Allies Win in 1943 and Revolutionaries Pursue Trump

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Commercial Insurance.

Speaker 2 As a business owner, you take a lot of roles: marketer, bookkeeper, CEO.

Speaker 1 But when it comes to small business insurance, Progressive has you covered.

Speaker 1 They offer discounts on commercial auto insurance, customizable coverages that can grow with your business, and reliable protection for whatever comes your way.

Speaker 2 Count on Progressive to handle your insurance while you do, well, everything else.

Speaker 1 Quote today in as little as eight minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, coverage provided and serviced by affiliated and third-party insurers.

Speaker 1 Discounts and coverage, selections not available in all states or situations.

Speaker 4 Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. This is our weekend episode in which Victor does something a little bit different in the middle segment.

Speaker 4 And we're looking historically at important moments in U.S. and world history in the 20th century.
And today, Victor will be looking at 1943 in World War II.

Speaker 4 So we'll learn a little bit more about after that year in which the tide turned to the Allies in 1942, how the war progressed after that. Before that, we'll look at a few news stories.

Speaker 4 So stay with us and we'll be right back from these messages.

Speaker 5 Time.

Speaker 4 It's always vanishing. The commute, the errands, the work functions, the meetings, selling your car?

Speaker 7 Unless you sell your car with Carvana.

Speaker 5 Get a real offer in minutes.

Speaker 7 Get it picked up from your door. Get paid on the spot.

Speaker 5 So fast you'll wonder what it catches. There isn't one.

Speaker 7 We just respect you and your time.

Speaker 2 Oh, you're still here.

Speaker 5 Move along now.

Speaker 7 Enjoy your day. Sell your car today.

Speaker 5 Car, Vana!

Speaker 7 Pickup fees may apply.

Speaker 8 What if your drive was fueled with more?

Speaker 8 More protection, more performance.

Speaker 8 Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline removes up to 100% of performance robbing deposits to rejuvenate your engine's performance. Fueling every every drive with a fuel like no other.

Speaker 8 Shell V-Power Nitro Plus premium gasoline. More performance with every drive.
Compared to lower octane fuels in gasoline direct injection engine fuel injectors.

Speaker 8 Actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving style.

Speaker 4 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Speaker 4 Victor is the Martin and Neale Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 4 Don't want to forget Hillsdale.

Speaker 6 And you know,

Speaker 6 don't forget Heritage. Oh.
We're here at Heritage today, and they've offered generously

Speaker 6 their studios. I'm giving a lecture today on the history of borders,

Speaker 6 and they're also the sponsors of our daily Signal every morning.

Speaker 4 Yeah, our Victor's Five Minutes video.

Speaker 6 We all ought a gratitude to Rob Louie, who thought up the idea of me doing five minutes every day.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so that's been really nice.

Speaker 6 It's nice to to be here. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 4 All right, Victor, so I wanted to start with the first topic today. The Government Accountability Office is issuing 39 inquiries.

Speaker 4 And the accusation behind that is they're trying to slow up Trump in his actions. The Government Accountability Office is an arm of the legislature, so they control it.

Speaker 4 But they're saying that the Senate doesn't have the right to stop them from issuing these inquiries.

Speaker 4 What I wanted to add that to is the courts trying to stop Trump, this government accountability office, and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

Speaker 6 You've got to put the whole thing in. Donald Trump is not doing what Reagan did.
He's not doing what George H.W. Bush did.
He's not doing what George W. Bush, and he's not doing what John McCain.

Speaker 6 or Bob Dole or Mitt Romney would have done. In other words, they were treating the symptoms of the project, the progressive progressive project.

Speaker 6 And he feels that's insufficient. He's a counter-revolutionary.
So in the Trump world,

Speaker 6 he is saying, why was the border, not just close the border, why was the border open? He's saying

Speaker 6 not just clamp down on crime, but why do these DAs let people out? He's saying, why did they do Afghanistan the way they did? Why were there two theater wars? And he comes up with an exegesis.

Speaker 6 And the exegesis is that there is a nexus of people on the left that do not have public support for their initiatives.

Speaker 6 So all of those initiatives that I mentioned, and we saw that in the 2024 election, this common term on the right, an 80-20 issue, a 70-30, that's to indicate that the public is behind the Trump initiatives.

Speaker 6 Okay. So

Speaker 6 he is saying they can thwart it. And how do they thwart it? They use the institutions.
They use, as you say, the government accountability office. We could use that as the administrative state.

Speaker 6 People within the, in the first term, it was people like Alexander Vinman and the National Security Council, or it was so-called anonymous, right?

Speaker 6 Or it was Kevin Kleinsmith, the lawyer for the FBI, who forged a document. These are people, or it's Anthony Fauci who was a partisan.
These are Lois Lerner during the Obama.

Speaker 6 So those people are left-wing, and the unionized employees below them are left-wing. And they try to stop someone.
So Donald Trump is looking at them, and how is he trying to address that?

Speaker 6 He's cutting, cutting, cutting. And they are angry about it.

Speaker 6 And then there's the circuit and the district judges, 700 district judges, maybe cherry-picked 400 of them, and maybe a couple hundred circuit judges. That's the Court of Appeals, maybe 150 of them.

Speaker 6 And so he is going to have to start appointing judges, and they will.

Speaker 6 But he has got people in the Congress trying to say that a district judge should not have jurisdiction over the entire. There's bills in the legislature, the Senate and the House.

Speaker 6 So he's trying to address that. He looks at the media and he says, what am I going to do with the media? Let's get rid of NPR, the subsidies, or PBS.
Look at the universities.

Speaker 6 That's where they train these people. And they break the law all the time.

Speaker 6 They're not transparent as they're supposed to be about gifts from gutter or communist China. China.
They don't report that to the Department of Education as they should.

Speaker 6 Stanford got fined four years ago.

Speaker 6 They're gouging the federal government on grants, 50, 60% instead of the 50%, so he's going to go down to 15%.

Speaker 6 They are not apolitical, so we'll have to look at taxing the endowment.

Speaker 6 the endowment income. They don't follow the 2022 Supreme Court rulings on race.
They still hire, promote, retain, and admit people by race. So we're going to go look at their federal funding.

Speaker 6 So in that whole process, those people know they're targeted as revolutions. They are the revolutionaries.

Speaker 6 And he says the counter-revolutionaries are going to put you back to your constitutional place.

Speaker 6 And it's a knock-out, drag-out fight. It sure is.
And he's the first Republican. Reagan tried to do it with the Cold War.
He said, no more Kissinger détente.

Speaker 6 And it's very simple. We win, they lose.
And then he tried to slash taxes, you know, and

Speaker 6 supply-side economic. But no one's looked at fundamentally A to Z.
And this is kind of like the Reformation, counter-reformation. You know what I mean?

Speaker 6 It's going to be brutal.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I'm sure that they see themselves, if they could articulate it this way, as the counter-revolution. The Democrats do.

Speaker 6 Well, they think that they're revolutionaries. They believe that they have a mission to get into government and pursue an agenda, and

Speaker 6 it manifests itself in various ways, but the way to

Speaker 6 epitomize it or

Speaker 6 sum it up is they believe in a mandated quality of result as government people.

Speaker 6 And so they feel that people that have too much money or power or corporations or white Christian males or cisgender, whatever the term they use, they use mechanisms to

Speaker 6 level the playing field, they would say.

Speaker 6 Not for themselves. They're the apparatus of the old Soviet Union that have DACAs on the Black Sea.
But for the people, that's their agenda.

Speaker 6 And he's trying to do other things as well. He's going over their heads and he's saying to the left, I'm going to appeal to the working classes

Speaker 6 on the basis of class solidarity. No tips.

Speaker 6 I'm going to back unions if I have to in some cases. I'm going to give no cutting of Medic Social Security.

Speaker 6 And so he's really taken the Hispanic vote and the black male vote and combined it with a white working class, and out of that, he gets a 51%.

Speaker 6 And that's what also they're angry about.

Speaker 6 The black elite, the Hispanic elite have the same relationship to the working classes of those constituencies as the white working class does to Stanford professors or

Speaker 6 NPR, they're out of touch.

Speaker 6 And he's trying to take away that group. So that's another element of why these people are going after him in every possible way.

Speaker 6 They get up in the morning at the government accounting office and say, How can I stop this person? And they go to bed thinking I didn't do enough.

Speaker 6 That's how they think.

Speaker 4 Well, I was looking at some of the discussion of original sin, that Tapper book and Thompson.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 they were saying that one of their big arguments for these staffers that they covered up Joe Biden's inabilities. And they did it because they said Donald Trump was an existentialist threat.

Speaker 4 So I mean, you can see that, I guess.

Speaker 6 You've got to remember that's the signature mindset of the left. It always starts with my

Speaker 6 My ends are so much more noble. Yeah.
Because I'm not for greed. I'm not for inequality.
I'm for mandated equality. And therefore, because I'm for that,

Speaker 6 any means necessary are justified by those noble ends. And that's what the Soviet Union was about.
That's what socialism is about. That's the whole story.

Speaker 6 Once you set yourself up as a heaven-on-earth person or

Speaker 6 a God on earth, you can do anything and justify it.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 6 That's the history of the left. That's what they always do.
That's why they're so insidious. They're so hard to defeat because they have a much better

Speaker 6 ad than the right does. That right says we're for individual liberty and freedom, and if people do better than others economically, we have

Speaker 6 incentives, religious incentives, the church, we have community, we have family incentives to be philanthropic

Speaker 6 voluntarily. But the left says no, no, people are

Speaker 6 great

Speaker 6 people are greedy and therefore the state has to intervene and force that.

Speaker 6 And that's a more attractive opiate, really,

Speaker 6 for many people.

Speaker 4 Aaron Powell, well, especially if they think the state's going to be giving them money and things, which I think a lot of the Democratic voters see it that way.

Speaker 4 The last thing, the second, not last thing, the second thing I would like to talk about about the democratic narrative is they're using this Ukraine war now,

Speaker 4 ironically, and I wonder what you have to say about this, that it's because Putin has, of course, challenged Trump, I think just even today he's said Trump is unhinged himself.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 they're saying that the Ukrainian war,

Speaker 4 it's showing the weakness of the United States because Donald Trump is failing at resolving this conflict. And I was wondering.

Speaker 6 What was there a conflict?

Speaker 6 Donald Trump says ad nauseum. It was 2017 to 2021 and he never left his borders.
He went on When George W. Bush was weakened by the Iraq War in 2008, he invaded Georgia and Ossetia.

Speaker 6 When Obama had the hot mic conversation in Seoul in 2012, in March, and he said to Medeved, tell Vladimir that if this is my last election, if he'll give me space, I'm quoting him verbatim, I will be flexible on missile defense.

Speaker 6 And you know what? Nobody realizes they both kept their bargain. He canceled Polish and Czech missile defense, which would have been handy right now given Iran threat.

Speaker 6 And Putin let him,

Speaker 6 he behaved until Obama was re-elected. And in

Speaker 6 early 2014, he said, you know, the deal's up, and I'm going in. And Obama did not do anything.
And then Biden came in.

Speaker 6 First thing he did is he canceled, put on whole javelins and other offensive weapons. And he said, tell Vladimir if he's going to conduct cyber warfare against the United States.

Speaker 6 Please, please don't attack nonprofits, hospitals, and stuff.

Speaker 6 And then they ask him, what would you do?

Speaker 6 He says it depends on if it was a minor invasion or not. That was Biden.
And then, of course, Afghanistan, the debacle, and power. So Trump's attitude is, I didn't do any of this.
They did.

Speaker 6 Now, I came in and he

Speaker 6 said two things. One was accurate.
I think I mentioned that the other, and one was inaccurate. He said, I could stop it on the first day.
He couldn't. Nobody could.

Speaker 6 But he said it wouldn't have happened if I was president. He's correct on that.

Speaker 6 So, what's happened now is the left thinks, well,

Speaker 6 it's been 120 days he didn't stop the war. And he thought he was going to pressure Zelensky first, and then because

Speaker 6 he had been more understanding of other issues that may have aggrieved Vladimir Putin, such as

Speaker 6 NATO, that people in the past had promised indirectly or sometimes overtly that Ukraine would be a member of NATO, even though they had pledged to Putin they wouldn't do it.

Speaker 6 They were trying to find they were accusing Trump of trying to find reasons why he could deal with Putin. All of that is out the window now because Putin, Trump is starting to see,

Speaker 6 has an imaginary line. And that line says

Speaker 6 to the East,

Speaker 6 I may be assassinated or dethroned because it's not enough for the military, industrial, oligarchic rulers of Russia. To the West, it is.

Speaker 6 And I've got to explain why I

Speaker 6 launched a preemptive war that did not take Kiev. I told them we were going to take Kiev, and then we would have had the whole country.
That failed. We had a puppet government,

Speaker 6 that failed. And now we had to start from scratch from the Donbass in Crimea.
And I'm telling these people, I got Crimea, it's a part of Russia forever now. And that wasn't true before.

Speaker 6 It was disputed. And the same thing with the Donbass.
I got a pledge that I'm not going to be in NATO. And these people are saying, and you killed a million Russians or wounded them.

Speaker 6 That wasn't enough.

Speaker 6 Vladimir, you've got to take half of Ukraine or something. So that's the dilemma that he's in.
So now he's finally mobilizing like the Soviet Union, 1944.

Speaker 6 And that economy is now a war economy.

Speaker 6 And Trump knows that. So now the irony of all this is there's only one solution to stop him short of something stupid, and that would be Americans involved.

Speaker 6 There should be no Americans involved on the ground there.

Speaker 6 And we're violating already the rules of the Cold War, which said, as I said last time, you can't use a proxy to attack the homeland of your superpower nuclear rival. And that's what we're doing.

Speaker 6 It's a little bit tricky because he invaded and started it. But nevertheless, what Trump is now doing is he said, I didn't start the war, and

Speaker 6 nobody had given a fair hearing of Putin. I did.

Speaker 6 And he is now the aggressor, and you can't reason with him. So there's no, well, you should have been nicer.

Speaker 6 With the left, there was no plan. It was just on to Moscow.

Speaker 6 Whatever it takes, is what Putin said. And people would say, but you violate,

Speaker 6 they lied to Putin. They said that they wouldn't be in.
There was all these little questions that people on the paleo-right said. That's all over with now.
So Trump has kind of clear the air.

Speaker 6 Putin won't deal with it. Zelensky will, he doesn't like Zelensky because Zelensky is always whining and nagging, and you'd give me this, give me that, gimme, gimme, gimme.

Speaker 6 But he knows now that the war wouldn't have started if Putin hadn't invaded. So then what's the next step? There's only one next step short of war.

Speaker 6 And that's a secondary boycott on all the oil that Russia sells. Putin knows that.

Speaker 6 And Donald Trump doesn't want to do that because central to his trade controversies and all of his economic program is cheap energy. And you take off

Speaker 6 10 to 12 million barrels of exported oil off the market, and you're going to have a price shock. And it's going to hurt a lot of economies.

Speaker 6 And that means India, China, the Middle East will not be able to buy.

Speaker 6 And even Europe, Europe talks talks a great game, but they're still buying, I think, a quarter of all the natural gas from Russia, liquefied natural gas. So

Speaker 6 that's where we are now. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Yeah. And the left can't say anything because they said that he was Putin's puppet and he would never do this.
And now

Speaker 6 he's considering something much more serious than anybody in the Biden administration or the Obama administration or the George W. Bush ever conceived.

Speaker 6 When they got all those people together and they said, what do we do to get him back? And that came up. And people said, we could have a oh, no, no secondary boycott.
That would ruin the oil market.

Speaker 6 We would get this. We would get India angry at us.
We get our ally. So it was a taboo subject.

Speaker 6 And now the left is going to be in a very difficult position because they're saying that he was Putin's puppet. And suddenly he comes through with an initiative that's much more radical than theirs.

Speaker 6 Radical in the sense of anti-Putin. Yes.

Speaker 6 So we'll see if the mere threat of it, which Trump holds, that's why he says these crazy things,

Speaker 6 crazy like a fox. I think Putin's gone crazy.
I think.

Speaker 6 Notice he didn't say Putin is a killer like Biden. Putin is evil.

Speaker 6 He didn't do any of that.

Speaker 6 But he says he's crazy, and crazy means... I'm so mystified.
He was so rational before. Now he's temporarily crazy, but he's not a killer.
That's how he does the art of the deal. Yeah.

Speaker 6 He always gives somebody,

Speaker 6 he puts them in a room and shuts all the doors and he opens a window. You can climb out if you want.

Speaker 6 Or when you're Biden and you just say, as long as it takes, he's a murderer, he's a killer. He did that with Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 6 They killed Khashoggi. We're not going to have anything to do with him.
Then he got on all fours and crawled back before the midterms and begged them to pump oil.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he sure did. I would like to take a moment, Victor, for our sponsor, Native Path.

Speaker 4 Native Path is packed with only type 1 and 3 3 collagen fibers, the ones your body needs most for healthy joints, skin, bones, hair, nails, and gut.

Speaker 4 Plus, it's third-party tested for purity with no fillers, no additives, and no artificial junk. Two scoops a day of Native Path delivers 18 grams of protein.
Mix it into coffee, tea, or any drink.

Speaker 4 It's completely flavorless and easy to use. Right now, get a special bundle deal at a fraction of the retail price.
Plus, free shipping. Available at get nativepath.com slash Victor.

Speaker 4 With over 4 million jars sold, thousands of five-star reviews, and a 365-day money-back guarantee, this is your moment to take control of aging.

Speaker 4 Before symptoms get worse, go to nativepath.com slash victor now. Supplies are limited and demand is surging.
So Victor, I wanted to look at, there was a

Speaker 4 graduation speech given by Scott Paley.

Speaker 4 And in it,

Speaker 4 he basically reiterated the democratic talking points that the government now is a danger to your free speech, your rights, et cetera.

Speaker 4 And it seemed a terribly political speech to give at a graduation ceremony. I felt sorry for the students there.

Speaker 6 I've given four or five.

Speaker 6 I just gave one at Hillsdale and I talked about some of the political issues, but not as it evolves Hillsdale. I said specifically it is not the mission of Hillsdale to be a political actor.

Speaker 6 What I did say is in this

Speaker 6 tumultuous times people are going to be looking for traditionalist leaders and Hillsdale's office. You have to be very careful.

Speaker 6 Because even in an

Speaker 6 If you go to a left wing, and they're all left wing except for a few of them, there are people in the audience that that didn't come to hear you harangue them.

Speaker 6 Ken Burns did that at Stanford not long ago, and that's a liberal institution. And he just basically said anybody who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 to the people.

Speaker 6 It's a terrible thing to do.

Speaker 6 So he had no common sense. And then you get to the next level of criticism.
Scott Pelley is talking from 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes did an interview with Kamala Harris, and they

Speaker 6 edited it to make her word salad sound semi-coherent. And they did not tell the people that.

Speaker 6 They would never do that for Donald Trump. So

Speaker 6 he's at an Orwellian institution going way back to 2004 when the head of 60 Minutes, their iconic Dan Rather, got in front of the American people and said, this is a memo that we have verified that shows that George Bush was given preferential treatment.

Speaker 6 And it took the the blogosphere about a nanosecond to show that that was typed on a Microsoft Word program that didn't exist at the time. And then when he was trapped, he said,

Speaker 6 it may be fake, but it's accurate. And so that's a discredited

Speaker 6 form, the 60 minutes. The next thing is, when somebody says something like that, rather than just say it, you should be empirical.

Speaker 6 So my question to him is:

Speaker 6 let's look at the branches of government.

Speaker 6 Let's start with the judiciary. Is Donald Trump using the judiciary to investigate the Biden? He may,

Speaker 6 but is he appointing a special counsel to say, you know, Joe Biden, this was never really adjudicated.

Speaker 6 Robert Herr found him culpable,

Speaker 6 but he said that he...

Speaker 6 was not mentally coherent enough to convince a jury. But that was an independent decision.

Speaker 6 I want to go back and revisit that and say that the data that he accumulated as a prosecutor was sufficient as an investigator, but a different

Speaker 6 AG might make a difference. So we're going to investigate Joe Biden.
He could do that. Did he do it? No.
Did he have a local or state is there a right-wing Fannie Willis out there?

Speaker 6 Is there a right-wing Letitia James? Is there a right-wing Alvin Bragg? No. Nobody is trying to.

Speaker 6 Hunter, all of them. Hunter was given a federal pardon, like Fauci and Adam.
That's not a state pardon. And they could go.
That's one reason the state and the local governments were so,

Speaker 6 prosecutors were active. They were immune if anybody

Speaker 6 pardoned Trump. If they thought that they would still be going and Trump would pardon himself.
And that's why they use the local governments. Okay.

Speaker 6 Is there a state, were there in this election, did the Trump campaign, or will the Trump campaign in the midterm say, you know what,

Speaker 6 it looks like AOC is going to be the nominee against J.D. Vance or Markov Ruby, just to take some names.
We got to get all the red states to get her off the ballot. Let's go get her off.

Speaker 6 That's what they did.

Speaker 6 Did the

Speaker 6 Republican Party in the last

Speaker 6 13 years,

Speaker 6 basically deny the people a chance to nominate their president? No.

Speaker 6 Not since 2012 have they had an open convention. In 2020, they cleared the field.

Speaker 6 Pete Buttigig and Bernie Sanders had won, respectively, the Iowa caucuses and

Speaker 6 New Hampshire. And Joe Biden

Speaker 6 got Jim Claiborne to speed up the date of South Carolina, and then they got all of them out. Suddenly, within 30 days, Elizabeth Warren

Speaker 6 got out.

Speaker 6 Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigig,

Speaker 6 Spartacus, all of them got out. And then they coronated him.
They knew he was mentally incoherent, and they used him as a waxen effigy to use these handlers, as Jake Tapper is now telling.

Speaker 6 And then we go to the next four-year cycle.

Speaker 6 Did they nominate Joe Biden? Yes. He won 14 million votes in the primary.
So he was the nominee. And then they did something that nobody's ever done in the history of modern politics.

Speaker 6 They egged Donald Trump on by having a debate challenge before either candidate had been nominated. That was a stress test.
That was designed to get rid of him and deny the voice of 14 million people.

Speaker 6 And it worked. He was completely non-composment.
mentes. They said, you're out.

Speaker 6 Blank, blank, the 14 million primary voters. And then everybody said, but we're going to have a primary.
Joe Manchin says, I might run, right?

Speaker 6 And everybody said they're going to.

Speaker 6 No, no, no, no, no. Then they took 24 hours and they appointed her.

Speaker 6 And by the way, she was appointed on the basis of her gender and race, according to Joe Biden, when he pre-announced that he had limited the field.

Speaker 6 So they really had not nominated anybody by a fair vote of the people since Barack Obama's second term. Did Donald Trump do that? No, he ran there.
You know what I mean? He ran all the way.

Speaker 6 So when you look for barometers of how he's weaponized the government,

Speaker 6 it's hard to see that

Speaker 6 he's weaponizing it. We'll see.
We'll see if the IRS starts to just audit people like Lois Lerner did. We'll see if Cash Patel emulates James Comey or Andrew.

Speaker 6 Maybe Cash Patel will wear a wire and he'll get Pam Bondi and they'll try to go in and

Speaker 6 tape some Democratic leader. Chuck Schumer.
Chuck Schumer, yeah, say he's incompetent or something. Or maybe a FBI

Speaker 6 lawyer will forge a document like Kevin Kleinsmith to get a FISA warrant. Or

Speaker 6 maybe the FBI director in the next election will suddenly unload a bombshell. Or maybe he will have a private conversation with somebody and then leak it to the New York Times.

Speaker 6 So I'm just looking for evidence that they have weaponized the government in the fashion that Biden did. And by the way, Obama did in 2016.

Speaker 6 With the DOJ, did they give a sweetheart deal to one of the Trump kids like they did Hunter Biden before a judge intervened?

Speaker 6 I have some legitimate-it's not me, I don't matter, but people have legitimate worries that some people around Trump are doing too much business. And the

Speaker 6 is it going to be overt like Hunter's paintings where you're selling this junk stuff to donors? I hope not.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 I don't see yet anything that he's done that is comparable to what the left does. Yeah.
Because the left always projects. Whatever they do, they accuse other people of doing.
And so

Speaker 6 when they talk like this,

Speaker 6 there's no evidence at all.

Speaker 4 Yeah. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about 1943.
And I confess that in World War II, 1943, we don't,

Speaker 4 because I have taught generally World War II,

Speaker 4 and we don't usually talk a whole lot about 1943. So I'm excited to hear about that.
Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Speaker 4 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor at his website, The Blade of Perseus.
It is found at the URL VictorHanson.com. And come join us there.

Speaker 4 You can sign up to be a subscriber for $6.50 a month or $65 a year. And with that, you get two articles a week plus a Friday video that we do for our ultra subscribers.
So please come join us there.

Speaker 4 So Victor 1943, I'm excited to hear about how

Speaker 4 the war progresses for the Allies.

Speaker 6 Well, we said at the end of 1942, you could make the argument that in the fall the Axis reached the high point.

Speaker 6 They had a Nazi flag in the Caucasus. They were 40 miles from the Russian oil fields.

Speaker 6 Rommel

Speaker 6 was 90 miles into Egypt, and he was on his way to the Suez Canal and Alexandria. And the Japanese had not been defeated until midway, really.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 there was a turning point in late 42 with the invasion of North Africa. But in 1943,

Speaker 6 I think you can make the argument after February or March of 1943,

Speaker 6 the Axis could not win. But that was when they had the Casablanca conference, and they announced without Stalin that they were going to seek unconditional surrender.

Speaker 6 So that meant they didn't have to defeat as they had done in World War I. They had to destroy because they were not going to surrender.

Speaker 6 And that meant that they had to have a different type of military that they started the war with.

Speaker 6 So once we went to war, these brilliant architects and industrial, Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford, William Knudsen, the war production, they started to take over the economy.

Speaker 6 And we had all of these brilliant engineers at

Speaker 6 Lockheed and Boeing, and they were making shipyards. So they, all during late 1941, they actually started a little bit before the war with the Carl Vinson Naval Acts.

Speaker 6 But what was happening on aware to the Axis, there were 26

Speaker 6 huge Essex carriers, best carriers,

Speaker 6 they will come in in 1943.

Speaker 6 And they are going to produce 50,000 Sherman tanks. And the uploaded Sherman tank, for all the criticism of it, in terms of durability, reliability, it's a wonderful tank.
And it's made.

Speaker 6 They are now going into Iran and they started going through Archangel and they are supplying the Soviet Union with 25%

Speaker 6 of their military. And it's not just their military needs.
They have sent Harry Hopkins over there. And they said, what do you need and what do you do well?

Speaker 6 And they said, we make big things, guns and artillery and tanks better than anybody. But we don't do radios.
We don't have rubber ponchos. We don't have sea rations.
We have no aviation.

Speaker 6 We don't have...

Speaker 6 And we've supplied everything they didn't need, along with the British.

Speaker 6 And then they

Speaker 6 said to the British,

Speaker 6 You're right. We don't know what we're doing by mid-1943 as far as bombing.

Speaker 6 We've got to do some things. We've got to go.
if we're going to go at daylight, it was around the clock, we're not going to be so precise.

Speaker 6 We're going to drop bombs in the general area and we're going to start. They started to experiment at the end of the year with drop tanks on for fighter escorts.

Speaker 6 And then in the Pacific and in the European theater, there was a whole new generation of airplanes. So the dominance of the Zero, the 109, and that was going to end.

Speaker 6 The Supermarine Spitfire, the latest model, was better than the Falkwhiff 190. The P-51 was on the drawing boards.
It would come into mass use in early 44. It was better than the Falkworth.

Speaker 6 The P-47 was as good or better. And then in the Pacific, the Hellcat, and of course,

Speaker 6 and then they had the Iowa-class battle. All this is starting to come.
So, how does that manifest itself?

Speaker 6 After we invaded North Africa, in May, the entire Africa Corps will surrender, squeeze between Montgomery and Patton. That's a quarter of a million people.

Speaker 6 That follows the February collapse of two army groups at Stalingrad, 250,000.

Speaker 6 After Stalingrad,

Speaker 6 the Germans cannot win. They have a huge battle, the biggest tank battle in history

Speaker 6 at Kursk. It's basically Stalin tanks and T-34s against the new Panther and Tigers.
And it's a horrific battle about the Germans, they know the Germans are coming, they want to cut a salient.

Speaker 6 And after Kursk,

Speaker 6 you could argue that it's a tactical German, but the losses are so horrific, they will never have the wherewithal to take any more land. They go into Kharkov for a while and they come back.

Speaker 6 So the front by July of 1943 in Russia, it's going to go back

Speaker 6 to Germany.

Speaker 6 Yes, back to Germany. They're going to do hedgehogs.
They're brilliant. They are going to kill six Russians for every German and lose.
Wow.

Speaker 6 So that is something that's happened in 1943. The Americans, after getting this big surrender in North Africa, have now invaded in July Sicily.

Speaker 6 And then right after that, they've gone into the lower boot of Italy. And they think it's going to be the soft underbelly.
But two things have happened that will stop that.

Speaker 6 Number one,

Speaker 6 the most brilliant commander in the American Army, George Patton, who

Speaker 6 is unpopular, but an authentic military genius, and George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower know that. He has slapped two soldiers.

Speaker 6 One had malaria, one what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome. No one would believe you would take your most effective commander, but that's what they did.

Speaker 6 So when they go into Italy, you have a functionary, Mark Clark,

Speaker 6 and John Lucas, and whether it's Anzio or any of the landings, that is going to be a bloodbath. And no one has ever really taken Italy from the south.

Speaker 6 You've got to go up two sides of the Apennines Mountains, you know, Hannibal, Napoleon, they all come from the north, and it's going to be a disaster.

Speaker 6 And this military genius is going to be put on ice for one year with no role in planning D-Day

Speaker 6 so

Speaker 6 it's the turning point in the sense that the Mediterranean now to recap is all in allies hands they're never going to take Malta North Africa the whole when that war started the only country that was in

Speaker 6 the Allies hands was Egypt. And now the entire like frogs around a pond the entire Mediterranean is in Allied hands.
Italy has gone, it's quit the war in 1943.

Speaker 6 Mussolini is in a puppet state up north that Hitler has saved.

Speaker 6 The Italians are now infiltrating American lines and helping Americans and British, or they're neutral, or they're fighting Germans.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 in the Pacific,

Speaker 6 the Japanese

Speaker 6 takes us a little, this is after the Battle of Midway. This is now now the tensions turn to Guadalcanal, and it is a horrific battle.

Speaker 6 But by October, the Americans in five critical sea battles and in the on the island have defeated the Japanese, and they've stopped any notion that Australia will be cut off or the Japanese will have New Guinea.

Speaker 6 And then, as the year ends, they've got this brilliant strategy with Nimitz with the Navy and the Marines and MacArthur with the Army, mostly Army,

Speaker 6 and he gets them to use the fleet in a primary. And his idea under Operation Cartwheel is to go around New Guinea and go into the Philippines.

Speaker 6 And Nimitz's idea is to go straight an island hop, skip over Rabal, take Tarawa,

Speaker 6 skip, forget about Taiwan, and then take the Marianas, and then Iwo Jima, and skip so you can bomb Tokyo. And they're going to start that in 1944.

Speaker 6 But the point I'm making is they now have a strategy, they have better weapons, and they found the right people. They found that Admiral Spruance, the victor at Midway, was a great commander.

Speaker 6 They know that Nimitz has proved himself.

Speaker 6 They know that Bullhalsey is erratic, kind of crazy, but he's a great guy when you need him. They've looked at the system in Europe for the coming D-Day.
Eisenhower is sober and judicious.

Speaker 6 Montgomery is sort of a competent yes man, but they have brilliant people

Speaker 6 like Patton who will come back online in a year. And he has some of the

Speaker 6 best corps commanders in the Army. They all come out of the Army War College.
They're brilliant. You've got some people coming out that are absolute military genius.

Speaker 6 Curtis LeMay is now revamping some of the B-17 with Jimmy Doolittle. Jimmy Doolittle's got this idea about fighters, a new strategy,

Speaker 6 escorting. Doolittle and LeMay and then LeMay are going to revamp the B-17.
They're going to take horrific casualties in 1943. They're going to lose 15%

Speaker 6 at places like Schweinfurt, the ball-bearing factory, or trying to Plotoisi trying to bomb the Romania. And it doesn't work.

Speaker 6 But they're going to learn from the 40,000 dead Americans that you can still bomb

Speaker 6 Europe effectively if you're flying from Britain across the Channel over friendly France, occupied France, where there's not German airfields, number one.

Speaker 6 Two, if you have fighter escort with a P-47, but especially the new P-51 that has a Merlin engine in it, and you have a guy like Jimmy Doolittle who says you don't have to stick next to the plane, give a 19-year-old a P-51 and tell them, just you're free to go escort the bombers, then find where these Germans take off and just hang out at their,

Speaker 6 and when they take off, shoot them down, and when they come back, shoot them down. But shoot as many fighters down and don't just think you have to hover around the bomber.

Speaker 6 It's a brilliant strategy, it works.

Speaker 6 And then you've got LeMay who will go over and 44 and revamp the B-29. So it's the pivotal year when war production, new weapons, new strategy, and like every war, it's sort of like 1864

Speaker 6 when finally the war is turned over to Ulysses S. Grant, General Sherman, and

Speaker 6 General Thomas.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they finally get great commanders, geniuses, and then they crush the South. And now they've got the right team.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 the economy is just,

Speaker 6 it's,

Speaker 6 the American economy is just about ready to surpass all

Speaker 6 the British Empire, the Russian economy, the German economy, what's left of the Italian command, and the Japanese combined.

Speaker 6 So they can't win the war after February, March, 1943.

Speaker 6 It's just a question of how many Americans are going to have to die, and how many British are going to have to die, and how many Russians are going to have to die to go in and physically kill Hitler and Dojo.

Speaker 4 So I have a couple of questions. First is the short one.
You said Kurtz was the most devastating war, or it took a lot of battle. It took a lot of lives.

Speaker 4 So what is approximately how many lives are we talking about for a really bad battle in World War II?

Speaker 6 It's about over a half a million casualties, dead, wounded, and over

Speaker 4 both sides?

Speaker 6 Or each side? Or the Russians, it's hard to know. But probably 500,000.
When you say a battle, this went on for for weeks.

Speaker 6 And probably a half a million to 600,000. Yeah.
And then somewhere over 2,000 tanks.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 Van Manstein,

Speaker 6 anytime there's a bulge in a line, everybody wants to cut the bulge off at its base.

Speaker 6 And the problem with Kursk is they had this, the Russians had overextended themselves, and the Germans had been so successful in 1941 in cutting those

Speaker 6 blisters out that the Russians knew it.

Speaker 6 So, what they did was they dug tank ditches, they had anti-tank obstacles, they mined everything, they put a rail line right up to Kursk, and they started sending in thousands of T-30

Speaker 6 four tanks. So, they knew exactly what the Germans were going to do.
And finally, Hitler himself, who was reckless, tried to tell Manstein, I don't know if this is smart or not.

Speaker 6 And Manstein said, we can still win.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 they lost the cream of the German Armor Corps, and then they lost their best soldiers at Kursk and their best equipment.

Speaker 6 And from now on, except for Kharkov, they went and tried, they took it, and then they lost it, then they took it again, then they had to give it up. But from now on,

Speaker 6 from middle to late 1943, it's going to be a continued retreat.

Speaker 6 And when the D-Day starts in June of next year, it's going to be Operation

Speaker 6 Bagration.

Speaker 6 It's going to be accelerated.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And the second question I have, because we don't hear a lot about Mussolini, we all know he's dethroned more or less in 1943.

Speaker 4 However, you said that he's a puppet state. And I understand that the Germans have two lines of

Speaker 4 soldiers that the Allies have to get through. First off, is that true? And then just, I guess a preview.
How long does it take them to defeat northern Italy?

Speaker 6 They never do.

Speaker 4 Oh, they never get to Austin.

Speaker 6 No, they never get to Austria. They never do.
There's the Gothic line

Speaker 4 of Germans.

Speaker 6 Yes, they have actually three or four of them. And

Speaker 6 because Italy is long and narrow and it's mountainous, and the British are on one side, the Americans are on the other, they make these successive lines, Siegfried line, Gothic line, and it's designed to go.

Speaker 6 And the Americans think they can go behind them with amphibious. So

Speaker 6 when they do do that successfully at Anzio, and the Germans are pretty canny. Here is on the right side.

Speaker 6 They evacuate Rome and make it an open city, right? This is in 1944.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 6 there's

Speaker 6 a choice, and they think they've landed here, and we're kind of behind our lines.

Speaker 6 Any good commander, a Patton or a German commander, would forget about the decoy of Rome, but just go north and then trap the German army where it can't get out.

Speaker 6 And they said, no, we'll make it an open city, and Mark Clark will be such an egomaniac that he'll want to take Rome and parade through. And that's exactly what happened.

Speaker 6 So then they did that, and then they had to go. And, you know, Monte Cassino, they had to destroy.
So they were just head to head. And what saved them was they had,

Speaker 6 by July, we'll talk about 1944, they had 100% air supremacy, not superiority supremacy. So they were bombing, bombing, bombing.
But

Speaker 6 the idea originally was they were going to invade Sicily in July. And then

Speaker 6 in August, September, they were going to land, and they did. And then they were going to...

Speaker 6 In Churchill's mind, he was terrified of D-Day, and they had been given a date. And he said, you know what?

Speaker 6 I remember the Somme, I remember Verdun, I know what it's like fighting the German army in France, I can remember what happened at Dunkirk. I just don't want to do this.

Speaker 6 But we'll go into the soft underbelly, and we'll go through Italy, and we'll just go zhum. And there'll be two things about it.
We don't have to hit the German army head-on.

Speaker 6 And we'll get Italy out of the war quickly, and they'll join us or be neutral.

Speaker 6 But more importantly, when the war ends, we're going to be behind Germany and Austria to the east and we can stop the Soviet from the Soviet machine from occupying Germany and Europe.

Speaker 6 He was already thinking like that.

Speaker 6 And the problem he didn't understand was

Speaker 4 Stalin was also thinking like that, right?

Speaker 6 Yes.

Speaker 6 He didn't understand that for that to happen, he needed a different type of command.

Speaker 6 He had a good British commander, Alexander, but they were taking troops away to plan already for D-Day, and that hurt Italy. And then they also decided, I don't think it was worth Operation Torch.

Speaker 6 They invaded southern France, Anvil, they called it later, and that took soldiers away from Italy. And then they had the idea was that if you had

Speaker 6 Air Force bases with long-range B-24s, you could bomb Eastern Europe. and they did from Italy.
So

Speaker 6 there were reasons that they either didn't capture the moment or they used it for purposes other than what was intended, but it was a disaster.

Speaker 6 I think anybody looked at the amount of Americans and British who were killed in Italy and what they achieved.

Speaker 6 I mean, later people said, Mark Clark said, well, we kept the German army from massing on the beaches of Normandy. I don't think that's quite right.

Speaker 4 Didn't they have the Tehran conference in 1943? And isn't it there that Churchill and FDR agreed with Stalin that they would not invade through the Balkans?

Speaker 4 Exactly what you described Churchill was thinking.

Speaker 6 Well, Churchill.

Speaker 6 Churchill hadn't been at Casablanca.

Speaker 6 I mean, Stalin hadn't.

Speaker 6 So now he was yelling and screaming. And the reason that they were able to deal with him so long,

Speaker 6 Stalin was right that they didn't.

Speaker 6 People like George Marshall wanted to invade France in 1942. That was the American doctrine from the war colleges.
Find the enemy and go to him.

Speaker 6 And the British, who had been fighting World War I, much who lost a million dead,

Speaker 6 said, no, no, no, no. You can't fight the German army.
They're too good. You have to

Speaker 6 finesse them, go around them or something. But really, what Churchill was saying is, we've got Stalin, and he is as bad as Hitler.
He's on our side now, but he probably won't be. And more importantly,

Speaker 6 when Stalin pressed them and said, what you're doing is

Speaker 6 you are using air power and you are fighting the Japanese, the Americans, and you are not dealing with the German army at its center.

Speaker 6 You are dealing in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, but you won't go on the beaches of France and go to Berlin, because to do so, you will come up against a million, two million of the best soldiers in the world.

Speaker 6 But we're doing that. And you know we're doing that, and you are delaying this so we get killed and weaken the German army.
True. But then Churchill and others said to Stalin,

Speaker 6 well, yeah, but we didn't cut the, we didn't start the war. The war would have never started if you had not concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, August 23rd.

Speaker 6 You invaded Poland. You were on Hitler's side.
You were a Nazi supporter, an active one. So don't give us any lectures.
You were on their side.

Speaker 6 And the only reason that you're on our side is he attacked you. So there was a big disagreement.

Speaker 6 And in the end, 20 million Russians would be killed, and they would kill three out of four German soldiers.

Speaker 6 And we got out of the war with 450,000 dead, Britain with 420,000 compared to 20 million. And so they did a great job and they did a great service, but

Speaker 6 there was never the British were the ones that did not want to go into France.

Speaker 6 They just had bad nightmares of 1914 and the German army, and they tried to tell the Americans, you've never really, you came in late in 1917, you don't know what they're like.

Speaker 6 We've been fighting them since 1939.

Speaker 6 Americans are kind of like cocky, you know. We have B-17s, we have B-24s,

Speaker 6 we have Sherman tanks. We'll just...
We like Americans. Well, you know, the funny thing is they landed in June, and in May they're in Germany, you know.

Speaker 6 So ten months later, and what the Americans said was,

Speaker 6 well, yeah, Russia started from Moscow in December 1941, and they didn't get to where we are until four years.

Speaker 6 So whatever you say about us, the distance from Moscow to eastern Germany is about where Normandy is to center of Germany. So we did the same distance in nine months.

Speaker 6 And so i th that controversy continues.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Last question.
I hope it's a quick one. The British had ra a radar system at the Battle of Britain in 1940, which was very effective in warning the British

Speaker 4 Air Force that the Germans were coming in. Did the Germans have any radar along their north, the Atlantic Wall that they had? Because they had that covered.
So they had radar.

Speaker 6 Yeah, they were almost as sophisticated as the British.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they were very

Speaker 6 sophisticated with radar and

Speaker 6 with anti-sonar. Their submarines had finally developed some means to block sonar.

Speaker 6 Technologically,

Speaker 6 why they lost the war was not technology. You can argue the atomic bomb, yes, but

Speaker 6 it was production.

Speaker 6 They had a fundamental misunderstanding of war material.

Speaker 6 They were highly and over-engineered. And what I mean by that was, when they made a tank, they said

Speaker 6 what matters is the size of the gun and the thickness of the armor.

Speaker 6 And the Americans who had to take those things all the way over the coast said, no, no, no.

Speaker 6 It's how long will it run without maintenance? How many miles will it get to the gallon? How easy is it to fix? And how many can you make?

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 in 1944, if you were in a Sherman tank and you ran up against a panther or a tiger,

Speaker 6 you were done for. But three out of every five Americans survived a direct hit because they had a little, they made a hatch at the bottom.
They could get out.

Speaker 6 And they weren't not Ronson lighters, like everybody said.

Speaker 6 But the point point is that they almost never met a panther. They only made

Speaker 6 1,600 tigers and most of them were on the Eastern Front and they didn't make over 6,000 or 7,000 Panthers, but they made

Speaker 6 80,000, 90,000

Speaker 6 Cromwells, Churchill tanks, and Shermans. So basically in Europe it was American Shermans and British tanks attacking infantry.
And when they saw a regular Panther, they were pretty smart.

Speaker 6 So they had taken a 17-pounder, which is a high-powered 76-millimeter gun, and they put it on a Sherman. It's ridiculous.
It was like this big long thing,

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 they called it a firefly. And when they got in trouble,

Speaker 6 you'd hate to be in the thing because when you shot it, it would shutter the whole port turret. So these medium-sized tanks, when they saw a tiger, and they would blow them up.
Fireflies were great.

Speaker 6 And, you know, that's what

Speaker 6 Germany never cooperated with Japan or Italy. We cooperated with the British and the Russians all the time.

Speaker 4 But the ingenuity of German engineering gave them some pretty good radar on the Atlantic West.

Speaker 6 Good radar. They were ahead of us in radar.

Speaker 6 They were ahead of us in missiles, V-2 missiles. They were ahead of us in cruise missiles with the V-1.

Speaker 6 They

Speaker 6 had better.

Speaker 6 We caught up, but the 88mm was the best gun in the world, most accurate they had. We caught up to them with the proximity fuse and other stuff.

Speaker 6 You could argue they were the first, had Hitler allowed the 262 jet Mister Schmidt, they could have had Miss Rchmidt fighters swarming us as early as

Speaker 6 July 1944. But he wanted to make a bomber and he delayed.
He didn't understand it.

Speaker 6 And if you look at the actual German soldier, their helmets

Speaker 6 protected more than 30%

Speaker 6 fewer wounds to the head.

Speaker 6 They're kind of like a modern American helmet.

Speaker 6 Their hand grenade, those potato smashers with a handle, they were more effective than ours.

Speaker 6 They made their personal machine guns were better.

Speaker 6 They had a phenomenal. The 42, I mean, my gosh, they could fire 1,200 rounds a minute.

Speaker 4 But did they have an atomic program like we had?

Speaker 6 They did. They were heavy water.

Speaker 6 They would have gotten it. They were farther along.
They were. First, we thought

Speaker 6 they were just doing heavy water, but they were pretty far along. In three or four more years, they would have done it.

Speaker 6 Almost everything,

Speaker 6 their problem was quantity, quantity, quantity.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 it had

Speaker 6 so

Speaker 6 when they made a tank engine, the clearance between the cylinder and the piston, cylinder and the piston was very tight, so you got more power and compression, but it was easier to it got hot.

Speaker 6 Get a little sand in there, and you'd be in trouble. And Americans were much, and Russian stuff was much easier to maintain, much more practical.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 4 they just... Didn't Rommel have trouble with his tanks in the

Speaker 6 African war. Yeah, Africa.
But basically, when you get back to it, Hitler

Speaker 6 was worth probably 100 American divisions because he didn't.

Speaker 6 So he said that he didn't have enough troops in 1941 when the Italians started to collapse in 1940 to save them. So he sent Rommel with two divisions, 25,000 people.
And he said, don't screw it up.

Speaker 6 We're going to invade the Soviet Union in May or June, and I can't afford it.

Speaker 6 But later, when it was already lost, he sent a quarter of a million people over there. So what I'm saying is, if he had just delayed

Speaker 6 going into Russia

Speaker 6 one year, and he still had Russia as a partner,

Speaker 6 and given Rommel

Speaker 6 10 divisions, Rommel would have easily overrun the British at El Oman. He would have been in Alexandria.
He would have taken Cairo. He would have cut off the Suez Canal.

Speaker 6 And he would have been in the oil fields of the Middle East. And that would have been terrible.
But

Speaker 6 he shorted Rommel, and then he went into Russia. It was stupid.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, I just thought about this right now.

Speaker 4 Do the Germans, they don't have a nuclear program today, do they? I know the French, of course, do, but.

Speaker 6 They have a nuclear program like the Japanese don't have a nuclear program. Oh, okay.

Speaker 6 And what that means is they've had nuclear plants and they have nuclear physicists and they have enough plutonium in storage that if they wanted to make bombs, I think South Korea could make 100 right now.

Speaker 6 Japan could only make three or four hundred

Speaker 6 and they would work.

Speaker 6 And the Germans could do it too. But part of the

Speaker 6 understood protocol at Potsdam was, remember

Speaker 6 what the NATO motto was

Speaker 6 when they formed NATO in 1953, it was Germany down,

Speaker 6 Russia out, America in.

Speaker 6 So, how did you keep Germany down? You divided it.

Speaker 6 And they thought they were going to reunite it, but they did reunite the British, American, and French sectors, West Germany, and then Russia wouldn't do it. But that weakened Germany.

Speaker 6 The other protocol that was never explicit, but it was understood, is they would not have nuclear weapon, but France and Britain would, the winners.

Speaker 6 And people have always wondered about that, and that is what would happen if that protocol was stopped and Japan and Germany on our side now got nuclear weapons.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 6 And would they have a different attitude? And you can see that Germany has been very anti-American, especially toward Trump. And people,

Speaker 6 they're much more likely to think Japan would be valuable with nuclear weapons that check China than Germany.

Speaker 6 But that was part of that, that came out of World War II. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back. And since we're speaking about nuclear weapons, we'll talk a little bit about North Korea and then we'll go on to Melanie.
Trump has

Speaker 4 taken

Speaker 4 the veil off of whether Barron was

Speaker 4 applied to Harvard or not. So we'll get to that after these messages.

Speaker 4 Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor on X.
His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. You can also find him on

Speaker 4 YouTube for these videos and on Rumble and also Spotify. So join him in any of all of those places if those are your social media outlets.

Speaker 4 So Victor, the North Koreans apparently just came out this morning that they had

Speaker 4 enough nuclear material or nuclear fuel fuel to have 90,000 nuclear weapons.

Speaker 6 Not 90,000.

Speaker 4 Sorry, 90 nuclear weapons, not 90,000.

Speaker 6 They'd like 90,000. No, they would.

Speaker 4 They would be using them, unfortunately. But yeah, so that's the new news this morning.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I think

Speaker 6 we've got to be very careful because South Korea is on the verge of going nuclear. Yeah.

Speaker 6 And that may be good or not. I gave a lecture once, I think I mentioned this,

Speaker 6 and a South Korean military official showed up at it, because I'd written about this, an article, and he said, I want you to tell me how many nuclear weapons are devoted to the defense of South Korea.

Speaker 6 This was after North Korea went nuclear.

Speaker 6 And I was just curious, so I wanted to play left-wing naive guy. And I said, well, it doesn't really matter because once you start a nuclear war,

Speaker 6 and he says, it does matter.

Speaker 6 You have 6,500 nuclear weapons. How much is protecting Canada? And I said, oh, 50.

Speaker 6 How much protects the American homeland?

Speaker 6 I said, oh, I don't know, a couple of thousand. How much protects Japan?

Speaker 6 And I said, I don't know, 150.

Speaker 6 How much protects all of NATO? I said, a couple of thousand. He said, where are the nuclear weapons? And it was all in response to Barack Obama had...

Speaker 6 announced that he wanted to build down to 1,500 nuclear weapons total.

Speaker 6 And everybody in the left said, this is good because 10 nuclear weapons will wipe out the world. And this guy had come over and said, you wrote something about this.

Speaker 6 Tell me if you get down to 1,500, there's nothing left for us to protect us. We want to know how many nuclear weapons are pledged in an all-out war to protect us.

Speaker 6 So you can tell the Chinese and the North Koreans, if you touch

Speaker 6 South Korea, we will nuke you. And they won't believe you unless you can say you got about 100 of them to wipe out all.
And I thought it was ridiculous at the time, or Wellian. But looking back,

Speaker 6 what I'm getting at is we have to be very, very careful at this point with Australia, with the Philippines, with Taiwan, with Japan and South Korea to assure them

Speaker 6 of the old we pledge San Francisco's safety or LA's safety or Portland to your survival.

Speaker 6 Because if you don't, they all have the ability very quickly, and they have plutonium that they stock up

Speaker 6 to be nuclear for their own any time they would sense the United States is not shielding them,

Speaker 6 that would make them independent nuclear powers.

Speaker 6 And actually, Don Rumsfeld was rumored to have said in 2006

Speaker 6 when North Korea, remember the Bush administrator it started under Clinton and then under Bush, they were trying to negotiate it, and then North Korea let off a bomb.

Speaker 6 And Rumsfeld, I think it was 2005,

Speaker 6 before he left, he went over there and supposedly said to them, to the Chinese as well,

Speaker 6 we had a deal that each one of our clients, so you had a client and you let him go north, and we have a client and we're going to let them go nuclear.

Speaker 6 And our client is better than your client.

Speaker 6 Because his will work and yours won't. And

Speaker 6 I don't know if that restrained them for a while. Then Trump was confronted with the same thing.
They always inherit it from a democratic administration that lets them do it.

Speaker 6 And then Trump basically, when

Speaker 6 Kim Jong-un was threatening Portland and Seattle, you know, I have new missiles that can reach them. He said, I have a bigger, I have a button too, and my button is bigger than yours.

Speaker 6 Everybody made fun of him, said he was a sable rattling juvenile. And then all of a sudden, we didn't hear anything about Kim Jong-un.
And China said, What are you doing? Shut the blank up

Speaker 6 and controlled it. And then, when,

Speaker 6 of course, when Biden came in, he started up again and started shooting missiles everywhere.

Speaker 4 Yeah, once that came right back down, though, as far as I can remember.

Speaker 6 It's a larger question with Trump because there are fishers in the MAGA movement. The MAGA movement, the J.D.
Vance Tucker wing, is we just keep out of things. We're Fortress America.

Speaker 6 And we don't do optional stuff.

Speaker 6 You saw that

Speaker 6 the signal

Speaker 6 chat secret thing between Hegseth about whether to hit the Houthis or not that was leaked.

Speaker 6 And then you have not neocon, nobody wants nation building, but you have the Jacksonians. No better friend, no worse enemy, don't tread on me, and their idea is that, yeah,

Speaker 6 MAGA's right and we're MAGA, but every time you have to knock some heads around. So

Speaker 6 Trump destroyed the Wagner group in Syria. They got rid of Baghdadi.
They got rid of Soleimani, but without getting into war. So we're going to go hit the Houthis.

Speaker 6 And that's their attitude. And that's friction right now we're talking about.
So MAGA is saying,

Speaker 6 what do we care if Iran goes nuclear?

Speaker 6 We can nuke it anytime. And Jacksonian says it's our pleasure that it's not.
And we will get rid of them. because they're going to eventually do it against our allies or us.

Speaker 6 So that's a big fissure that's never really been resolved.

Speaker 6 Trump himself is not an isolationist.

Speaker 4 Could I ask you, though, which one do you think is worse? Because we seem focused on Iran and stopping the Iranians. But isn't the nuclear threat from North Korea equal, or is one more

Speaker 6 than the other?

Speaker 6 North Korea is a puppet of China.

Speaker 6 There is no master of Iran.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 that's number one. And although there is an existential enemy

Speaker 6 in South Korea,

Speaker 6 they know that if they attack South Korea, North Korea, they'll have another Korean war.

Speaker 6 Iran's existential, the purpose of their nuclear, is Israel. Now, they're afraid of the Israel.
Israel's probably got 250 nuclear weapons, but if they attack Israel, we'll probably come in.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 excuse me.

Speaker 4 We have come in because we've helped defend Israel.

Speaker 6 We may or may not come in, I say. We will be more likely to come in to defend South Korea than we would Israel.

Speaker 6 So my point is that there is no check on Iran. Like there is, you can go tell China, if you don't control them,

Speaker 6 We're going to have big problems with you at trade or whatever.

Speaker 6 China is building three nuclear weapons a month,

Speaker 6 40 a year, and they think they're going to have 1,000 nuclear weapons by 2030.

Speaker 6 And Trump has already announced that we're going to start

Speaker 6 revamping our nuclear

Speaker 6 stockpile.

Speaker 6 And some of these new defense contractors like Andoril and those people, if you look at some of the weapon systems they're talking about,

Speaker 6 they're pretty scary. They're almost unstoppable.

Speaker 6 And we're changing under it's it's long overdue. We're going from big blockbuster platforms, you know, $14 billion huge carriers or $175 million F-22s

Speaker 6 or

Speaker 6 big, big bombs,

Speaker 6 to

Speaker 6 a million little drones that are controlled by a fighter aircraft, have an arsenal of a million of them.

Speaker 6 Or if China wants to come across, we could flood the sea with six or seven thousand small little submarine drones.

Speaker 6 And that's what we're trying to catch up.

Speaker 6 We don't have that capability now, but we will if we listen to people like you know

Speaker 4 if we're smart.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 4 So, Victor, let me welcome back Vibrance. Vibrance is

Speaker 4 one of my favorite products that we spawn that sponsors us here at the Victor Davis Hanson Show. And I have found the secret to all in one serum, and it's Vibrance Super C Serum.

Speaker 4 The ingredients in this one bottle can replace your day creams, eye creams, night creams, neck creams, wrinkle creams, and dark spot reducers.

Speaker 4 Made in the USA with the highest quality ingredients including vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, vitamin B5, and vitamin E, Super C Serum delivers noticeable results.

Speaker 4 Simplify your skincare routine, get a healthier complexion, and minimize wrinkles and age spots with Vibrance.

Speaker 4 And if you don't find it better than your current skincare routine, you'll get a full refund. Go to vibrance.com/slash victor to save up to 37%

Speaker 4 off and free shipping. That's Vibrance.
V-I-B-R-I-A-N-C-E. Vibrance.com slash Victor.
And we thank Vibrance for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Speaker 4 And to all of our listeners, I enjoy Vibrance and am sold on their products. I highly recommend it.

Speaker 4 So, Victor Melanie, Melania, sorry, has told the world because Trump's getting a lot of criticism from his policies on Harvard, that, in fact, Baron did not apply to Harvard.

Speaker 4 And I was wondering your thoughts either on that

Speaker 4 or in your.

Speaker 6 I don't understand that because that's not a debatable point. Harvard has records.
He either didn't or didn't. He either did or didn't.

Speaker 6 So Harvard is in this existential fight with Trump and its defenders float this story out.

Speaker 6 Why didn't Harvard just either produce the goods and show the application because they have a record of it or not? And they kept quiet like, well, we'll just see where it goes.

Speaker 6 And then she said, absolutely not, unless he applied and didn't tell her, or maybe there's an argument with these multiple applications where you just apply, you know, you just apply the form and then you check all the count that is that an application?

Speaker 6 I don't know, but it doesn't seem like he did in the traditional sense. And then Harvard is

Speaker 6 a very sticky point because Trump is starting to see a little bit of defection on the right

Speaker 6 because

Speaker 6 right intellectual, I mean everybody who goes to Harvard and places like Harvard. So they look at this and they say, okay, they're anti-Semitic.
Yeah.

Speaker 6 So,

Speaker 6 you know, Claudine Gay is not going to do anything about that type of stuff.

Speaker 6 So you've got a reason maybe to say, clean up your act, or you're not going to get it.

Speaker 6 And we understand that they're avoiding the 2022 court ruling on affirmative action on DEI, and so get them on that.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 6 they're not reporting income from China and get them on that.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 they're not protecting First Amendment rights. Get them on that.
But then the Trump administration, you know, says, and they're also teaching this and this and this. And then

Speaker 6 these intellectuals on the right wrote four of my colleagues at the Hoover Institution. And their argument is you've got to draw the line.
Now you're telling an institution

Speaker 6 what they can do and cannot do, and that's against the First Amendment. So, this is a tricky question because I think the Trump

Speaker 6 general counsel will come back to them and say, no, we're not telling them what they can or cannot teach.

Speaker 6 We are telling them, just like USAID, that we have a choice to fund private institutions, and we don't have to fund any of them. And we don't have to give any reason.

Speaker 6 We can just say, you know what, we don't like the Harvard crimson colors. Sorry, we like Stanford's red better.
So we're going to give stuff.

Speaker 6 But it's a tricky, so you're starting to see defections among the right intellectual community, and they are saying that they agree with Jason Riley today in the Wall Street Journal said, I agree with you on the anti-Semitism and this and this and this, but now you're

Speaker 6 too intrusive and you're going to hurt with the student visas and all this. And,

Speaker 6 you know, the Trump

Speaker 6 people will say, so

Speaker 6 we don't have people that can get into Harvard here, and we have to import people from China and India. Is that what you're saying? And from the Middle East? We're that impoverished in people,

Speaker 6 maybe

Speaker 6 and

Speaker 6 30% of the research anyway is DEI. So it's a hard question, but I haven't seen

Speaker 6 the left has all these arguments, but they're going to have to make an argument that the federal government

Speaker 6 is obligated to give money to private institutions, and if it doesn't, it has to explain why. And we don't give federal money to a lot of them, like Hillsdale that doesn't want it.

Speaker 6 But there's also other ones that are just, they're not Harvard.

Speaker 6 So

Speaker 6 why does Harvard or Stanford or Princeton or Yale, what makes them as private institutions have a claim on federal funds? And that's what the Trump administration is saying.

Speaker 6 And they are saying, they would say to these scholars who are constitutional experts,

Speaker 6 you're right, we're intruding on what we don't like about them.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 your problem is

Speaker 6 you're agreeing with us when you agree

Speaker 6 with us that you don't like it. You don't like anti-Semitism? Fine.
You don't like the idea that they're sidestepping the Supreme Courtroom? Fine.

Speaker 6 You don't like the idea that they're still using racially segregated dorms?

Speaker 6 Fine.

Speaker 6 But now you're saying you don't like the idea that they're teaching communism or DI or hate America. Well, we do.
We disagree with you, so tell us why we have to fund it.

Speaker 6 Just tell us why, because that's our job. Where is it in the Constitution that says we have to give money? Yeah, exactly.
Why can't we just say, like,

Speaker 6 I think it was Judge Jackson earlier, as I mentioned, on immigration and a ruling of the 40s. They said, if you don't want to let somebody in, don't let them in.

Speaker 6 You don't have to write a PhD thesis and explain why.

Speaker 6 If you don't want to give Harvard some money, just say, you know what, it's anti-American. Well, they're saying, how dare you do this?

Speaker 6 There is a split, a class split here

Speaker 6 among the right. So people with advanced degrees who come from these institutions or work at them, look at it one way.

Speaker 6 And people where I live that are blue-collar look at it another way. And somebody gets angry for me saying that and said, Well, First Amendment transcends class.
No, that's a little bit different.

Speaker 6 They say, Well, why doesn't the federal government give money to Reedley College? It teaches people how to weld. It teaches people how to be electricians.
It teaches people. It does.

Speaker 6 And my father ran a vocational training center at a community college. He didn't get federally.

Speaker 6 If there was federal funds, it was small. He applied.
But why don't they fund all that stuff and give it more?

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I don't know. I mean, are you telling me they have a $53 billion

Speaker 6 endowment and they don't have enough money to fund cancer research or

Speaker 6 scientific research? I think they do. I think all they have to do is fire all their DEI people

Speaker 6 and cancel all their DEI grants. Because 30% of them, you look at what they're doing at Stanford, 30% of them are grants like this.

Speaker 6 They go to the National Institutes of Health and instead of saying we have a new molecule that will stop a glioblastoma in your brain, they say we want to study how there's systematic racism that is denied access to the COVID booster in this community.

Speaker 6 That's not going to do anything to cure anybody from COVID.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 6 But that will get more, that will probably probably be put before the other one. It'll get privilege or primacy over it.
So Trump is just saying,

Speaker 6 I'm taking a shotgun and blasting, and you can put barriers up where the pellets land. It's up to you.

Speaker 6 So if you put a big shield over your science and your engineering grants, then my pellets will just take out the DEI, and that should be fine.

Speaker 6 But what you want to do is you want to take off the shield and let me blast everything. and then you're saying, oh, you're cutting cancer.
Well, it's you who are cutting cancer.

Speaker 6 I don't know how this is resolved, but it'll probably end up in the Supreme Court. Yeah, I have a feeling.
Same with the students kicking out the student visas.

Speaker 6 It's funny because when he says no student visas

Speaker 6 and they say this is cruel and everything, have you noticed that the last three or four weeks I noticed at Stanford that everything's really quiet. You don't see any Hamas is great.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 foreign students are very well-behaved. I'm so lucky to be here.
It's nice to be in the United States rather than I hate this place and it's a racist, sex, you know, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 6 So it has an effect.

Speaker 4 Well, Victor, for our last topic, we could talk about the French president's wife shoving him in the face, or we might even talk about Secret Service in a brawl outside of Obama's residence at 2.30 in the morning.

Speaker 4 But I thought more important was Musk's criticism of the big, beautiful bill as two extra.

Speaker 6 I don't know why Macron's wife, I just saw the hand come out and slap him, but he is, what, 20 years younger or something?

Speaker 4 She pushed him.

Speaker 6 Pushed him, yeah. He's horrible.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 6 he's French and he's male. Yeah.
So, and he's 20 years younger than his wife. Yeah.
So there's a subtext there. That's all I'll say.
Yeah. And she probably waited until the cameras could see it.

Speaker 4 You think so? Yes.

Speaker 6 I don't know. And then

Speaker 6 Secret Service, I think one of them was saying, you better get the supervisor over here before I whop her ASS.

Speaker 6 And when you collate that with during the Obama administration, there were secret services that were visiting prostitutes, that were drinking, that were partying.

Speaker 6 They have a dismal record of protecting Trump from two.

Speaker 6 It's something's wrong.

Speaker 6 I don't know, is the DIA non-merocratic hiring or whether they're in the past partisans were, it was kind of a weaponized bureau, but something that's why Trump tried to get his own people in there.

Speaker 6 And I think it'll

Speaker 6 happen. But it's not,

Speaker 6 it doesn't give me confidence that Donald Trump is protected.

Speaker 4 Safe, yeah.

Speaker 6 It doesn't at all.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 4 Musk.

Speaker 6 Well, Musk's point was that he's working and taking all this flack, and he's only up to 200 billion.

Speaker 6 And Trump's Congress, the big beautiful bill, it's like,

Speaker 6 well, all these wealthy people in California that

Speaker 6 you know, they pay $100,000, $200,000 in California income tax, now they're going to be able to write up to $40,000 or $30,000, they're going to get $20,000 or $30,000 handout.

Speaker 6 And that makes me think I got to go fire another person, and then they're going to say, you're just firing this person so that these wealthy fat cats in New York, even though they're liberal, are going to get money.

Speaker 6 And then

Speaker 6 we ran on trade deficit, budget deficit, national debt, but $2.1

Speaker 6 trillion budget deficit. And you look at this, there's some tax cuts and all this.

Speaker 6 It's not going to stop. It's not going to be tangible before the midterms where you say, we came in and we cut.

Speaker 6 And I think his argument is: if I'm going to take all the flack about cutting, I need an argument to show.

Speaker 6 So, you know, his SpaceX blew up, and

Speaker 6 he hasn't been putting his eye on the ball. I'm not saying he's responsible for that, but he has devoted a lot of his energies.
This is a guy who used to sleep on the shop floor to cut.

Speaker 6 So, what he's saying to Trump in the Republican Congress is, I

Speaker 6 have really,

Speaker 6 I was a good liberal and standard, everybody loved me.

Speaker 6 And then I became a conservative because I thought conservative principles, among them physical sobriety, were more important.

Speaker 6 So I joined and I took a lot of, I got all these guys to leave their great jobs and I've got 200 billion. I'll get up maybe to 400 billion.

Speaker 6 But what good does it do when you give these tax cuts that are not productive tax cuts? Even the tax cut on tips,

Speaker 6 I don't know if that's going to be the same thing as accelerated depreciation on business. But what he's saying is the deficit's going to grow this year under Trump.
It could be $3 trillion.

Speaker 6 And then he's saying

Speaker 6 even if

Speaker 6 you're right

Speaker 6 for this whole thing to work,

Speaker 6 You're going to have to grow the economy from a projected 2.3 to 3 or 3.4 because you're already at 6% of GDP as deficit. And you said you were only going to be at 3%,

Speaker 6 Scott.

Speaker 6 So Kevin Hassard, who's a really brilliant, I like him, he works where I do.

Speaker 6 He's arguing these tax cuts and these incentives and this foreign investment are going to grow the economy at three, even four.

Speaker 6 And if that happens, you're not going to get $5 trillion of federal levy. You might get six or seven.

Speaker 6 And so

Speaker 6 you wouldn't have a huge. And

Speaker 6 Musk, all Musk is saying is, I don't know if that's true or not. All I know is I'm the most hated man in America for trying to get these cuts.

Speaker 6 I fight for every dollar, and then your Congress just spins it like crazy.

Speaker 6 And I think

Speaker 6 it might be a parachute for him to get out and get back to Tesla without damaging his. He's got to be careful what he says.

Speaker 6 So he basically can't criticize Trump.

Speaker 6 He's got to criticize the Congress because he wants to be on good terms with Trump, but he knows that he's sacrificing his companies by lack of attention and public anger at him.

Speaker 6 So it's a good issue, it's principle, to get to back off

Speaker 4 and criticize the bill.

Speaker 4 Well, thank you, Victor, for this show today. Thanks to our audience for joining us.

Speaker 6 Thanks to the Heritage for

Speaker 4 the Heritage for hosting us, too. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

Speaker 6 Thank you, everyone, for listening and watching.