Gavin, the Gerrymander, and Air Power in WWII

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely 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.

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We have some news for this Saturday edition and then we'll look at air forces in World War II and some of the technology, air technology in World War II for the middle segment.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

So, Victor, lots of news out.

Donald Trump has had some court victories that are just very significant.

Number one is the CBS interview of Kamala Harris that they doctored so that she didn't look as bad as she might.

In court, Donald Trump has won a $16 million payment victory, and he's going to have that donated to his library, so not just for him personally, which I thought was

really nice.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that victory first.

Well,

it's a lot there.

You know,

when Trump used the word fake news, people got very angry.

But now, if you think about it, what CBS was doing,

they were interviewing Biden and then later Harris, and they interviewed Donald Trump, as you remember.

And this was at the height of the campaign, and this was the top-rated news show.

And now, post facto, we know that they edited Biden.

We found that out recently, but they, most notoriously, they edited Camilla Harris.

So what you basically had was

the network of Edward R.

Murrow and Walter Cronkite trying to affect the outcome of an American election by selectively improving an interview on one side only.

And that was utter corruption.

And so

CBS, which

was in the process of being acquired by the son of Larry Ellison, decided to just

pay up on the suit on the Harris editing.

It was a pretty big scandal, and I think they're going to have more exposure as they look back at all of the edits for both Biden and probably Trump as well.

But it's really a reminder that people say, Well, Donald Trump's trying to censor the news or he's trying to intrude into the domain of CBS.

No, he's not.

All he's trying to say is that you can't have a democracy if you have these multi-national and transnational corporations that are trying to weigh the scales by doctoring evidence, and evidence is an interview.

And so

it was emblematic of the entire campaign, especially of Harris.

We didn't find out in the beginning that she was paying for these endorsements by Beyonce or Oprah or Al Sharpton.

That was all hidden and suppressed.

And yet it didn't work.

So

the Redstone family wants to to get rid of it, and I don't blame them.

And it's all of those network news, and MSNBC has changed its name to MS now.

NBC wanted to divorce itself from that toxic brand.

And that's another accomplishment of Donald Trump.

He had an ability to bring out the essence of the hard left, excuse me, in the media and in politics.

They were so,

I don't know what the word is, fixated, obsessed, addicted to his tan, his appearance, his queen's accent, his tweets, his just everything about the messenger, as well as the message, that they decided that

any means necessary to destroy him would be acceptable to the American people.

But the American people didn't agree with him because he's a populist nationalist that appeals to the middle class.

So all they did

was destroy themselves and anything that didn't destroy Donald Trump, and nothing did, made him stronger.

and the final result of it is that he has a legacy of omission and commission.

He did all of these things that are,

you know, we've talked about this counter-revolutionary agenda the first eight months, but omission is

just by getting in these teeth-to-teet, head-to-head confrontations with these left-wing iconic institutions and politicians, he brought out the worst of them, or I should say he revealed themselves to be the worst.

And he really destroyed the Democratic Party as we know it.

Whatever this is now, it's not the old Democratic Party.

It's a Jacobin, socialist, quasi-communist base that controls the party.

It's a revolutionary party.

It had four years to use this waxen effigy of Joe Biden to put this agenda in.

And now we have a counter-revolution that is trying to,

I guess, erase the last four years of madness in eight months.

And it's very controversial, but all counter-revolutions are.

But

I don't think CBS will ever recover.

60 Minutes has ruined its brand.

It's kind of like Budweiser beer.

Yeah, you know, there's a lot of speculation that they settled that 60 Minutes case because they had another interview in 2023 where they did the same thing to Joe Biden.

And so they wanted to keep that under wraps and not have to.

And they had emails about it.

Where they get killed is in Discovery.

So

that's why Fox settled

with the Dominion voting.

They paid that exorbitant multi-hundred million dollar fee because they didn't want the email exchanges to be published.

And

there were rumors, and there was probably credence that

they were emailing among the producers, what are we going to do about Joe?

He didn't sound like he was there.

Can you cut that?

We have to do this.

I got a call from his campaign.

Jill wanted us to do that.

That's what they're worried about.

So, and corporate money, it's not all that much.

Same thing, you got to remember that this is on top of George Stephanopoulos costing ABC $16 or $17 million when he lied and said Donald Trump had been convicted of rape.

He had not.

What's amazing to me is all of this stuff coming out.

I know that we all kind of knew Joe Biden was crazy from almost the get-go, but throughout his term.

But what's really interesting to me is that doesn't it send a message to Kamala Harris that they would rather have an adult old man in office than her?

And then the whole idea that

she thinks of running for anything just

she doesn't seem very self-reflective, I guess I'm trying to say.

I don't know the degree of covering up whether they had to edit Biden because of age-related dementia or edit her because of innate dementia,

or alcohol or whatever it is.

There's something wrong with her because she can't use normal syntax, and she goes on to these riffs, existential riffs, about being and not being and the burden of time, and she plugs them in anywhere.

But

I think you once said that she has a vocabulary of probably about 500.

I said that on Fox News.

I got a lot of criticism, but that was generous.

The thing about her is that

she got to remember that she was picked for two reasons.

Two reasons.

In the hysteria following the death of George Floyd, Clyburn, Representative Clyburn, who had won South Carolina, went to Biden and said, you wouldn't be nominee.

You were done.

You didn't win New Hampshire.

You did not win Iowa.

And I promised you that

we delivered the Nevada caucuses.

But I told you that I can deliver the black vote in South Carolina, which was about 40% of the primary vote.

But as a requirement, you were supposed to defer to me and the hard left wing.

Now, you did the hard left wing ideologically.

You're going to open the border, you're going to have the Green New Deal, but you haven't done it for me yet, and I want a black woman.

And he said, yes.

He said, just a black candidate, but it was a black woman for vice president.

And then they looked around and they thought, wow, there's the election denial of Stacey Abrams.

There's Maxine Nutty, Maxine Waters, which black woman has national Susan Rice, who lied four or five times about Benghazi, lied about WMD in Syria, lied about

she went, she was in that infamous Obama.

Give me the CIA analysis that I want.

So they couldn't do anybody, but she was the only one because she, for two reasons, she had no record in the Senate, and the record that she did have was to the left of Bernie Sanders.

She was the most left-wing congresswoman by her votes in the entire 100-person con.

So they picked her.

But that was only one reason.

The other reason was the Spiro Agnew reason.

And that was that Richard Nixon allegedly picked Spiro Agnew because he knew that the left hated him.

And at some point in his presidency, from 69 onward, they would try to impeach him and maybe convict him if he lost the Senate.

So he picked this guy, Spiro Agnew, the nattering nabobs of negatism, who had a shady reputation.

He wasn't as crooked as everybody said he was.

So when he got in trouble in Watergate in 72, before the election, they were alleging about Watergate.

But he didn't abdicate until 1974.

But in that year and a half,

everybody said, do you want Agnew?

Do you really want Agnew?

Whatever you say about Nixon, he's smart.

He went to China.

So we can't have Agnew as president of the United States.

So that was the same thing with Biden.

They picked her because they said he can't finish the term.

He's completely without cognitive control.

He's suffering from dementia.

He's a useful waxen effigy, a useful idiot.

If I could be so.

An idiotes is what the Greeks called it.

Not an idiot, but somebody who is so trapped within himself,

he doesn't understand outside stimuli or anything.

So my point is,

they knew that, and they knew that if they had her as vice president and they assigned her hopeless task deliberately, you're going to be space czar.

And then she hired those students.

That was a choreograph.

They paid actors to act like students.

And then we're going to have you go down and

you will be border czar.

And then you have to deal with that chronic liar, Majorkas.

And then you're going to go down and look for root causes in Latin America.

So every time she did that and opened her mouth, it was another argument you cannot impeach, get rid of 25th Amendment Joe Biden.

And then all of a sudden he was so bad, they said, wait a minute, she is black, she is a woman, she is attractive, she is young, maybe all of those word salads and her terrible record in the Senate, but once we just coach her, we can bring her in and we'll raise all this left-wing Silicon Valley Wall Street money.

And they did a record, $86, $83 million in one month, and then a billion dollars for that abbreviated campaign.

And then we'll just keep her on ice.

We will not let her out.

No press conferences, no hostile interviews, no extemporaneous comments on the tarmac.

You script every, and they did it for about 40 days.

And finally, the cheated journalist said, this isn't fair.

And she started to have interviews.

And when she started to have interviews,

the party was over.

But

she really is idiotes in the ancient Greek ideas.

She doesn't have any external understanding of herself.

The very fact that she ran again, did Spiro Agnew try to run after he was?

No, he was indicted.

He was indicted for fraud ex post facto as a governor of Maryland, as I remember.

And

he split he's pledged something nolo contendre and that means you just accept the penalty for the crime but they don't officially say you were convicted it just means in Latin I choose not to contest the charge

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So, Victor, let's go ahead and turn to

the other case that Trump has had a victory in, and that is the Letitia James case

on his real estate.

so she said overvaluing his real estate.

The first judge awarded over 500 or getting close to 500 million dollar penalty on Donald Trump.

The appeals court have thrown out that penalty.

So woohoo!

Donald Trump's.

Yeah, there was five basically liberal judges, but one of them said this is just completely a joke and he should not have any charges.

He should never have been brought.

Two of them said,

We really don't know what he did,

but the fines are crazy.

And the other two said, We're left-wing.

We like what she did.

The fines are great.

So it was three to two, I suppose.

But the biggest problem she had was,

it was threefold.

She ran for office promising to get him.

Denial, I guess that's a federal charge of denial of rights.

She took away his civil rights.

She said in advance with a bill of attainer, I'm going to get him.

She didn't say how.

She just said, I'm going to prosecute him and I'm going to put him in jail.

That's what she ran on.

And so it was this Lativia Berea, give me,

I have the man, just give me the charges.

It was predetermined, and that really hurt her.

The second thing was there was never, no one could ever figure out who was victimized.

Deutsche Bank said, oh, yeah, we sent him, we had $100 million of loans with him.

It was great.

He paid the interest ahead of time.

In fact, we made money on him.

And they said, well,

did you know that he overvalued his collateral?

No, we looked at his collateral.

We know better than you do.

And they wouldn't even let that evidence in.

They had outside appraisers who said, and then Mar-Lago, she said, was worth $17 or $18 million.

But as people pointed out, vacant lots not far from Malago, with only one site on the ocean, not two on waterways,

were going vacant for $40, $50, $80 million.

So it was probably worth $600 million, 20 acres.

So there was no victim.

The valuation was undervalued, not overvalued.

And the lender who you would have thought would have said, let's prosecute that SOB, excuse my language, because

he did this to us and did this to, and they said, no, we like him.

And so

it was a travesty.

And

it's very hard for all of us listening to adjudicate who was the worst judge.

Judge Cohen.

Excuse.

He was

it Cohen and the E.

Jean Carroll?

No, it was Kaplan.

Judge Kaplan.

And he was the one who said that E.

Jean Carroll, you could not bring in the fact that there was a law and order episode that was exactly what she'd accused.

A TV show.

She used a script, basically.

And she admitted in court that she had watched that, and she knew that the same department store and the dressing room and a celebrity was accused in the TV show of just what she was doing.

And she couldn't remember the year in which she was attacked.

And she said that her favorite show in the meantime was The Apprentice.

And for almost 30 years, she didn't complain.

And she would have never been able to bring the charges except the New York legislature passed a special bill of attainer directed at Trump and said, for one year, you can have no statute of limitations on accusations of sexual assault.

So that job, that judge,

and then he was judge, jury, and executioner in a way that he fined Trump $83 million.

She got on TV and said, hey, Rachel, Maudow, do you want

an apartment in Paris?

You want to get a new wardrobe?

I got all this money.

So it was a joke.

Even her magazine that she wrote for, she said she had damages, she lost her job.

They said, no, there's not really a market for an 80-year-old woman who writes about sex.

Sorry.

That's not why we fired her.

And then,

so that judge was, and then we had

Judge Engeron.

He was the Letita James judge.

He was the one that dreamed up this $400 million fine plus 9%

interest.

And

she ran on the idea that she was going to get him, just like

Eugene Carroll told everybody she was going to get Donald Trump.

She wrote a book about men she'd slept with, and she said she was going to get them.

And then Reed Hoffman paid that, and Judge Kaplan, and then Letita James ran, as I said, said, I'm going to go get him on this real estate deal.

So that was a second one.

And Judge Ngoron fined Trump.

And he put a gag order on him.

Every time Trump said, you are biased, you are ruling, you're a Democrat.

So was Kaplan, no matter.

And then there was a third judge, and that was Mershon.

And that was the Alvin Bragg.

He was a Democrat.

He'd given to the Democrats.

His daughter made a fortune, $80 million in new business as a Democratic consultant, advertising that her dad was going after Trump.

He didn't disqualify.

He put a gag order on Trump, da-da-da-da.

And then Alvin Bragg basically said, well, it's a federal offense, and the feds, for seven years, haven't done anything about the 2016, 2015 gag order

on, not gag order, but non-disclosure was a gag on Stormy Daniels.

She got paid, what, $130,000 or something thousand not to talk about it.

And they said, well, why didn't the Feds say that that was a

campaign expense that they didn't report?

And they said, because

anybody who's a public figure, or whether he's running for office or not, and some stripper comes up and says, or nudist porn star says, you had sex sex with me.

I'm going to go tell everybody.

It's perfectly legal to say, if you don't tell anybody, I'll give you this money.

And it's not a campaign expense, and that's why the feds didn't charge it.

So Bragg comes along and says, wow, I need help.

I don't know what I'm doing.

Hey, Biden, remember

Coangelo in the DOJ?

He helped Letita James.

He tutored her.

Then he went to work for Garden.

He's your number three guy.

Can he quit and come back and help me?

Because I need to find out how I charge this guy with a federal crime when I'm a local prosecutor.

And they did.

So that was, and then we had Jack Smith, and he was, I'm going to get him on insurrection.

Nobody's ever been charged in 100 years.

And finally, he got them on, what, four counts of January 6th.

Oh, he was trying to interfere with an election.

Oh, he was trying to conspire to interfere with an election.

Oh, he was trying to racketeer to stop an election.

And then he had a.

He was a judge in that case.

It was a Florida judge.

It was a Trump appointee, the only one.

And she was wonderful.

And she reined him in and said, you're not.

So he had to refile when the Supreme Court said you could not prosecute a president in office for his normal duties.

And then, of course, the whole thing blew up when Joe Biden came forward and said, oh, I just remembered.

It's been 30 years since I had classified documents.

I had them as a senator.

Oh, I had them as a vice president.

I didn't have them in one place like Morlago.

I had them in four.

I had them in Hunters Garage.

Oh, I'm very patriotic and meritorious because I'm going to report mine on like Trump.

And the only reason he did it because he was going to appoint Jack Smith is a special thing to go after Trump.

And people are going to say, how about you?

So then they appointed Robert Hurr, who's

then it got really weird.

You know, he's guilty, but he's senile.

He can be, he's senile enough to be president, but he's too senile to address a jury.

So we can't prosecute him.

And after that, it was a joke.

Yeah, that's insane.

And so, you know, he's got all these hundreds of classified documents, thousands of them, 13,000 documents.

102 out of 13,000.

And they even had to come with little labels to put them, classified, and then they had to scatter them all over the floor.

Look, it's a mess.

It's worse than Hunter's garage.

So

it was just a sad chapter.

Yeah, and

all of these cases should have never been filed.

Yeah, and it's funny that the left complains and want to say, look, he's being an autocrat because he's using the courts, and they're the ones that started it.

They started to do it.

That's what they all do.

They all project.

They all project.

The Republican Party has been hijacked by ultra-mega nah, does that work?

Because that's what we've been hijacked.

We're run by socialists and communists, so we're going to call them the same thing that they've been hijacked.

Oh,

we've destroying democracy.

We tried to get him off the ballot.

We raided his home.

We had five legal cases to put him behind bars or bankrupt him.

Oh, we impeached him twice.

Oh, we pride him as a private citizen.

Oh,

he's destroying democracy.

We'll just project what we're doing onto him.

Yeah, don't bring a case against a president that's bogus if you don't want him to get back at you when he gets in.

It's not even getting back at you.

Well, I mean, you know, finishing the case, right?

Bringing it to a.

They broke the law.

I mean,

Clapper lied under oath to Congress when he said that

the NSA didn't spy on people.

Brennan did it twice.

Comey basically lied 245 times and pled amnesia.

Mueller lied when he said he didn't know what Fusion GPS or the Steel Dossi were.

Of course he knew what they were.

So what do you do with all those people?

And then Obama, you know, he was the one that said, basically, all your lieutenants say there was no collusion.

Well, that didn't work.

Our collusion didn't work, and we couldn't stop him from being elected.

But I want you, Brennan, and you, Clapper, and Comey, are you listening?

I want you, all you guys go back and you concoct a new assessment that says for the record that your operatives found that he was colluding with the Russians.

And I need it quick before he's president.

That's what Obama did.

If there's any justice, he should be indicted for that.

Absolutely.

Well, let's turn before we go to air technology and World War II to Governor Newsom for a second.

There are two things on him.

Maybe we'll just deal with the first one because I think all of your audience has been hearing about the gerrymandering case.

So basically, Governor Newsom has put in a redistricting bill to his own assembly to try to redistrict some and get more seats in a mostly Democratic seated House of Representatives, California, to get even more of them to be Democrats because he says he's responding to the Texas gerrymandering, which that incidentally has to your audience has gone through and they are voting on it as we speak.

So

it looks like that bill will pass and redistricting will go on.

So Victor, what's going on with all of this back and forth on gerrymandering?

Well, it starts with this case.

There are more red state legislatures than blue state.

However, the formula that people use to determine the degree of gerrymandering is the following.

They look at a particular state's national vote for president, or they look in the most recent election and see, based on the party affiliation of state representatives in the state senates or state assemblies,

Republican or Democrat.

And they come up with a formula.

This many people vote Republican, this many people vote Democrat.

If you look at the entire, and congressional districts have about 750,000, they're all the same size, and that gives you 430

congressional districts.

Okay, so on that formula, even though there are more red state legislatures,

there's a deficit between the amount of congressional districts that are predominantly of one party versus that party's vote in that that state.

What do I mean by that?

I mean that if the congressional districts that they carve out have a majority of Democrats or a majority of Republicans, they should reflect how many districts percentage should reflect the actual vote in the state, more or less.

They don't.

So when you look at all the congressional districts, there's about 20 extra seats that the Republicans are being shorted.

In other words, Massachusetts, New Mexico, zero, even though 40% of a Trump voter, or Illinois, 3, even though 38%, or California, just 9 out of 52, but it's 38% Trump, but they only have 17% of Republican districts.

So Texas says, well, we're going to stop that.

We're going to start redistricting.

But then they left, said, well, it's not the census.

You're supposed to wait every 10 years.

And then they said, yes, but you broke the rules because you went way overboard.

We wouldn't have minded had you gerrymanded Massachusetts or New Mexico or these other blue states to reflect your actual blue majorities.

But you couldn't get away.

You were greedy.

So they said to Gavin Newsom, you could have had, instead of nine, you could have had 18 seats that were going to elect Republicans that reflected the actual Republican vote in your state.

But you did even worse.

You created, under Schwarzenegger, you guys in California created a non-partisan commission.

I think it's five or four Democrats, four Republicans, and two Independents.

But then you stalked it.

You deliberately appointed fake Republicans and fake Independents and you gerrymandered these districts so that you would only get 17%

of Republicans when you should have had 40% representation in the Congress.

Okay, that was the background.

So Newsom tried the podcast with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon.

He's got two social media people that write his stuff.

He does the hand thing.

He does this.

And he can't find anything to g to resonate.

So he comes up with this idea, wow, Texas is

trying to get more Republican to match the actual percentage.

So I'm going to be the guy who does the same thing.

But this problem is this, that

the left wanted the veneer of an independent commission they control.

So the legislature, the assembly, and the Senate, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor, they approved this bill that put it to the voters.

And the voters, by a two-thirds

vote, amended the Constitution and said that an independent commission will not gerrymander.

But it did.

So now Newsom is in this, think of his position that he's taken.

Number one,

I'm only giving 40%, 38 to 40% of the state 17%

represent.

I want to get down to 7 or 8%.

Instead of having 9 representatives, they're only going to have four.

So I'm going to take all these districts and make really jigsaw puzzle-like shapes so there's only about 8% of Republicans get a congressional representation.

That's what he's doing.

And I'm going to do it by doing it before the census, like Texas did.

But the difference is,

everybody says, but you guys wanted

an independent body.

And you have one.

And now you want to destroy the independent body, even though it's kind of rigged for your sake.

And even though you've only got 17, you're so greedy, you want basically no representation.

And you want to do this and destroy this commission, which was a liberal cause.

And then you think you're going to get two-thirds of the vote.

He's only getting a third of the vote in the primary.

So and then you're going to all you're going to do is draw attention to the fact that we already cheated more than the Republicans have cheated.

And

we've already deprived them of about 20 seats nationwide because we don't reflect the actual vote in our states.

We gerimini by getting these.

So then

what did he do?

He thought, well,

I can do two things.

I can say I'm doing this for people of colors because if they they redistrict to represent the actual vote of individual states, then black and Latino districts will not be gerrymandered, so there's very few white people in them.

And therefore, we'll only have, we won't have a black or Hispanic caucus.

And the right said, well, we're not against that.

Just take them out of your Democratic portions.

Don't take them from us.

So if you have 40%

Republicans, just let us have 40%.

If you have 60% vote for Harris, then make all the black districts you want.

But take it out of your 60%, to be fair.

So then

the polls are against him, and he'll probably lose that plebiscite.

Because there's some big money that's against him.

Charles Munger Jr.

and Schwarzenegger's organizing money.

But then the question is, why is he still doing it?

Well,

when the left has no political power and they're smashing watermelons, they're carrying bats, they're doing Corey Booker Spartacus stuff, they're using potty mouth swear words, Jasmine Crockett, Joy Reed, this New Yorker, they're all talking about white people as stinky and they're plague-ridden, this racist crap.

They're desperate.

So he's going to come along and say, I'm just like the squad.

I can outdo Jasmine Crockett.

I'm going to be really the tough guy, and I'm going to have my two young kids tweet dirty language and capital letters and go after Trump and then I'm going to be the guy that fights as Eric Swalwell.

I don't care if I win.

I don't care if I, what do I care if they vote me down?

Because California is going to go for me anyway.

It's a left-wing state.

At least I'll be a fighter.

And that's a strategy.

But it won't work nationwide, I don't think, if the Republicans can get the message.

And, you know, here in the San Joaquin Valley, I'm speaking from my office at Stanford today, but I'm in the San Joaquin Valley, and the ones they're targeting are in the San Joaquin Valley for the most part, and the Inland Empire and Orange County.

And what they're doing is very clever.

They're looking at the nine representatives, and they're just saying, you know what?

They're all incumbents.

Incumbents win 90% of their races.

So we're going to put two incumbents in every new Republican district.

And then they're going to have to run against each other.

And it'll be a suicide pact.

And one of them will lose, and they'll only end up with four or five.

That's the strategy.

He thinks it's really cute.

But we'll see.

Wow.

Yeah, we will see.

And for all of us in California, we already know how gerrymandered the whole state is, or a lot of us do.

I have been the last 30 years, I've been in three different districts.

I have voted for Devin Nunes, I've voted for David Valdeo, and I've been in the Jim Costas district, a Democrat.

And

now it's going to change again.

Yep.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll get to hear a little bit about air technology in World War II.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

You can find Victor on X.

His handle is at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

And please consult the unaffiliated fans of Victor Davis-Hansen on Facebook because they do a lot of good work finding old stuff that's been they bring to light that Victor has done in the past.

So they're they're highly recommended.

And Victor, so excited to hear about technology, air technology in World War II.

Take it away.

Well, you know, we finished our history of warfare.

It took us about five months from

we did an earlier one from all of antiquity to the present than we did the 20th century great battle starting with the Russo-Japanese War.

But I had a lot of people write and said, you know, I'm more interested in World War II than anything.

So I thought I'd have one or two episodes on, and a lot of people asked me questions about the technology, the ships, what's the difference between a battlecruiser and a battleship, was a Sherman tank that good or that old, was it unduly condemned?

So I thought we'd look at air power.

And as a general rule, the Allies, and I'm talking specifically about the British and the Americans,

were ahead of the Axis.

Not when the war started necessarily, but almost equal.

When the war started, the Japanese had a very light flighter called the Mishabishi-Zero,

and it had two 20-millimeter cannon, it had no self-sealing tanks, it

was very light, it had a pretty powerful, I think it was 1,300 horsepower, it had a long, long range, and it could turn better, climb faster, dive better than existing American aircraft.

And they were the F-4 Wildcat

and the P-39 Air Cobra

and the P-40, you know, you call it Warhawk, except

the one with the alligator mouth or dragon mouth, P-40.

They all had a kind of an American trademark, and that is they were heavily built and they could take a lot of punishment.

But they weren't as fast and they didn't do well against the Zero for about a year from 40, December of 41 all the way to early 43.

Britain had the Supermarine Spitfire, had a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, and it was comparable to the top-flight German fighter of the war,

the BF

109.

And they were about the same speed.

They could go over 300 miles an hour.

They had about the same range.

This Spitfire could turn faster and it could maneuver better.

People argued that the 109 had a better dive or climbing.

Anyway, they were about comparable.

When the Germans started to bomb Britain, however, the British had a brilliant strategy.

They had something called the Hawker Hurricane, which was made of laminate wood.

and it had an engine.

It wasn't as good a plane as the Supermarine

Spitfire.

It could not engage with the 109 fighter.

So when the German bombers came over Britain and during the Blitz, they put the Hawker hurricanes high up

and the Supermarine Spitfires then engaged the 109s and tied them down.

And as they were tying them down and dogfighting, the hurricanes came down and increased speed.

They had a good dive rate.

And they had a 20 millimeter cannon and they went right through the bombers and then out again and took off so that nobody they had a speed that was comparable or excess uh as good as the 109s and so for the first part of the war it was more or less equal in the and then technology and production caught up

The Americans then had things on the drawing boards as far as fighters that were way ahead of anything.

And one of them was the P-38 double engine fighter, the Lockheed Lightning, and the F-5

Wildcat, and the F4 Corsair

and Wout Corsair.

And all of these could reach speeds of 400 to 450 miles an hour.

They were typically American.

They were very heavy.

They had an armor plate that would protect the pilot from

and one on the bottom of the floor and some models that would stop machine guns coming up.

They had a rubber interior of the gas tank, so when you shot them, the rubber would close on the hole and stop a fire.

The Japanese never had that.

Germans even came late.

And they were superior at that point to every model of Japanese fighter.

And by 1943,

they had achieved not just air superiority, but air supremacy.

That is, Hellcats on carriers were better than any Japanese Zero and Raiden or Oscar or any of the other planes that followed them.

And it got worse for the Japanese because the Hellcat then achieved amazing speeds and

so did the Corsair.

And then

in late 43 in Europe especially, but there were some in the Pacific, they created something called the P-47 Thunderbolt.

And it was a very strange plane.

The Americans put this huge air-cooled engine.

Those are the round ones, not the pointed ones.

And they didn't have a radiator.

And if

you could get up high and you had a turbocharger, a turbocharger, all it did, it took the exhaust gas that goes out when you combust in the cylinders and it uses that forced air to create horsepower to give you a boost.

It's not quite like a supercharger that uses that to spin the crankshaft, but

in any case, they came out with this Thunderbolt, and it was armored, it had self-sealed, and had this huge Allison double WASP engine, about 2,000-plus horsepower, and it could go about 450 miles an hour, and it could climb up to 40,000 feet.

It didn't have a long range, but it started to change the war because it could escort bombers from England all the way to the German border so that the Luftwaffe could not take their 109s and shoot them down.

The Germans in response then came out with their own air-cold engine, the Fockwuff 190, a superb plane.

And in almost every category it was equal to the P-47.

So then the Americans said,

well, we need a plane that's even faster, at least at high altitudes, than the P-47, or at least comparable, but it has to have a range to go with the bombers all the way into Germany.

And they had this brilliant P-51 airframe.

It had a certain type of new type of wing.

It had a lift capacity.

It had a big turbocharger.

At least they added it later.

And they had the Allison engine, but it wasn't conducive to the type of turbocharger.

So when they got up in thin air,

it started to not be comparable with the Fockewoof 190.

So they went to the British and the British said, we have the Merlin engine.

The Spitfire is a wonderful plane, and we're putting this latest 2,000-horsepower Merlin engine in them.

But your airframe is even more sophisticated, so we'll tell you what you can make these Merlins in the United States under Packard.

So they did, and all of a sudden they created this P-51 Mustang that could go 460 miles, 70 miles an hour, but it could go all the way with a drop tank.

In other words, they fill a gasoline tank and over friendly territory, they'd fly, then drop it, and then they would have the regular gas gas to go into Germany and back.

And it had six 50 caliber machine guns.

The P-47 had eight, and I think 3,500 rounds.

But anyway, the point I'm getting is it was as good or better than the Focke-Wuff 190, latest German airplane.

And they had a brilliant guy named Jimmy Doolittle, and he said, instead of just sticking next to the B-17s, once these Fockewoff 90s, 190s come out of the clouds and they hit 450 miles, you can't stop them with a machine gun on a plane, like a static 180, 200-mile B-17.

But

you can destroy them when they take off, and you can destroy them when they land, and you can destroy them on their way to the bombers.

So what he did was he told all these 18, 20-year-old kids in these beautiful planes, and they had each three, four hundred hours of training, whereas the Luftwaffe was short of fuel, short of pilots, and they were sending young German 18-year-old kids with 40-50 hours and these sophisticated Focke-Wuff 190s.

And when they turned like a hornet's nest of these P-51s loose, they would just circle the airfields of Germany and wait for these planes to take off.

They attack them when they were gaining speed.

They would come back when they were landing, and they would attack them high up at 40,000, 35,000 feet.

And all of a sudden, the loss rate for B-17s and B-24s descended.

Anyway, the point of all this is that when you look at the United States coming into the war on December of 1941

with

substandard aircraft like the Wildcat, it was not a bad plane, but it was substandard compared to the 109 in Europe or the Zero.

And then you look at some even P-40, P-39, P-36, all of these planes.

And then suddenly, in the space of 18 months, they're producing the P-38,

Lockheed Lightning double engine.

They're producing the P-47 Thunderbolt.

They're producing the P-51 Mustang.

They're producing the F-6 Hellcat.

They're producing

the Vought Corsair.

And all of them are capable of getting almost, except for the Lightning maybe, it's earlier, up to 450 miles an hour.

They're all heavily armed, and they're better than their Axis.

And that was going to be true until the last six months of the war when you started to see Misschmidt jets come in from Germany.

But they had very limited range and they were very vulnerable when they took off and landed.

So the result of all this was

I was asking my father once,

so I said, you took off from Tenyan and you had to fly 1,600 miles from the Marianas over Tokyo.

And did anything change?

And he said, yeah, everything changed.

I said, well, what changed?

He said, well,

we started flying February March, and we went all the way without any fighter escort.

So when we got over Japan, there were the Raidens and the Henrys and the Oscars waiting for us, even though we were way high before the March fire rage.

But he said,

after February March, we took Iwo Jima.

And Iwo Jima was two-thirds about the way.

So he said, once we got near Iwo Jima, these P-51s started taking off, and they started flying the rest of the way with us,

even though we were way high in the original raids.

When you look at the loss rate, they lost almost 500, 450 or something B-29s, but the loss rate radically changed from planes lost to enemy aircraft versus crashes.

In other words, most B-29s after March,

April 1945,

when they lost a plane, it was that was overloaded or it crashed or there was mechanical problems on the 3,200 mile trip because they had fighter escort and then just to finish

Japan never made a successful bomber

they for a variety of reasons and Germany

Germany had a very different idea they had crazy people Goering wasn't even the worst of them in the Luftwaffe but they believed that you could not hit anything with a bomber

we said the Norden bomb site could, but it wasn't very good in actuality.

But they said you'd have to dive bomb.

So they created two engine bombers or like the Stukas or the Junkers 88 and they would just dive bomb, but they couldn't carry very much, 2,000.

And then they went to two engine

bombers and they thought the answer, kind of like a modern jet, is to increase the horsepower of the two engines because of the drag, you know,

what they call the nacelle, the big housing of the engine.

Every engine slowed down a plane because it was kind of a for, you know, obstruction in the air current.

But they never figured out how to make two engines more powerful than four engines, even though the four engines had a greater drag on them.

So then they came up with the worst plane of the war, the Heinkel, I think it was 177, and they said, we've solved the problem.

We're going to put two massive 1800 horsepower engines back to back,

not side by side, and we're going to have a crankshaft.

So one engine's going to turn it, and then the one right behind it will turn it even faster.

And we're going to get a huge propeller.

So two propellers will be turning twice as fast as four propellers.

And then

they could never synchronize them.

So in other words, each engine has peculiarities, so they would never get exactly the same RPM.

So you'd get the crankshaft turning, and then the other one would be connected, but it would kind of go slow and retard it.

And then they would break crankshafts, or they wouldn't synchronize, and it was a disaster.

But it was very funny, because during the 30s, they had the Condors, and they were very sophisticated transport planes with four engines, but they never...

They never caught on.

And so in Britain, they had the Sterling Short, the Hanley Page, and then the best, maybe the best bomber of of the war, the Lancaster bomber.

It could carry 15,000, 16,000 pounds of bombs.

It had four Rolls-Royce engines.

And

it was in rivalry with the two Americans that we thought the B-17 was the best bomber of the war up until the B-29.

It had been there from 1936.

We called it the Fortress.

It had 11 50-mount caliber machine guns.

It was built like a truck.

It was very hard to shoot down.

It was very kind of slow, 180-mile cruising speed.

It only carried about 8,000 pounds.

And we thought, we're going to put them all in daylight.

And you can't attack

all these machine guns in collective use.

And it didn't work, didn't work, didn't work.

And then we said, well, we're going to make a faster plane with more bomb load, the B-24.

We'll make more of them or as much.

Didn't quite work like that.

And the bombing was not working, 43, 44.

and then they said, you know what?

The British were kind of right.

You get a smaller crew, you go at night and you don't have any moral scruples, you just fire a bomb.

And you try, if you go during the day at 25,000 feet and you drop precision bombs, it never hits the target, and you've got to climb all that way up.

and they know you're coming in daylight.

And so they were about ready to give up.

And then they came up with this idea that, well, what if we got these fighters and got extra fuel tanks?

And they even told the British, why don't you get this Spitfire and put drop tanks on it?

And the British never really wanted to do it.

They thought they were needed for other missions.

But the Americans finally, as I said, with P-38s, P-47s, and P-51s, they could escort these bombers all the way.

And then they came up with the idea that, well, what if Boeing made a four-engine bomber and they put the new double Woss Allison engine in it with 2,000 horsepower, 2,200, and you had four of them, like 9,000 or 8,500 horsepower, then you could carry 20,000 pounds of bombs.

You could go up to 30,000 feet,

and you could put 11 men in them, and you could have all these turrets, and they'd be indestructible.

You'd have a pressurized cabin so that you put a range of 3,200 miles, not 2,000.

And that was all designed for Germany because they didn't think D-Day would work necessarily.

They were going to base them in England.

They could go all the way to Dresden and back.

But they never used them because when the time, they were very dangerous.

They used magnesium in part of the engine apparatus and it would catch fire.

So the engines would catch fire and blow up.

in mid-air in the original B-29.

I remember my father told me they were on their way to COBE

and all of a sudden he looked around and he was in the central fire control where he could look down at the engines and he said, wow, one of them just blew up.

It melted.

And this was right before they got to Tokyo at night.

And he could see this flaming, so they cut it and he said, well, good thing about the B-29, it can fly on three engines.

We'll drop the load, and then the light load will be 20,000 pounds.

We'll get back.

So they dropped the load, and he's sitting there, and he was relaxing, and he saw the other one blow up.

And he said, now we only have two engines.

They got hot.

And then

they were going out, and this was in, I think he said it was June or something.

And then the third one started to blow up and was firing.

So they were 200 miles from Iwo Jima.

And they landed with the fourth one, blew up.

And they had to change the engines, whole new engines, I think it was every hundred hours.

And it didn't work.

And finally, you know, at the end of the war, they got rid of it, they solved that problem with the ally.

It was a great engine, wonderful engine, but they didn't use magnesium to the same degree.

And they were wonderful in the Korean War.

But the point I'm making is the British and the Americans knew very early that the only way to carry a lot of bombs so you didn't take too many planes was to get four engines.

And you had to have a turbocharger to go up at high altitudes.

And they were way way ahead of the Japanese.

They were ahead of the Germans.

Hitler was responsible for a lot of problems.

If he had approved earlier design, they had two-engine wonderful night fighters.

They were working on a four-engine bomber with four separate engines.

And if they had used the jets just for

attacking bomber squads rather than trying to bomb, he tried to make them into a bomber.

It was crazy.

So he was responsible.

Goering was a buffoon.

And if you're interested, you can read about Albert Galan, the first and the last.

He was the head of the a lot of very high commander of the Luftwaffe.

And he talks about going into Poland and France with the BF-109 and how it was superior to everything and they were just shooting down everything and then going into Britain and coming up against the Spitfires and these wonderful British pilots.

And then it was even.

And then all of a sudden the Americans come come over and they're shooting down these unescorted B-17s and killing all these Americans.

And they're winning the war.

And then all of a sudden this big clunky thing called the P-47 shows up.

And you shoot it and shoot it and shoot it and shoot it.

You knock off the propeller on one of the propellers.

And it still flies.

And you take out four cylinders of the cool engine and it still flies.

And they shoot off the tail.

There's even a couple of things where they shoot off a whole half of the wing and it still flies.

Same thing with a P-38 and then he says we're doomed because they're sending more fighters than we have.

So really World War II in some ways was won by the brilliance of American and British aerial engineers

in so many insidious ways because once fighter escorts started to accompany the B-17s, to a lesser extent the B-24s, they needed planes to protect the German homeland.

So what did they do?

They took all these Fockewuff 190s and Bf-109s from the Russian front to use them to stop the bombers, 10,000, and they took all the wonderful 88 millimeter anti-tank guns and they used them to shoot straight up as flak.

And so as soon as they started to do that,

then the Red Army found out that the Germans had no air support.

and they had lack they lacked a lot of their tank killing capacity with 88 millimeter horizontal guns.

It's very important because when they talked to Stalin, he kept threatening them, you're not opening a second front.

And Churchill and Roosevelt kept saying, we're doing strategic bombing and we're losing, they lost almost 100,000 airmen, British and American, 80,000 something, and with wounded probably more.

But the point I'm making was the bombing not only disrupted, it didn't do much in 42 and 43.

They did burn down Hamburg and a lot of Cologne, but by 44, mid-44, and late, they were doing enormous damage to the infrastructure of Germany, and most of that stuff was going to the Eastern Front.

But more importantly, they were bringing back all of the Luftwaffe squadrons and all of the 88-millimeter

teams, and they were using them for air defense of Germany, and the Red Army suddenly just took off.

Well, Victor, I have a sponsor to introduce and then a couple of questions.

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So, Victor, I just have a question that's probably just unique to me, but we read about the Battle of Britain, and you hear how the hurricanes were, I could see Spitfires and fighter planes, how they could be very useful.

But they also use their hurricanes in some way.

And how do you use a bomber plane over your own?

No, a hurricane was a fighter, a Hawker Hurricane.

It's a fighter.

Oh, I thought it was always a bomber plane.

No.

Did they use it as a bomber?

Oh, okay.

No.

The British had three types of bombers.

They had something called the Sterling Short.

It was a four-engine bomber.

It was really a sturdy, good plane for 1938, 39, 40.

But it wasn't equipped

with the speed or the capacity quite to go all the way to Germany.

and they took a lot of losses.

Then they came out with a Hanley Page

four-engine bomber.

These were planes that could fly between 180 and 220 and carry 5 to 12,000 pounds.

They were ahead of their time.

Then finally in 43, 44 they came out with this wonderful bomber.

I think in some ways it was the best bomber of the war.

The Lancaster.

It only had seven people in the crew and yet it carried 15 to 16,000 pounds.

It had a huge bomb bay.

It could have dropped the atomic bomb.

It was that powerful.

And

they were protected.

They didn't really have fighter escort until 1944.

But when the Battle of Britain, remember the fall of France was June 23rd to 25th.

Then Hitler waited until the Blitz.

So he started in August, or really in September of 1940.

And he went all the way to 41 until May when he was preparing the Cretan campaign and going to Russia.

But in that period,

they had bases in Norway to hit northern...

They were trying to move shipbuilding and air factories up to Scotland and Northern Ireland because they thought that was too far from the Germans.

And then they started basing planes in Norway,

which was not very successful for the Germans for a variety of reasons.

But nevertheless, they had these Derners bombers, these

Junker bombers, and these Heinkel bombers.

They were all two-engine, and they would fly over from air bases largely in France, about 150 miles, and they were carrying incendiaries.

At first, they were attacking airplanes.

airplane factories, radar stations, and air bases.

Their idea was to get rid of all the fighters, and nothing could stop them.

And it was working.

And then Churchill and the British Air Command staged a raid in Berlin.

It didn't do much, but it infuriated the Germans.

And they said if they got to Berlin and they attacked us with indiscriminate bombing, we're going to use fire raids.

So they stopped all the attacks on the fighter factories and airfields and radar stations.

And what happened is the British were making four hundred to five hundred planes a month.

So they were almost depleted by December.

And all of a sudden they got all their Spitfire and hurricane production back up to snuff.

So even though they lost 50,000 dead and they burned down Coventry and they burned down a lot of part of Manchester, Liverpool and London, the dock works and everything,

they were starting to lose enormous, like six, seven, eight percent of every mission because these Spitfires then came in.

They had sophisticated radar in the shore.

They knew exactly where they when they were coming.

They put these big balloons all the way over London.

They had cables holding them, so they didn't know, you couldn't see the cable.

They'd run into them.

It was very hard to fly among the balloons.

They had flat guns, and

they didn't know how to use all these planes.

They could make four or five hurricanes for the price of a Spitfire, because they were laminate wood with a metal frame.

And they were very light, and even though they were not as sophisticated, they weren't as fast a plane, they had a cannon on them, and you could make them cheap.

and if you could put them high up at 25,000 feet and just have them circling, so then the German bombers would come like this, and then the Spitfires would be like hornets, and they'd attack them,

and they would fight with German escort fighters, the 109s.

So they were fighting like this, and then, boom,

the hurricanes would come out of nowhere and attack these un-escorted bombers whose fighters were being shot down by the British.

And then when the British bailed out, half of all the pilots were not killed.

So they would bail out, and then they would go right.

Some of them, we have stories, where they bailed out in the morning, and they were back fighting that night or the next day in a new Spitfire.

The Germans bailed out, and they were POWs for four years.

Just the opposite happened when we went over to Germany.

But

it was a very good plane, and they went on, and they had something called the Hawker Tempest, which was a wonderful plane.

It's really amazing that a country like Britain that was under attack under the Blitz, at least until May of 1941, and then they had the V-1 and V-2 attacks in late 43 and 44 and 40 parts of all the way up to D-Day,

they were still able to create these brilliant fighter planes.

You know, the Spitfire kept improving.

By the end of the war, it was going almost 470 miles an hour.

And they built these Lancaster bombers and mosquitoes, night fighters.

I can see how we could do it because we were never under attack, and we had a much bigger industrial base and a much bigger technological support system.

And we had brilliant American engineers, and we had a lot of competition: Vought, North American, Boeing,

Lockheed.

And they were all in competition to make faster, better planes.

But it's amazing how the British did it.

They made wonderful planes.

And

they were one-on-one against

the Germans.

And I think people get angry to hear that, but I think you could argue the late model Spitfire was better than the late model Fockew 190, and the late model Mustang P-51 was better than the Focke 190.

The British, I mean, the Germans had jets, but they really didn't make a difference.

There were so few of them.

Yeah, well, maybe it's the nature of their government.

It was amazing what Britain did.

It's very sad to look at Britain today

with all these problems with open borders and unassimilated, hostile immigrants and censorship,

crazy New Green Deal, and to think that this is the country that stood alone from

late June 1940 all the way to the invasion of Russia and June 22nd, 1941.

For one year, it was the only thing stopping all of Europe under German control.

It was being bombed, and its navy was all over the world.

They were fighting,

you know, non-stop against the Japanese and the Germans.

And after, I mean, in 1942, they were fighting against the Germans.

And they were the only country to fight the first day of the war and the last day of the war.

And they produced brilliant ships, brilliant airplanes.

Even their tanks at the end were really good.

So, and then to see what's happened to them, it's really striking.

It's really sad, yes.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take our last break and then come back and talk a little bit about Gaza and Ukraine in the news, the recent news.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

These podcasts are available now as videos on YouTube and Rumble and on Spotify, and it's called the Victor Davis-Hansen Show on Spotify for those who want the new episodes.

So, Victor,

the news this week about Gaza is we're coming up on September, and Britain, France, New Zealand, and a couple of other countries have said that they will recognize Palestine as a state and support a two-state solution.

And Netanyahu has gotten out in front of this with the presses to make the argument that nobody would allow for a place like Gaza to be right next door to him.

And he used examples like London or in the United States and the commensurate amount of deaths that were caused on October 7th.

And he says neither of you guys would tolerate a state right next door that had done that to you.

So he's done that.

And then the second thing about Nanyahu is he has invaded, as we're speaking today, Thursday, Gaza City.

So they're currently fighting in Gaza City.

So your thoughts?

I find it really cowardly because I think these European leaders,

they make a quantified cost-to-benefit analysis decision to back, basically back the Palestinians.

And they do it for self-interested reasons.

They go like this.

Okay, who has more people?

500 Arab Muslims are 11 million Jews in Israel.

Oh, well, we'll go with the majority.

Who has oil?

Who has 40% of the world's oil?

Ooh, the Arabs do.

Who is more likely to attack us with international terrorism in the past?

The Jews?

They did a little bit during the 1947-48 founding when they blew up the kingdom, but basically ever since and they have not.

So they say, well, we don't have to worry about terrorism when we attack Israel.

And we make fun of it, we criticize them, we cut them off,

but we do with the Arabs.

And number four,

in our domestic population,

which are we going to be more worried about, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism?

And the answer is: we don't want to offend Arabs in London, but we can go after Jews.

And so they make these cost-to-benefit analyses, and they never ask themselves, why is there a huge wall, kind of like our southern wall with Mexico, that a lot of bobbed wire between Egypt and Gaza?

Why don't these brother Arab nations say, you know what?

We want to rebuild Gaza.

It's a good idea, but we're going to have to temporarily locate.

So come into

Egypt, we'll help you with golf money, and you'll be protected from Israel, and then they'll get rid of Hamas, and you can go back.

They don't want any of them to come into Egypt.

And I guess they feel that if they bring Gazans into Egypt, they will stir up the population, the pan-Arabism, they'll commit terrorist acts, they'll have Hamas infiltrators.

What I'm trying to suggest is they're more afraid of Hamas than the Israelis are.

But they'll never say that.

And the British are terrified of them, and so are the French.

But, you know, it's kind of like the Iranian reputation.

Everybody said, oh, you've got to be careful, Iran.

They have 9,000 rockets.

Hezbollah has 150,000.

The Houthis have 10,000.

Hamas has 20,000.

You don't go in to Lebanon, the graveyard of foreign Western countries.

And then all of a sudden it disappeared.

Somebody said, you know what?

Somebody in the Mossad and Israeli Defense Intelligence said,

I looked at the history of Iran since the theocracy took over in 1980.

And guess what?

They've never won a war.

They have never won a single war.

They only blow up people and kill people with terrorism.

But they're not that formidable.

In fact, we can get rid of Hezbollah, we can get rid of Hamas, and we can go into Iran.

And they did.

So it's

what I don't understand is they have 500 million people in Europe.

They have the third largest economy in the world.

They know that they've been a target of radical Islamic terrorism.

As much as they've opened their borders, They still have about 85% of the population in France and Germany that is non-Muslim and native born.

So

it either is they really believe that the Palestinians in Gaza

didn't start the war, October 7th wasn't that big deal, it wasn't supported by the Gazan people, Hamas is not that bad.

And so what I like, the America's finally doing, they're finally weighing in.

They're saying, you know what?

You have the International Criminal Court.

So these creepy people from these illiberal regimes are justices or they're European nuts and they have just convicted Netanyahu and said he's a war criminal.

So you know what we're going to do?

We're going to sanction every one of those judges and see if they still want to do that.

That just means if you have any money in the United States, we're going to lock it up.

That means if you ever want to come to the United States, you cannot.

That means if you're visiting the United States, you've got to get out.

you judges.

And they're doing that now.

And same thing when Canada recognizes Canada, think about this.

And I know I have a lot of Canadians listening, and I love Canada, and I like Canadians, but

you will recognize the Gazans and you want a separate state, but you won't pay your 2% to help your own NATO, European and American allies.

In other words, your $40 to $50 billion you will not pay to protect Western interest

in NATO.

You, who had the fourth largest Navy in World War II, had your own beach at Normandy, and yet you will not help your own

NATO alliance members, you'll welch on your promises, and yet you will go out and recognize Hamas

and basically promise it and the West Bank an independent state right in the middle of negotiations to get the hostages back?

Do you think they're going to give them back if they think they're winning the diplomatic war?

Can't you hold off a couple of months?

And we know what all of these countries would do if Gazans, you know, if they landed in, I don't know, they took over 20 or 30 airlines and they landed in Paris or, you know, 6,000 of them and killed 12,000 civilians, what would they do?

They'd go nuts.

But

it's very cowardly what's happening with the Europeans.

It just,

you know, when I saw those Europeans there, I thought, wow, 500 million people.

$20 trillion plus GDP, one and a half times the population of the United States, all you'd have to do was stop your stupid Green New Deal and go back to nuclear, oil, natural gas, electricity, close your borders,

and stop the socialism, and you would be more powerful than we are.

You have an intellectual tradition, you have these universities.

They can't do it.

They know what they have to do, and they know they don't want to do it.

And they're just

shrinking.

They're kind of like blue state America.

You know they have a 1.4 fertility rate

and it's twice the their electricity is twice what it is in the united states yeah victor you said

that's a whole whole continent of california

yeah yeah it sure is you said earlier that there were 500 arabs did you mean 500 million yes 500 all of the arab states over

shorthand 500 million arabs surrounding yeah wow i didn't know that that that

the

good thing they don't get along because they would be like Europe if they did get along.

Well, I mean, they do all hate Israel.

Maybe the Abrams Accord will change that.

But the thing about the wealthy westernized Gulf is, and to a lesser extent Jordan and Egypt, they are nor if you talk to them privately, and I've talked to journalists and I talked to some of their diplomats or military people when they visit Hoover,

and I visited Jordan, I visited a long time ago Egypt.

They are more afraid of the Palestinians than they are of the Israelis.

You know, Black Sec Timber, they put down, they killed the Jordanian government.

King Hussein killed thousands of Palestinian terrorists.

So they understand that if it's just a matter of letting Israel live, Israel is not going to attack them.

But that's not true of the terrorists.

So they're scared of them.

They're scared even more of Iran.

They're happy right now because they look at Iran and they think, wow, they only have 40% of their launchers.

They've lost half of their conventional missiles.

They have no nuclear program for five or ten years.

They have internal dissension, and those Israeli Jews got operatives all over inside Iran that are still killing scientists and generals and disrupting.

This is wonderful.

All we have to do is say publicly we hate the Zionist Israelis and then privately tell them, go ahead, what do you need?

You want our airspace, you want our defense systems, we'll help you knock down missiles, but just get rid of these Iranian nuts, these Shia crazy fanatics, and we're on your side.

But we'll always damn you and

hate you publicly.

But privately, you're not bad guys.

We kind of like what you're doing.

Yeah, it's funny how diplomacy works like that.

I would like to

fly on the wall in the private conversations between Putin and Trump, because he must have been asking, okay, seriously, what do you want, Putin, in order to end this war?

Putin, I know what he told him.

I've talked to some people high up in the administration.

Oh, really?

What did Putin tell him?

He said basically,

I already stole most of the Donbass,

and I already stole Crimea.

And you were never going to put them in NATO.

Half the NATO countries don't want Ukraine in there.

I don't even think a lot of the Ukrainians.

So So we had a majority Russian speaker, so I did it.

So I didn't invade, so you'd say, oh, Mr.

Putin, we're now going to reify what you stole.

It is yours, Crimea.

I knew that.

You were never going to get it back.

So I went in to take Kiev and take half the country and maybe the whole thing.

I thought it would crumble, and it didn't.

So then I said, well,

My fallback position, since I don't want to be humiliated, is to go from the Donbass and Crimea and go westward.

And so I never in my right mind thought that the crazy Europeans and Americans would arm the

Ukrainians and they would have drones and tanks.

They'd kill wounded, missing, captive a million of my men.

Now I'm kind of stuck in a quagmire, but I c I have more resources than they do, Mr.

Trump, and I can wear them down.

And I'm a dictator, so I don't have any civilian unrest.

And I want to get more territory.

And I want the Donetsk region.

I want the whole thing, even though I only have about 40% of it.

I can't take the other militarily, but if you

give it to me, and then we'll have a DMZ.

And then

he's thinking, then we'll have,

you know,

I'll be famous in Russian history as the guy who institutionalized Crimea and

Donbass, and I got some more territory, and it was worth it.

And then my successor will praise me as he goes to Kiev.

That's what he's thinking.

Yes, but in these dealings, we all know that Zelensky cannot cede territory without a vote in his country.

How are they going to work that out?

They will vote to give them Crimea

and they will vote to give them

the Donbass, most of it.

and they will vote to give them what they have now under occupation.

But they they will not vote to give them stuff that they fought and died for and that Russians have not taken, even though they know that if the war goes on another six months, Russia will take it.

So that's it's not what they say it's in their constitution.

It's what they are on the battlefield, the soldiers think.

I'm not going to give up something to these people that have killed us, and we've fought heroically.

But on the other hand,

I need help because if this this goes on another four months, they're going to overrun us and kill us.

So what Zelensky is saying is

I can violate the Constitution, I can get a plebiscite, whatever, I can give Putin what he took in 2014, and I won't even get in NATO.

All I want you to know is that he's going to do this again and again and again.

You have to give me security guarantees that you'll have Europeans and Arab support from America.

And B,

he can even take the land that he stole beyond the Donbass area that he had in 2000.

I just don't want to give up

thousands of square miles that we are holding and protecting, and it's not purely Russian-speaking.

I'm not going to do that.

And that's what the rub is.

Because Putin is saying to us,

subtext, subtext, not overtly, if I don't have that area, they're going to kill me.

Because they're going to tell me that I lost a million Russians for nothing because we already had this in 2014 and I didn't get enough territory to justify all these dead Russians.

But if you give me this area that's very rich in minerals and it's Russia, and I can say that I took 25% of Ukraine,

then I can survive, and I'll be kind of a Russian hero.

So what is Donald Trump trying to say that he's going to do?

He's in a very tough spot because he has to say to Putin, okay, we're going to have a secondary boycott.

That means anybody who buys your oil or anything from you, your wheat, anything, we're going to sanction and not let them into the U.S.

market.

Nobody cares about North Korea and Iran, but they do care about you're still selling stuff to Germany, natural gas and stuff, and you won't be able to do that, and you won't be able to send any to India.

And that will mean $400 million that you were getting at the beginning of the war, you'll have less than 30 or 40 billion, and you will go broke.

The reason he doesn't want to do that, he's facing the midterms, and he knows if he has a secondary boycott and he gets in a huge trade war with India and China, because China is buying Russian oil, you could see a worldwide disruption, you could see prices spike, because we're talking about no Chinese or Indian products in the United States, period.

That would raise the inflation rate.

So he doesn't want to do something on the eve of the midterm.

And yet he doesn't have much leverage with Putin if he doesn't.

So that's what they don't understand.

That's what everybody's problem is.

Putin's problem is I got to get more territory to justify this stupid mistake I made and get a million Russians killed and wounded.

Trump's idea is that I see now that really he's the problem.

I agree with that.

But I can't just give a blank check to the Ukrainians because we've already given them $200 billion.

My mega-base does not want to get involved.

And more importantly, the only leverage I have are secondary boycotts, which if I punish China and India, it's going to hurt the economics of my whole administration.

And then you've got Zelensky, who's saying, in theory, I can't give him anything, but I can give him what he already stole 11 years ago.

And I don't need to be in NATO if they'll give me security.

But I do not want to give him what we heroically have stopped him.

Asterisk asterisk.

However,

if this goes on and I'm still doing this five months from now, I won't have this territory.

He's going to kill us all and take it because he doesn't care.

And we don't have the wherewithal to stop him.

And that's why this whole thing is never so close to a settlement and never so far away.

Well, thank you, Victor.

We're at the end of the show, and I have two comments.

One's a a question from a listener and the other one's a comment.

And they're both from the website.

So hello, Mr.

Hansen.

I am a citizen of Finland, but I love listening to your podcast.

I like when you talk about your Swedish relatives and how they were grim, silent and drank a lot of coffee, because that's also a stereotype of us Finns.

In Finland, we consider Swedes our more jolly and outgoing cousins.

I can't believe that's possible.

Were there any Finns around Selma in your childhood?

Yes.

What kind of people were they?

Thanks for the hard work.

Essa from Finland.

Well, I knew the Madsen family.

Probably some of them are listening in Ridley, California.

They were Finns.

I knew Denny Madsen.

I knew

his sister.

And I knew his older brother, who was a fruit broker.

And I would say they were some of the hardest working people I've ever met in my life.

They were farmers.

And the old man I met once, they had a

I know you know that area where Reedley Beach is.

They own the area on top of it.

Beautiful.

They drank heavily.

I'm not saying they were alcoholic, but they did drink.

I had been with Denny Madsen when he drank.

And I knew I'd been with him when he worked.

When the rain came in 1980, he put a backpack on his back, a gasoline backpack with blue, and he put Cap Tan antifungus, and he walked every row of 25 acres blowing by hand.

And that's pretty toxic.

It could be Captan and Botran.

But they worked like crazy.

But the only thing I don't understand about

the

question is I grew up in a town that was Danish, believe it or not, before the immigration from south of the border, Salma was called a Danish town, and

Kingsburg was Swedish.

And the Danes were considered by the Swedes crafty and sneaky and smarter,

and the Swedes were considered happy-go-lucky and drinking.

And they used the Danes, because I had in-laws that were Danish,

I had My mother married a Swede and her sister married a Dane, so that was a problem.

But the Danes said Swedes were Danes with their brains blown out.

Oh my.

So for a Finn to say that the Swedish were serious

and less jolly, I mean,

they were more serious than the Finns,

I don't understand that.

So is it Danish the most or maybe the Norwegians the most

business-like or the Danes and then the Swedes and then the Finn?

I shouldn't even say that because the Swedes were so,

I mean, if you think about it, look at Saab and Volvo and they have the most sophisticated fighters in Europe, the Saab fighters.

And they're Swedish steel.

My father would always go like this when he walked by his 544 little ladybug Volvo.

He'd go like this,

Swedish steel, Victor.

See if you can dent it.

And then I was a bookworm.

I was like 11 years old.

I'd go, yeah, dad.

And they sold their Swedish steel to Hitler.

and finally they did it for free transportation.

And he said, oh, Mr.,

you don't know what it's like to live next to Germany, do you, Victor?

You've never done that.

But anyway, we had to buy, as I said earlier, Electrolex, vacuum cleaners, used Swedish Bobos, Ryecrackers, you name it.

The whole Swedish kaboo.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show, and I'm going to save the other comment, or it's actually a question for another show because we need to close.

Yes, and I'm at the top of the tower today, and I have to go to a meeting at 5 o'clock.

Yeah, so we'll go ahead and say goodbye to you and to our audience.

Thank you so much for joining the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching.

We had our interview with Barry Strauss.

He contacted me today.

He wants to thank all of you listeners.

He said it caught fire on the internet, and he was really appreciative about his new book, Rome and the Jews.

And we had Eric Schmidt, who will be coming out tomorrow.

So you all should listen to him.

He has a new book on what the Republicans can do to stop lawfare.

Yeah, because he was the AG in Missouri.

He was the AG.

Yes, he was.

He was a wonderful AG.

He's really a great asset to the Republican Party.

He's smart.

He's courageous.

He's industrious.

They need more like him.

Yes, they do.

So again, thank you, and thank you, Victor.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hansen, and we're signing off.

Thank you, everyone.