some suggestions.

Our one reader, and I'm sorry I forgot I didn't take down the name, but they said since they've dropped the NRO and the Wall Street Journal, what are some good publications to go to?

So give them about three or four.

Three or four.

What do you read in the morning visiting association?

I try to get a balance,

but I read

Breitbart for a hard right or the Federalist, and then I try to see what Politico is saying, but I don't enjoy reading Political, so don't read Politico.

I just do it because it's part of my job.

It's a good question.

I like Powerline.

I always have because they list articles to read, and then they have brief little vignettes themselves.

For the day's news, I go to Instapundit and just see what Glenn Reynolds is doing as sort of what's coming up on the radar.

I do a

video every morning for Daily Signal.

So I like what Rob Louie is doing at the Daily Signal.

I don't read

Atlantic.

I still read sometimes

commentary.

I read American Greatness.

That's where it carries my my column on Monday morning.

It takes me I wake up about

4.45 and I read from

4.45 to 7 o'clock.

And then I usually get

I read the Fox News, I read the New York Post, I do read the Wall Street Journal, and believe me, it's getting increasingly painful because I don't know what happened to them, but even when Trump has a program that's doing well, they'll look for the wrong thing.

And then what's even more disturbing is

if you look at the articles, I understand who their clientele is wealthy people, but it's all about mansions and beautiful, how to

get another.

Today it was about

people getting both an outdoor and an indoor swimming pool.

And

it just exudes all of this Martha Stewart kind of...

It didn't used to do that.

It was more or less giving you inside knowledge about how the

Wall Street investment world works.

But I don't know what happened.

It has that bad combination of being elitist and increasingly left-wing.

And the columnists are still good.

I agree with most of what Kim Strausso.

So I'm just saying, you know,

if you read what Kim Strausso or Holman Jenkins writes, it's pretty good.

Barton Swain.

But I'm reading a lot of news accounts.

I'm looking at a lot of podcasts.

You know where I get most of my news now?

It's in a very weird way.

I have an assistant, Megan Ring, who's just wonderful.

And she

gets about eight or nine requests to do media a week.

A day, actually, excuse me.

So she picks herself.

I don't have anything to do with it.

She selects selects what I'm going to do.

So probably

every day

I will do a Megan Kelly or Ben Shapiro or Mark Levine or I don't mean every day, but a typical day will have one of those type of things.

And then I do three to four Fox or Fox business a week.

or I do Newsmax twice a week.

But she puts two or three every day.

And when I'm on there, you have to go on 10 to 15 minutes early.

So I would say to get it set up from Zoom or Riverside.

I have a studio profile.

So you end up getting 15 minutes of news before you get on by all these different venues.

So maybe on an average week, five days, I'm on about 15 different podcasts or something.

Some of them are really good, you know, like the Spectator from England.

I do Piers Morgan.

I do John Anderson from Australia.

Australia, I do a great guy from Switzerland,

I'm going to do Steve Edgitson, the Great Britain News tomorrow.

And

you just, they ask you questions, you learn things.

So I'm getting maybe each week

two to three hours of news

on podcasts and interviews and TV.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Victor, for that.

And thank you for all the wisdom today.

I really appreciated the historical look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lots of new things in that.

Don't forget to our audience to

consider Victor's The Second World Wars, where he writes about the entire Second World War, and of course, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

So thank you for listening.

And thank you, Victor.

Thank you for listening, everybody, and watching.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and I'm Sammy Wink, and he's Victor Davis-Hanson, and we're signing off.

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