To War in 1939 and Delusional Democrats

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Eli Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com, and the name of the website is The Blade of Perseus.

So please come join us there.

This is our weekend segment, and Victor does something a little bit different in the middle part.

We talk a little bit about history, and today

on deck is the 1939 in World War II.

So he's going to be talking about World War II through the years,

taking each year one at a time each week.

So that's what our plan is.

But first, we have a few news stories.

David Horowitz has died, and we'll get Victor's reflection on that.

And the Eugene Daniels speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner Association, so our association dinner.

So stay with us for those, and we'll be right back after these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, so

just your reflections on David Horowitz.

I knew him about 25 years, right around 9-11.

I think I

went to one of his,

I spoke for one of his groups.

I helped, I spoke on a tour he did of Florence, and then I did another tour for the Freedom Center where I was a speaker in Rome.

So I spent a lot of time with him.

He's very bright.

He was born a leftist to communist parents in New York.

And on his own volition, I think during the tumult of the 60s, where he was very radical, and he and Peter Collier, Peter Collier was a wonderful person.

That was his.

I knew Peter much better.

He was the foundational editor of Encounter Books before Roger Kimball.

He was a wonderful writer.

He called me up, Peter did, and asked if he could help me on my World War II book in the proofreading.

And instead of just proofreading, he gave me a lot of stylistic and content tips about reorganization of some of the chapters.

I really appreciated that.

He was the one that suggested to me I do The Dying Citizen.

He wanted to make a film.

And then when he died, that fell through, so I just made it into a book.

I mean, the outline.

But I knew David as well.

David

was

He was the editor of Ramparts magazine, a very hard left magazine.

And then he, for a number of years, he edited Heterodoxy, which is kind of wild.

It was right during the

post-Reagan period.

And

he came out and Peter Collier, they wrote a very famous op-ed saying they're going to vote for Reagan.

Everybody couldn't believe it because he was among the most left-wing people.

And

his stock and trade was to explain what the left was about because he grew up in a communist family and he was he knew every

Bobby Seale, Ewey Newton,

you name it,

Bill Ayers.

He knew every radical there was

in that period, and he was very critical of them.

And he

had a number of children.

His son, Ben Horow, which is the big entrepreneur, billionaire entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, partner of Ken Andreessen.

He had a lot of as he got into he traveled all over the world, but he got a lot of health issues.

I think he had

several bounces of cancer and other problems with his hips and joints, but he was very courageous.

He just kept pressing on.

And

he was a lifelong he was he ended up being in Malibu, California, and then he moved finally.

His wife was very she was a humanitarian who took care of horses.

I did a video for her about

the need to adopt horses that had been abandoned.

So he was a very multifaceted guy.

He was 86.

He didn't look it at all, even though he suffered a lot of bouts of ill health.

But

I think he got a little bit estranged the last decade because people in the mainstream were no longer publishing him.

He was a very big name in the late 80s and 90s

because he and Peter had done these Rockefeller type of biographies that were bestsellers, and then he was the go-to person for a left-wing apostates.

But then

as he got older,

the left became more angry, more angrier and angrier at him.

So it was very hard for him to get a public venue because they would just if he went to speak, they tried to shout him down.

If he was on TV, they tried to block the advertisers.

So

that was a struggle for him.

But he was a good person.

He was very bright.

He was a very good writer, very productive, very industrious.

And he

pounded the Freedom Center, which he did.

He did.

It wasn't David Horowitz Center.

And then he changed the name to the Freedom Center.

They had some frictions for a while, and they healed.

And

they had a wonderful CEO, Michael Finch, that you've known.

And he's really, he was the hands-on operator.

And no doubt they'll find a good director, and Michael will continue at that role.

All right.

So, let's then turn to the White House correspondents dinner.

And Eugene Daniels is the CEO or chairman, chairman of the Correspondents Association.

And he tried to put a nice face in his speech.

There was the interesting thing about the dinner was usually they roast a president, but obviously the president was not there, or at least they have comedians, and they really didn't have very very many comedians.

So it was a very

sober dinner.

Eugene Daniels' speech is what I'm interested in.

He says this in it, and this is, quote, we care deeply about accuracy and take seriously the heavy responsibility of being stewards of the public's trust.

What we are not is the opposition.

What we are not is the enemy of the people.

And what we are not is the enemy of the state.

And so obviously, in some ways, directly challenging Donald Trump, who has I think half of what you just said is demonstrably untrue.

The Media Research Center and even the Schorenstein Center, left and right,

have shown in the past that about 85 to 95 percent of all coverage is negative.

So when he says we're not

the opposition, then let me ask him some questions.

Why when J.D.

Vance was in the debate, did the moderator only fact-check J.D.

Vance?

Why did CBS edit out the word salads without telling anybody on the Camilla Harris interview and not any other person, just her, the embarrassing lapses?

Why

you could make the argument in the one

Biden, excuse me, Harris-Trump

interview, as in the Candy Crawley years earlier with Romney Obama.

Why did the moderators intervene heavy-handedly on the side of the Democratic candidate?

So it's demonstrable.

It is demonstrable.

When he says we're not the opposition and we're dedicated to the truth, they're not.

All you have to do is think Russian collusion, who ran with that?

Who said that Donald Trump and Putin had colluded?

That was the media.

Who told us that the laptop

was

a product of Russian disinformation?

It was the 51 intelligence authorities, but the media, social media and traditional media, censored stories that said otherwise, the truth.

Who's the one that told us about the Alpha Bang hoax?

That was completely, that Donald Trump's office was communicating with a Russian bank.

That was a complete lie.

Who told us that there was droves, troves of security and classified files at the Trump House?

There was 102 out of 14,000, 0.007.

Who told us that the walls were closing in and a bombshell every week with the Mueller investigation, the media?

Who was the ones that told us that

for all practical purposes, Joe Biden was fit as a fiddle?

They did.

And I could go on and on, but they know, he knows what they're doing.

He has no credibility.

The media has one of the lowest ratings of anybody, and

it's completely biased.

Everybody knows if you put Biden or Obama on there and you have a left-wing journalist, they're going to go easy on them.

If you put Trump on, they're going to go much harder.

And they're like professors.

Professors say we're just

devoted to disinterested inquiry.

94% of

most

surveys show they're left-wing and they're actively left-wing.

That gets me really angry.

I don't mind if they're biased, if that's what they want to do, but when they give these self-righteous, sanctimonious lectures, no one's listening, Eugene, and the president's not there.

So it's a White House correspondence dinner.

There's no connection with the White House anymore.

There's probably not one conservative in that entire room.

And there's no president because you have roasted and attacked him in a way you never did to the same severity with Obama or Clinton or Biden, and it's defunct.

I went to one of them.

I was teaching at the Naval Academy in 2002 and 2003, and I was invited by a very good journalist if I would be his guest.

I won't embarrass him by his name.

And

it was just, it had been taken over by celebrities in Hollywood.

Everybody was dressed up like they were on the red carpet in Hollywood.

And I was sitting at a table.

You remember the person who played in the Sopranos, James Galifondi?

or he was, I forgot his name.

I don't want to put you on the spot.

I can't remember.

I forgot his name.

James, oh, I can't remember.

But he was there, and all I remember at my table, I had never seen somebody devour so much food.

And then to my back,

sitting at the table next to me, but his chair was back to mine, was Robert Duvall,

who had already made, some years earlier, Lawnsome Dub.

and that was one of my favorite Westerns ever he was just Augustus McRae he was just brilliant in that

film version of the novel so I didn't want to say anything to him the last thing he wanted to do was an obscure

I was a professor writer but so I just sat there but it was the funniest thing why he when they got the first

course there was a number of left-wing I had the feeling from what I could hear he was concerned center right

and he was talking about about horses.

But I was just listening to him because he was the closest person to me, even though our head, because it was so crammed in there, our heads almost.

But then there were all these left-wing journalists that kind of lined up on the first course, and they said, oh, excuse me, Mr.

Duvall, you're one of my favorite actors.

I know you're eating.

Can I have an and they kept doing this.

And then he finally said,

Do I do this to you?

Have I ever got up and gone over to your table and interrupted you and said I wanted to talk to you?

And they got, one of them said, of course not, but he said, Of course not, exactly.

And he cut them off and said, No more, see you.

That was really good.

Let me have my dinner.

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Yeah, I just asked that because after two months of a chronic sinus, it makes a person obsessive, compulsive, and full of anxiety and drives them literally insane.

And after these bouts of antibiotics that do, you mentioned joint.

I thought, oh, wow, that's the one symptom, nausea and other things.

But joint pain from that, I get reacted.

So I'm getting compulsive about it.

I want to appreciate everybody's writing me.

Yeah, they got lots of things.

I need to get over it and get on with what's left of my life.

Yeah.

I think you're getting better.

You seem a lot better these days.

So let's turn, Victor, to the Harvard report that was done by an internal two task force on anti-Semitism.

And of course they did find anti-Semitism at Harvard.

But some of the things that they noted in addition to obviously the protests for pro-Palestine and those types of things we've been hearing a lot about that there were cruel, hateful posts on Jews and the Holocaust and Israel on Harvard's side chat social media platform.

That was the one that surprised me.

It didn't surprise me.

They just had one at Dartmouth

where people were called inbred, Jews.

And Harvard has had people on their social media said that Jews, American Jews, were

settlers, colonialists, and

were

beneficiaries of white privilege.

I don't think that helped much in 1942 to 45.

I don't think Hitler said you're a fellow white person with it.

So that is just ahistoricism.

Harvard knows what they're doing.

They all know what they're doing.

And I've said this on a couple of other videos, not in this venue, but if they were smart

President Garber, I think his name is why don't you just I think what's happening is they're they're puffing up their chest and they're all signing these letters, you know, that they're going to jointly oppose the Trump administration.

But the Dartmouth president didn't sign, and and there's a lot of presidents that didn't sign.

So, two things are going on.

Number one, a lot of them are not going to sign because they secretly hate these people because they know they've seen that other side of their one-eyed jack.

And then these people themselves, these presidents.

But by these people, you mean the pro-Hamas, pro-Palestinian?

It's not just that.

They understand that this is a cesspool.

This is one of the finest American institutions all through our history and up until the 80s.

And then it was completely corrupted.

And it has a level of corruption and malfeasance that's staggering.

And everybody knows it.

But they keep, they put their Ivy over it.

They put their Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton little veneer over it.

They brag about how hard it's to get in.

They make among the bike coastal elite the thing to go to a party and say, my kid is at Princeton.

I graduated from Stanford.

I don't know why Tommy went to Yale, but Susie is going to go to Princeton.

I'm just beside myself.

Can I get a Harvard person and my five children in the Ivy League?

That's how they talk.

It's like a cattle getting branded.

They're a big brand.

But they don't want this to be revealed.

And what do I mean by this?

Let us count the waste.

Anti-Semitism, check.

Getting around the Supreme Court 2022 ruling so you can use race as a discriminatory criterion and, I don't know, admissions, hiring, retention.

Yes.

Yes.

Gouging the federal government 40 to 60 percent on grants in a way you would never do a private foundation.

Yes.

Denying speakers and visitors to the campus First Amendment rights of free speech.

Yes.

Denying fellow students or faculty accused of certain hot-button woke crimes, sexual harassment, hate speech, no legal counsel, no

right to confront your accuser.

Yes, they do that.

Taking $60 billion in aggregate money over the last 30 years from nice countries like illiberal Qatar and Communist China.

Yes.

Partnering with communist Chinese institutions abroad,

even though you know those very institutions are engaged in harassment and even genocidal activity toward the Uyghurs in the case of China, partnering with the

University of Berserk on the West Bank that was a hotbed of terrorism.

Yes, yes, they do that.

I could go on.

So there's so many things that

300,000 Chinese students that they make the Chinese Communist Party pay by a premium, no discounts, And then

it's a quid pro quo investment that the Chinese Communist government thinks if they tra if they have a say in how American elites are trained from Harvard and the Ivy League, then they will be treated more favorably, and that's true.

So everything about them, what they're a $1.7 trillion

student loan program gave them a guaranteed flow of cash and as soon as that was passed they started raising the rate of tuition, annual tuition and women board twice the rate of inflation.

50% of Harvard students,

their parents pay for the whole tab.

That's $400,000.

So you have this little

puppet show in Cambridge where you have all of these spoiled little kids that go there, and half of them have parents and can afford nearly a half a million dollars per kid.

And then they play act as if they're radicals, they hate Jews, they do all of this rite of passage, then we're supposed to think, well, we could, and they get $9 billion subsidy, and $2 billion has been suspended.

They have a $50-plus billion dollar subsidies.

But the thing about it is, and then we're supposed to, the guy who is making ball bearings in Dayton, Ohio all day long is supposed to pay taxes for that.

for these people and to subsidize.

And then if you don't want to pay taxes for that, because of all these violations I just enumerated, then you're destroying key strategic research that Harvard does for the U.S.

government.

You're destroying health.

You don't want cancer to be solved.

That's what they tell you.

And then, of course, 95% of the faculty are not diverse.

There's no diversity, equity, inclusion if you're a faculty member.

And final

cherry on top,

they have loyalty oaths.

They don't call them McCarthy or

are you loyal to the United States?

Have you ever been a communist?

Have you ever known anybody?

No, it's, have you ever done anything for diversity, equity, inclusion?

Have you known, can you please specify exactly what you've said done for diversity?

And if you write,

I believe in intellectual diversity.

I always believe in equality, and I'm very inclusive.

You're not going to be hired.

That's who they are.

I know that personally from where I worked.

You've been a professor.

You have a PhD.

You know what I'm talking about.

So that's what they don't want the public to know.

So

they've puffed up their little breast and they're strutting around like a pigeon on a roof.

And we'll see.

But each day, there's people in the university have been victimized by these bullies and they're leaking.

And every day we get a report comes out and it's not favorable.

And they're going to lose this big time.

So if I were them, I would settle.

I would say to the Trump administration, there will be no more gutter-funded programs.

There will be any foreign dollar will be transparent.

We're not taking any more from the Chinese Communist Party.

We too agree that 300,000 Chinese Communist youth they're not all in the party, but many of them are inordinately the children of party members,

is too many.

We're going to cut back on that.

We will guarantee First Amendment rights.

We won't charge tuition or expenses any higher than the rate of inflation.

And we agree that we'll only charge 15% on surcharges, etc.

Well, Victor, you did just wade into the

universities signing on their presidents, chancellors of systems, to a letter that was intended, according to them, to

be against government overreach and political interference.

And there was a lot of wah, wah, wah verbiage, I agree, that didn't really mean anything because there was nothing on on the ground.

But here's what they say at one point.

Our colleges and universities share a commitment to serve as centers of open inquiry, where in their pursuit of truth, faculty, students, and staff are free to exchange ideas and opinions across a full range of viewpoints without fear of retribution, censorship, or deportation.

And I can tell you that their task force at Harvard did not find that that was true.

When I was in first grade, one of my best friends, he had a saying when he got mad at somebody not telling the truth.

Can I quote him?

It's been, I haven't mentioned this, and I just thought of him.

He died very tragically young in an auto accident when I was in high school.

A wonderful kid.

But I went all through school with him when somebody said, he said, you lie like 10,000 dogs.

You lie like 10,000 dogs.

And I think that might be an expression in German.

He was from German-American.

But my point is, they lie like 10,000 dogs.

They know that.

There is no diversity.

You don't want any diversity.

If you invite Victor Hansen to speak at Yale or Harvard and say you're going to have three lectures, and my number one is going to be:

is it wise to have late-term partial abortions?

Zilch, canceled.

Should biological men really compete in female sport?

Question mark, zilch, nothing there.

And the Israeli miracle,

the

blooming the desert, Israel, some topic like zilch, I will not be.

I can tell you, as somebody who's probably spoken four or five hundred times in 50 years at campuses, I've been shouted at the University of Tennessee, I've been shouted at the University of Southern Alabama, I've been shouted at the University of Oregon, I could go on.

They don't believe in free inquiry.

They don't want to hire anybody who they think is a conservative.

They are the most bully,

bullying, closed-minded people in the world.

If you say,

well, my name's Joe Smith, and

I think I'm going to be a classics professor.

I just got hired at Stanford.

I'm going to go to the chairman and suggest a class.

Heroism and the male tradition and the foundation of Western culture and Greek literature.

I'm very sorry, Mr.

Smith, but

I think you're unaware of all the substantial research on toxic masculinity, and then we just can't have that.

That's what they do.

They always do that.

And then they lie about it.

The only good thing about the academic community and the humanities, I'm not talking about the scientists or the doctors, but even the medical schools are now DEI.

The only good thing is that it draws a timid personality.

So whatever...

Their positions are always predicated on 51%.

So if Donald Trump wins this culture war and the public is behind him and there's money involved and they think 51% of the country and 51% of the money is no DEI, then you're going to start hearing things from academia.

Well,

I was always skeptical of diversity.

I thought it strayed from affirmative action, and I was a lone voice in the wilderness.

Of course, I always opposed it.

And I just don't think

there's no place in the modern university.

That's what you'll hear.

I have a friend in the biology department, and she said that now all of the grants that her colleagues are putting out have taken the word diversity out of it.

None of them want their name associated.

I'm going to do a new, oh, my,

the underserved community in, I don't know, sinus shots.

We are underserved by a race, class, gender, sexual orientation.

Now it's going to be sense of belonging, how we can come together.

It's now different.

It's the same thing, same old thing.

It's a big drag on the economy.

It is a huge drag on the economy to have billions of dollars, as I said earlier, and millions of hours invested in monitoring things.

Because we do have civil rights laws and they can be enforced, and it gives people a quality of opportunity.

And the whole thing is based on a bunch of people in a little room with levers and gears trying to, what, manipulate the entire country.

They think like this:

oh my gosh.

The Department of German at Stanford does not, it doesn't represent the United States.

There's 10 people in it, and nine are white males.

Oh my gosh.

And then if you say,

yes, but maybe that's a cultural trend.

Do you think that the number of Punjabis in the United States versus their numbers in farming is greater than their demographic?

Well, that's racist for you to say that.

They'll think like this: if you're in sociology, well, I've looked at the 30-something teams in the NFL, and the coaches are inordinately white.

And then they'll say this, and that's unusual because the teams are 75% inordinately black.

And then you say, well, wait a minute, which inordinately are you going to go after?

So if

the NFL is 65 to 75% black, and that's 13, 12% of the population, let's get some Asian slots for Asian guards or Hispanic quarterbacks.

Why don't we do that?

And they'll say, No, no, it would ruin the NFL.

It's purely merucratic, and it is, it is.

But they don't understand that

culture and

social life determine a lot of things why people are underrepresented or overrepresented.

But they never talk about underrepresented whites or overrepresented blacks.

You look at the U.S.

Postal Service,

the minority population is overrepresented, and say blacks.

I think by

and then, and as I said earlier, they never talk about people who are overrepresented in a way that is scary and spooky to them.

And that is the

roughly 72 to 75 percent who are killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, who are white males, who make up about 33 to 34 percent of the demographic.

And if you say to one of these DI people,

ah, yes,

I think that we should have,

it should be fairer about the people being killed.

And they would say, how dare you?

Well, I said that once at a,

there was a group of officers and they were talking about diversity and recruitment.

And I said,

don't you think that combat units are inordinately white males, mostly from rural areas, maybe even inordinately south of the Mexican-Dixon line or upstate New York or San Joaquin Valley.

What's your point, Victor?

I said, well, you're talking about race, race, and gender, gender, gender, and sexual orientation, but

you never talk about it when it matters most, the dead, the people who go out there and get killed.

So are you going to integrate according to demographics,

proportional representation, disparate impact?

Are you going to use those concepts for a company of soldiers out in some god-forsaken place in the Hellman province or Fallujah?

No, you're not.

And then they get really angry.

And I had so many letters from high-ranking officers.

How dare you mention the racial breakdown of the dead?

And I wanted to say, how dare you mention the racial breakdown of the living?

You know what I'm saying?

We shouldn't do it at all.

But they have no problem with.

Well, they do have a problem because if you go after that rubric and you say, as Lloyd Austin did,

or Mark Milley, that you want to look at,

what was the word, they had three words, white supremacy, white privilege, and white rage.

Remember before Congress in 2021, I think it was?

Might have been 22?

If you do that,

and then you inordinately go after a particular demographic for not having their mRNA shots as they did, those were disproportionately white males.

And then you have the chairman of the Joint Chief said he's going to have people read Professor Kendi, who basically says you have to be a racist to stop racism, and white people are the font of every evil in the world.

Well, then people are going to leave and they've left in droves.

And then I don't know.

I don't think that Sam Bankman, or what was his name?

Sam Bankman Freed.

I don't know.

Yeah, Sam Bankman Freed, or who was the other guy with name,

the

energy lower guy in the department?

Well, the guy, deputy of energy, Sam, I've forgotten his name, but he wanted to steal luggage and dress in women's clothes.

I don't think he's joining.

So my point is that

I don't know.

I just,

we have all these mythologies, but

I got in big trouble once.

I went to a university and a person of color got up and started yelling about the inordinate, how it was a white man's war, and non-white people died.

And I started quoting him the statistics.

It was early in the Iraq war.

He just said, liar, but it was true.

And so we shouldn't even be thinking about percentages, but because the left does all the time, they're very selective

when they spot

oppression, disproportionality, prejudice.

That's always one way.

They just don't, can't be disinterested.

It's either every single aspect of American life is going to be controlled by demographics, 13% this, 12% this, 40% this, or it's not.

But you don't pick and choose and say the post office is okay and the NBA is okay,

but

the cheerleaders aren't.

You know what I mean?

All right, Victor.

Well, we need to go to a break and we'll come right back.

And Victor's going to talk about the first year of World War II in 1939.

So stay with us, and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is available on X.

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So Victor, you're going to talk about 1939, and I'm interested to hear the beginning of this war and how we got into the world.

You talk about

the Spanish Civil War, the

Italian invasion of Betsy,

the Japanese fighting the Russians, and also the Chinese in

31-32, and then again in 1937.

All these precipitous actions

on the part of what would be the fascistic

Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis.

And that was finalized in 1940 with the tripartite pact.

So, after

just very quickly, we'll look at the Europeans.

So, on September 1st, Hitler invades Poland.

The Poles fought very heroically, and

they probably killed somewhere around 20,000 Germans and probably wounded or

inflicted casualties on another 40,000.

They probably lost 400 or 500 tanks.

People forget that, but they did.

They were heroic

and they were overwhelmed.

But the problem was within three weeks, Joseph Stalin concluded his war, well, I'll talk about it in a second,

along the Mongolian border when he was fighting the Japanese.

He wasn't afraid he'd have a two-front war.

So he came in late, but around the 20th of September, he invaded from the east.

And so the Poles were trapped, but they could have lasted another month or two against the Germans.

So they were trapped between two pincers.

And for all of you interested in the Ukraine war, remember that this was 1939 Poland, the creation of the

it wasn't, I shouldn't say the creation, it was the institutionalized finally of a homeland had been off and on for a millennium.

The Poles had always had a country, and then it was taken over by the Russians or Germans or Eastern.

But finally, they had recognized after World War I.

So

they split the country in two, and that's Western Ukraine today.

So the Soviet Union took over what is now Ukraine, and the western third of what is now Ukraine was Poland.

And it had been Polish-speaking and Roman Catholic for a millennia.

And just to

look ahead, in the Potsdam Treaty in 1945 about setting the borders after the war was over, Stalin said, how many

divisions does the Pope have, meaning he's not going to stop me

from taking on Poland.

And he said, if you want a Poland, then you want to make up for the land that I stole in 1939 when I was a Nazi partner, then you go to the Nazis and take Pomerania and Prussia.

And that's what they did to make up the difference.

And it wasn't quite fair, but to all a lot of parties involved.

But the point is, at that point,

it was kind of like those Westerns when there's three guys standing off in a gunfight against each other, three against three, or maybe the wild bunch, that scene where they kill Mapache and everybody just stands there.

What?

Are we going to just stop?

And then Bill Holden smiles.

I want to die today, but I want to kill all of you first.

And that's what happened.

Hitler just stopped

and he said to everybody,

Stalin is our partner.

He didn't say that was the point.

And France and Britain are all alone, and the United States isn't coming in, and Japan's running the Pacific.

However, I will make a deal with you.

And the deal was, you keep out of Poland and you keep out of my business,

and I will allow the British Empire to exist and the French Republic, but it will be on my terms.

That was basically the deal.

And of course they refused that

and then

he wanted to invade immediately but his generals told him it's getting too late in the year.

So that was one of the reasons that he offered that peace treaty.

I mean Mr.

Cooper, the friend that was on of Tucker's who said that Churchill was a terrorist

and that Hitler offered terms.

He only offered terms because he knew they probably would not take them and the year was getting

too late in the year.

So he digested that with the Russians and then they kind of made other deals where they divided up spheres of influence.

So Stalin then was told you can take the Baltic, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and Finland.

Big mistake.

So in November, right after the Paul Poland, he went into the winter war and he found himself November, December, January, February, March of 1940 losing about 600,000 casualties.

And finally, they cut a deal and Poland gave up I mean Finland gave up 10% of its territory.

And then Germany got a free hand to go westward.

And so

they looked at two countries the next year as they replenished their losses.

There was a lot of lessons, both from the Anschluss when they went into Austria and the annexation of the Sudetenland we talked about in 39, 38, excuse me.

But when they went into Poland, they discovered a lot of things, that the Mark I wasn't even a tank.

The Mark II was completely substandard.

And the Mark III, which they thought was going to be a great tank, was substandard.

Hitler would later say, if I had known about the T-34 Russian tank, I wouldn't have invaded.

But he had evidence that they were substandard.

And they lost a lot of men and they lost aircraft.

So they wanted to digest that.

And then in April of 1940, we'll get to it.

They invaded Denmark.

Denmark lasted six hours.

Kind of heroic.

They tried to protect the Jews of Denmark, and then he went into Norway, and that took him two months.

But we'll get to that in 1940.

So just to conclude, in 1939, Mussolini now has his fleet controlling the Mediterranean.

He's got kind of an uneasy peace with the French.

He did not declare war on us.

He did not declare war on Britain.

So it's just Russia.

It's just Germany and Russia.

And it's kind of a very strange relationship because the Russians have just defeated the Japanese in Mongolia at Kalingol, a battle, and shocked them.

The Japanese have discovered something that

their aircraft and their air force is very westernized, and it is as good as any.

And their navy is, but in terms of their army, in terms of artillery, they're very good with mortars, but in terms of artillery and tanks, they don't rate with the Western, and they were really beaten badly.

But Hitler

is going to be in alliance with them, but then he's in alliance with us.

So this can't last.

If you turn then quickly to the Pacific theater,

things are heating up.

They have invaded China in 31-32, and now they've invaded again, and they've expanded that in Manchuria in 37,

38,

and the major cities that about half of China is in Japanese control along with Korea.

And it is eyeing the Pacific, and it's starting to think

Germany was very, very, very successful very quickly in Poland.

And there's only three or four countries that are in its way in Europe and the West.

At some point, they're going to invade.

So Japan is gearing up, and it's looking at three or four places that is of opportunity.

If they get in a war with Britain, we can go in and join them and take Malaysia and have the rubber of Malaysia and Singapore.

If they get in a war with France, they will win, and we will get French Indochina and the bread basket of the Mekong, the rice basket

of the Mekong Delta.

If they get in a war with the Dutch, then we've got what is now Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies, and all the Shell oil fields.

So the Japanese are waiting.

The United States under Roosevelt wants to beef up Britain and it wants to beef up France before they're overrun.

But we don't really have any munitions.

Our aircraft is not as good as theirs.

We have congressional opposition.

We're still in isolation.

So we're not really, we're starting to say cash and carry, not Lin Lease.

They can buy stuff and just take it.

But the kind of the stuff we have, we don't have very good armor, we don't have yet good fighter planes.

So we're not helping.

And the Japan, Japan is

in China, as I said, and they're pushing their weight around.

And people in the United States are looking at the Japanese fleet, and they're counting carriers and carrier aircraft, fighters, dive bombers, torpedo, and the number of tonnage.

And they're shocked.

We've had 1935, the first Carl Vinson Naval Armament Act.

We started to build battleships again after 20.

You know, we hadn't built a battleship, I think, from 1915.

So they were, and we were starting to have a very we had absolutely the best nautical engineers in the world that designed the North Carolina and Iowa-class battleships.

Forget about the Yamamoto, the Mushashi, the Bismarck.

The Iowa-class battleship was way ahead of them, even the North Carolina, in terms of

survivor ability, speed,

firepower, efficiency, rate of fire, accuracy, radar.

So we were doing that in 35, and then we passed it in 37, the Naval Rear 37, 38, the Naval Rearmament Act.

So the weird thing about this was we were seeing in the Roosevelt administration, these were Southern segregationist Democrats, Carl Vinson.

On his social domestic policy, he wasn't what we would call liberal at all.

He was reactionary, but no one man we owe more to

him

because on Pearl Harbor, after they destroyed our battleship fleet,

ancient battleship, and we only had four carriers.

What the Japanese had heard was that these naval acts had already approved one carrier, carrier, the Hornet, but more importantly, a whole new class of carrier, the Essex class.

That was the best carrier in the world.

And it was designed by Americans, and it was already in the drawing boards, and they were already laying the hulls.

I think 32, they built 25 of them.

And then in addition, they had, I think, two North Carolina battleships and four of the Iowa class ready to come on.

They had a new thing called the Escort Carrier, the Light Carrier.

They had a huge Japanese, I mean American submarine, the Balejo class, the Gato class.

American submarines, we have a lot of misinformation.

You know, we talk about U-boats because they could go so deep.

And the Japanese destroyed...

The best ships in the world were designed by America.

Submarines were fantastic.

The destroyers were good.

The battleships and cruisers.

I don't know how they did it.

They just designed these new ships.

And yet, all these other countries, Britain, Italy,

France, Germany, even Germany, had more experience.

And yet something happened in the late 1930s where there was a lot of astute people that said, we're going to be at war with Europe and it's going to be a land war by nature because of Germany.

But in the Pacific, it's going to be a naval war and we're outmatched.

And so that was really affected Admiral Yamamoto because

if he did say it, that I can make them, I've awakened a sleeping dragon, I can run wild for six months, and then after that, I can't guarantee anything.

What was he talking about?

He knew from Japanese intelligence what the ship wore, Newport News, Shipyard, and places in Connecticut.

And

they knew what they were building.

And they thought when that fleet comes online, and they had estimated it would be somewhere in late 42 or...

early 43, but by 44 it it would be overwhelming.

Well, can I take us back to Europe and just ask at least one question?

Because we often see, if you watch World War II videos, stuff that was taken at the time,

one of the, I don't know if it's a myth or if it's reality actually, is that the Poles

fought against the Germans with a cavalry against tanks.

And you can see videos like that.

But I was wondering how unprepared were the Poles for this?

Because if you you look at the map, by the time Germany takes Czechoslovakia, it has surrounded Poland on three sides, and it's obvious where they're going to go.

So was the Polish army severely unprepared or was the Germany?

They knew from the Munich Agreement that they were next and they were arming.

But there were two things that deceived them.

They went to, after Munich, they went to France and Germany and they said, would you guarantee the territorial sovereignty of Poland?

And that meant, will you go to war if Hitler and Hitler and they said yes.

So on August,

before August 23rd of 1939, Hitler did not go into Poland.

He thought about it all summer long, but he was afraid of having a two-front war.

The Poles on one side and France and Britain on the other.

And because

that had haunted and terrified the Germans, Germans, because that's how they lost World War I.

And he said, no, two-front war.

It's kind of ironic that he insured one later.

But the point I'm making is he signed the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact on August 23rd.

At that moment, Poland was doomed because they had the huge Soviet Union, which was massively rearming and had been appropriating technology from us.

I mean, the British, I don't know why they did it, but they sold

the

Rolls-Royce engine to

the Russians and some of their fighters, which were the best in the world, with that engine.

And we were giving them the Christie tank suspension.

So they were rearming massively.

And so in 1939, when Hitler cut the deal with them, Poland was doomed because, as you said, they were going to be invaded from the north, from the acquired Prussia, from East Prussia.

They were going to be invaded from from the east from Germany, and they were going to be invaded from the south from occupied Czechoslovakia, Sudetenland, and the protectorates of Bohemia and Moravia, which were phony.

And then from the east from Russia.

So they were surrounded.

There are some scenes where they had cavalry, but it wasn't because they were romantic or disillusioned.

It was because in open field, some of the early model tanks, like the M1, for example, they didn't even have a cannon on it.

So they they thought that

you could still outmaneuver on the battlefield without encountering armor.

They were very heroic.

They were fought spectacularly.

It was just that was a great tragedy that

they weren't fully armed.

And one of the saddest things is when Hitler went into Poland,

he went in with almost three million men.

And at that time the Wehrmacht was not fully mobilized.

And if you look at the available resources to him, he had almost no aircraft.

He had no armor.

And he maybe had about 100,000 troops on the west.

The French army was what, it was always the bulwark of Europe.

Churchill alluded to it, we've always got the French army.

It'll bend, but it will never break.

These are the people who said at Verdun, they shall not pass.

They never broke the Poilu.

I mean, they were just, they were a great army.

And so the British thought we can bring over 300,000 and we will invade Germany if they go into Poland.

That's what Hitler was.

So he went into Poland

and he brought in all of his intelligence.

They said, they're not going to do anything.

They're just going to sit.

They called it a sitzkrieg, a sit-still.

They're not going to do anything.

And the French went into the Saarland, German occupying, and they went in about 20 miles and they looked around.

They said, there's nobody here.

Yes,

but we better not offend the Germans because they could come back out of Poland and fight us.

And then the British took,

they sent bombers over occupied,

excuse me, they sent bombers over Germany and they dropped what?

Leaflets.

Do you know what your Fuhrer is doing to you poor German people?

Yes, they did know.

They were very happy, but they thought they were...

didn't want to go to war.

So when that happened, just to end, then you had the true Sitzkrieg from

October 6th, when the war was kind of officially over of 1939 to the invasion of Denmark in 1940, you had October, November, December, January, February, March.

You had six months where these two armies faced each other.

And it was called what we call the phony war in the West.

And everybody, and Hitler then, this is what all of the isolationists isolationists and neo-isolationists claim onto.

Hitler didn't want a world war.

He made a deal.

So after he gobbled up Poland, he had

combondulated,

aggregated all of Eastern Europe, and he was in line with this horrific, murderous Soviet Union, he said to the British, you guys, you can have your empire, but

we're not going to give up anything we stole.

The Anschluss, Sudetenland, Morovia, Bohemia, and we have eyes on certain other colonies.

North Africa will be a domaino.

And the British said no.

And by the way, Mr.

Cooper, it wasn't Winston Churchill who said no.

It was Winston Churchill was not in power, as he implied in his transcript.

It was Neville Chamberlain.

Neville Chamberlain was in power till May 10th of 1940.

And Neville Chamberlain was humiliated, and he had now become a hawk.

And he said, I don't trust anything you said.

You said you were not going to

occupy you were going to believe in the Versailles Treaty and honor it.

Then you broke it with a 100,000-man army.

Then you broke it by making the Luftwaffe.

Then you broke it by arming the Rhineland.

Then you broke it by going with the Saarland plebiscite.

Then you broke it with the Anschluss with Austria.

Then you broke it with the annexation of the Sudetenland.

And then you broke it by going into Poland.

So why would we believe that you would ever honor anything?

He wouldn't have.

No, of course not.

It took Neville Chamberlain quite some time to reach that conclusion.

He was a very tragic figure because he was deathly ill.

He had, I think it was stomach cancer, and he fought on.

And Churchill was so magnanimous to him.

He brought him into his cabinet.

On May 10th, it was the day that Hitler invaded.

Everybody went into panic.

He invaded

Holland, Belgium, and France.

And it was a brilliant campaign.

You had all these brilliant people, von Kleist and Guedarian, and even Rommel, I think, was a corps commander or division commander.

But my point is that that was the day that Churchill took over.

But he didn't exile

Chamberlain.

He was a fellow conservative.

He brought him into the cabinet, the war cabinet.

He soon died.

When they asked him later about was

Chamberlain responsible for the war, for appeasement, and he said no, it was Stanley Baldwin, prior, who again and again tabled the rearming of Spitfires, hurricanes, and said the bomber always gets through.

Why would we want fighters?

The bomber always gets through.

It wouldn't be any good anyway.

And he said finally,

I think I'm sure that

Andrew Roberts or Larry Arnt will correct me, but I'm doing this from memory.

I think he said in association with with the funeral of Stanley Ball, and he said it would have been better all for everybody if he never lived.

Wow.

Well, Victor, we need to go to a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about personalities on the left.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, just a few things here at the end of the show to tie up news for for the week.

Oh, Walt.

What's his first name?

I've even forgotten his first name.

Tim, that's right.

Tim Walz was at Harvard Kennedy School, and he said that he was on the Harris ticket as the vice president because they were trying to attract white guys who work on pickups, watch football, and like to hunt.

And I think that's not surprising given the stunts he did during the year.

Everyone did that voted for him, I can tell you that.

I know.

Because all he did was play DEI and talk about white people in a derogatory term.

And then he had some kind of frenetic, herky-jerky, Adderall-fueled spasticity on the stage.

And he was a little bit heavy and he wore tight pants and what we call, you know, his ankles were showing on his high waters, we used to call him in high school.

He looked like a buffoon.

He was just mad.

And then he said silly, stupid things.

I've never seen a more polite,

steady, comprehensive dissection of a

debater than what J.D.

Vance did to him.

Finally, it was thinking like,

is he real?

I'm going to get in trouble because it's so one-sided, so I'm going to be nice.

And

he tried to be nice to him because he was so inept.

And his wife was from another planet.

She was the one that said she rolled down her window so she could smell burning rubber during the George Floyd riots.

And then the daughter was the one who tipped off on social media that her dad was going to call out the National Guard so people would be prepared for them.

That probably caused a lot of violence.

She's been mouthing off ever since.

And then he, you know, everything about his story was how many times he went to China, that was wrong.

The circumstances in which he got his sergeant major classification was wrong, lied,

the circumstances by which he did not go with his unit to

wartime Iraq, it was a lie.

So

I don't know what he's doing now.

I guess his tenure is over and he thinks he's going to lose if he runs for governor again.

Does he think he's going to run for president?

I thought he said something like that.

I guess he thinks he's going to make some money speaking by jumping around the stage like a roly-poly Mick Jagger or something.

But, you know,

he's just a walking catastrophe.

He gets on the stage and

he says, I got a phone here.

Hey, I got a phone here with a Dow.

And

Elon's.

Tesla is going down.

I check it every day.

And then you think, you idiot, your own state has a Tesla portfolio.

You're rooting against all of your workers who are invested.

And then

he started attacking.

Then he got into his potty mouth.

He called Elon a dip S-H-I-T, an A-A-S-A-T.

He's just a walking train wreck.

I wish he just, I don't wish he was.

I think he's good for the Republicans.

Yeah, he sure is.

And he's not much caliber.

And it shows a lot about how out of touch the Democrats are that they let that go on.

That he's a toxic, that he's masculine.

Yeah, he can represent the toxic masculine guy and draw in that.

And Doug Imhoff was too, remember him?

That was what was really embarrassing.

And then they got into Doug him.

They had all getting back to Mr.

Eugene, talking Eugene, who told us about

they weren't biased and they were not part of the opposition and all that.

Then we had M Hoff, remember?

And all the media said, and this guy is a very, very sensitive, successful man.

And he likes to be challenged, and that's why he married Kamala Harris.

And then, like a nanoseconds later, they have an affidavit that his prior girlfriend, they were in Paris, and she was looking at somebody else, and he slapped her, and he was a spousal abuse her, which is a cardinal sin.

And the left is always talking about me, too.

And then they didn't say anything.

I guess their attitude is, well, she might have talked back to him, so she deserved it, just like Abrego Garcia got to slap.

They seem to really like

men.

The left does that hit women.

They like Doug Imhoff when he slapped that girlfriend, and they didn't say a word.

Albrego Garcia

hit his soon-to-be spouse twice, tore her clothes off, hit her in the eye.

And then

the latest fellow in Wisconsin that the judge tried to hide,

he pounded three people.

One of them was a woman.

Why do they like to protect wife peekers, spouses?

I don't understand it.

Well, apparently

Albrego Garcia Hakeem Jeffries is trying to suggest to the other Democratic congressmen not to go down there to make a spectacle of this guy.

So somebody figures trying to worry.

And then what happens with Hakeem Jeffries is

he says something, and then somebody like James Garville or David Oxelrod or some of those Obama people call him up and they say, you idiot, what are you doing?

Just cancel all that and reboot.

And he reboots.

And he always tries to come up like culture, crime, seize.

You know, he says certain things.

It just, he is a wreck.

And he thinks he's Barack Obama.

Barack Obama,

whatever you guys think about Barack Obama, he was a rhetorician.

He was a dangerous rhetorician, a demagogic wreck, but he could speak more successfully and fluently in his little finger than Hycum Jeffries can.

Absolutely.

Well, speaking of Obama, we have Michelle Obama back on the stage with her brother by her side.

I don't either.

Why isn't Obama by her side?

But besides that, what she actually said this time on the podcast was that she's up all night because of deportations.

And she should be up every night because

if you look,

it wasn't for lack of intent, but if you look at Trump's first term and

the first hundred days of this term, and you calibrate deportations by time in office, Obama's got him beat by a lot.

They stopped all of Trump's deportations, but when Trump, when Obama, three plus million, they were like

the Republicans built cages.

No, Obama built cages.

The Republicans like to, no, Obama likes to.

You remember, he said, what is it?

What do you get about being illegal?

And that was what Clinton and Hillary said as well.

So

I don't know what she means about she's up all night.

I guess she was up all night in the White House when Obama said, she said, Vera, quit deporting people.

You're deporting them every day.

But, of course, she didn't.

She's very angry right now because of these rumors that they're.

Well, Tucker is really fanning these rumors.

I was going to ask you about Tucker saying that.

Go ahead and ask me.

He said that she hates her husband, and it's very clear.

Like, he was like, it's so obvious to everybody, she hates her husband.

Tucker has run with two

memes.

One is that Obama is a repressed bisexual.

He said that, you know.

And the other is that

tangential to that, that their marriage is, and Obama

for his extracurricular activities is not interested in his wife.

Maybe, I don't know what that means, but

that gets back to her.

And

especially, there was two iconic moments.

One was

the Jennifer Aston rumors that he was with her.

The other was, you remember when they went to a funeral in South Africa from Mandala?

And they were all sitting on the, and there was that kind of hot, blonde, Danish prime minister.

He was sitting next to Michelle, and his neck looked like it was turned like

an owl all the way around.

She was just glaring at him, like, don't look at that white woman, blonde.

So, there's all sorts of racial, sexual, cultural

hang-ups with Michelle.

And it goes all the way back to 2015-16.

Never been proud of my country till Barack Ron.

It's a downright mean country.

They always raise the bar on me no matter what I do.

We try to get the kids to school.

Then they make me get braces.

Then we get braces.

And we have to have piano lessons.

And it was just like a neurotic little yuppie.

And then there were the stories that she went into her law firm and she wanted to leapfrog over all the senior people and get the, was it the Adidas account or the Nike account?

And then they gave her the job for $330,000 to turn away customers at the University of Chicago.

because her husband, yeah, that was

the medical school.

Yes, it was.

We don't want the homeless people coming into the thing, and she's black, and she's left-wing, and nobody will

send them to the downtown hospital, right?

And then there was the whole

Reverend Wright, Jeremiah Wright, and that was all those things that he had a coterie of very intelligent, highly educated black women, and he was trying to match them.

Remember that he was the matchmaker.

And

Barack Obama, then, I think he gave an interview in the Chicago Sun.

I'm doing this by memory, but he said that, because the left was kind of weird.

Hey, you're a secular globalist socialist.

You can't believe in that hokey-dokey Christianity.

That's what they think.

They're very condescending to Christians.

And

he said, no,

I go every Sunday.

And they said, no, you don't.

I never missed a service and as soon as he said that people said oh you were there when he said

God dot God bless America God blank blank America chickens coming home to roost remember that and so Brock you were there because you said you never miss a service anyway it the whole thing is sad and then when she was first lady she said she was at Target and some short woman asked her because she was tall to get a package and remember that it was an oprah thing like when Oprah was in switzerland she wanted the forty thousand dollar

was it lizard or snake

wasn't

the reptilian purse it was really ugly they showed it and i thought you're a fool to pay thirty nine thousand bucks for that and then the woman the swiss girl would she fit she pushed all of opa's buttons she was young white blonde hair, European, Nordic,

and she didn't know who Oprah was.

That was what the subtext of the whole thing was.

Not that she was black.

Like, I don't know who you are.

You don't know Oprah Winfrey?

Me?

And then she got really angry and

another psychodrama.

So Michelle has got a lot of problems.

She wrote.

Can I have a little anecdote about Michelle?

If I can ask a question after that.

Okay, so one of my closest friends, I really liked Rush Limbaugh.

I know a lot of people thought he was polarizing, but when I was in Florida, I often, he would call me to go spend the afternoon in the studio.

He was one of the most magnanimous people I've ever met.

He said to me, I said, Rush, there's not one white.

I was kidding him because all the people around him were Cuban, Hispanic, or black.

He said to me, He said, You won't meet a white guy here.

And he didn't mean that he was exclusioning.

Just in that part of Florida, he didn't care what color people were.

And he was such an opposite of what the caricatures were.

But he called me

when

I think it was The Dying Citizen came out right before he was ill.

And he said, hey, Victor, you know what the best-selling memoir is right now?

And I said, I don't, Rush.

He said, it's that

drippy little Michelle Obama.

And I said, really?

He said, no, it's a mega.

It's been there for months.

It's a blockbuster.

I said, why are you calling me Rush?

And he goes, well, your book came out.

Are you getting help?

I said, not really.

He said, let's make it number one on Amazon.

So I said, really?

He said,

he said, I just have your permission.

So he never pushes stuff.

So for like a day, he said, you got to go out and buy Dying Citizen.

And then he called me like a day later and goes, go look at Amazon right now before it goes off.

And it was number one.

And I thought he was going to congratulate me because I knocked off Michelle.

For an hour or maybe.

Yeah, for an hour.

He was a really good one.

For a couple of days, I thought it was.

He was a very magnanimous person.

Well, so my question is this.

Don't you think after 30 years,

Michelle Obama would settle into this is a political arrangement that we've got and not be so angry about everything?

You mean like Eleanor Roosevelt?

Yeah, sure.

Roosevelt's a little bit more.

Yeah, sure.

FDR's had a

long

affair with Lucy Mercer.

And our daughter, Anna, is facilitating it in the White House and betrayed me.

But I am a cult hero to the left.

That's what she's trying.

trying.

And look at Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, the same thing.

Bill Clinton could not, any woman that was attractive, that walked in his,

I don't know, 20-yard radius was open game, basically.

And so she basically decided to withdraw from him and have a public marriage, a facade, and then use him for her own political trajectory, same as Eleanor Roosevelt did.

And you can make the same argument to a lesser degree about Jackie Kennedy.

They didn't divorce.

They didn't do anything.

They weren't bitter.

They just said, you know, I married a guy and I'm famous because of him, not because of me.

Eleanor Roosevelt would have been a minor social activist.

And

Jackie would have been a glamorous fixture in the New York-Washington corridor.

And Hillary would have been a stronger.

And Hillary would have been a strident

kind of a small version of Elizabeth Warren.

And they married, they were smart.

They knew that these people were promiscuous, they knew that they were charismatic, they knew they had rhetorical skills, they were good politicians, and they latched on to them at an early age.

And I'm not saying it was all one-sided,

because they saw something in them too, I suppose.

Barack Obama said he was no longer going to date white women.

You remember that in his memoir?

So he needed a black woman to cement his Chicago fetus.

He didn't think he was going to run for president.

He thought he was going to run for Congress, and he did.

And Bobby Rush, I think, beat him.

But he wanted to make sure people in the black community knew he was true to black values, so had a black wife.

And he wanted somebody who had gone to Harvard like he had.

So the thing I'm making, so they all accommodated themselves.

I don't remember

Eleanor Roosevelt was angry at FDR, but she became, she knew she was going to outlive him, and she had a long career as the, she was much more to the left than he was because she wasn't a politician.

And you could make the argument that

Jackie Kennedy probably was to the left of JFK.

And you can make the argument that Hillary was to the left of Bill.

Because they could.

There was no need to compromise.

And then

people could get to them on the left and say, go talk to your husband.

They were the conduit.

Kind of like Jill Biden, right?

Although Biden,

I shouldn't even mention him.

He's in such a special loony bin, just nutty, before he was demitted.

But my point is that she could have played that Clinton, Jackie,

Eleanor Roosevelt role and didn't have to be so angry and bitter.

I know somebody's going to say, yes, Victor, but she's black.

I know, but

this is from 1980 when she came of age to

now, she has lived in the reverse discrimination world of affirmative action.

Can I say one last thing, and I'll let you sit.

Christopher Hitchens, who

I knew pretty well, he asked me once if I liked him, because we had dinner a lot.

He came down here to the farm.

And I said, I do like you, Christopher, but sitting next to you is like sitting next to a coiled cobra.

I never know when you're going to spit or whether you're going to bite.

You spit sometimes, but I don't know if you're bite and I don't know how much venom you're going to put into your attack on me.

But he saved my life.

He really did.

I was in Libya.

I had a ruptured appendix.

I called my son and I said, I'm about ready to die.

I'm in shock.

I have 105.

They can't operate something.

And

I said, go in the desk and get a number.

And they got Christopher's number.

And Christopher called some people.

But anyway, he called me once and he said,

Victor, have you read

Michelle Obama's thesis?

And I said, no, I don't.

He said, I'm going to send it to you.

And he said,

you're a philologist.

I know you read four or five languages, but this is written in a language unknown to man.

He said that.

Unknown to man.

And I read it, and it was all about forming a community of resistance with help from former graduates so that black people who were admitted to, for instance, I'm kind of paraphrasing, it would not be victims of discrimination.

After you get in, you're a beneficiary of discrimination because you got in without the same standards of test scores.

But then you're victimized immediately when you get in.

And that's how she was trying to combat that.

But Christopher said that it was written.

And I said, what do you mean it's not written in a language known to man?

You said it was, it's some type of postmodern lacan Foucaultian emulation that's of a very elementary level versus someone who's agrammatical.

So

that was very cruel.

But it was private, everybody.

Now it's public.

It's only Christopher Hitchen was capable of that kind of

like sitting with a brilliant.

I've seen him strike out at somebody.

Brilliant.

I said to him when I was at dinner once with him, I said, if you coil and you strike me, I'm going to strike back

because I'm a mongoose.

That would be a great interaction to hear.

Well, Victor, I would ask you about Princess Dye and all that, but we'll hold off on her for some other time.

We have some comments on your website, on your article, Trump Tariffs, Trade and a Taboo.

Peter Steve, or sorry, Steven Peters says, merchants have no country.

The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.

And actually, that is a quote from Thomas Jefferson, sorry, but Steve Peters says,

and Brian McBeeben, Mick sorry, Mick Keeben says, great analysis, as usual, Dr.

Hansen.

I hope world leaders at all levels are listening and thinking carefully about the international, national, regional, and local commercial activities and inventories.

Imbalances are costly, often dangerous.

And this is the part I like.

And I wish...

DJT could always consider that his public statements need to always speak to the 60% rational people in the middle who care about how civilization really works and not about inflammatory statements from either left or right political extremists.

Snarky

New Yorker comments will not win supporters in any country, including America.

And that's probably true.

Donald Trump.

That was a funny article because I got

a lot of criticism

from economists that were on the left or libertarian, and some of them wrote me, and the argument was, stay in your lane, I mentioned that.

And the other is, you wrote trade deficits.

These are trade deficits in goods.

You're not including services.

And I said, services are a completely different aspect of it.

And

a trade deficit in material real things

is

what we're interested in because of the job creation.

And we're not interested in the job creation in Wall Street or banks or hedge funds or financial services.

Anyway, that was one criticism.

And a corollary is that you better not write anymore about economic.

But I had some from the other side

saying, don't criticize Donald Trump.

He should get revenue.

We don't need an income tax.

And I thought, you know,

the income tax,

40% of Americans do not pay income tax right now, and they get a credit back.

So

the tariff, if you're

the tariff constitutes about 1.8 percent of all federal revenue, if you got a 15 percent and you tariffed countries that are our friends that are running deficits with us, and the whole world, you would probably get anywhere from a trillion to three trillion over 10 years.

So you get 100 to 300 billion at most.

It's never going to replace the 5.4

trillion we get now from

mostly, almost all from income tax and fines and leases and rentals.

But you're not going to replace it.

And all it's going to do is offend people because it's going to look like we're trying to price gouge or jack up people to get money from them rather than to focus on reciprocity, fairness, symmetry.

That's all we want.

We want to lower tariffs.

So we want to tell Canada we'd like to have no tariffs with you, but you have tariffs on all

our dairy, goods, and poultry.

So I think you can't win.

Well, thank you, Victor, for everything today.

You can win on this podcast, so we like that.

And thanks to our audience for joining us.

Thank you, everybody, for listening and viewing.

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