The Atomic Bomb Controversy and Fixing the Government

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our Saturday edition where we look in our middle segment at something cultural or in this case warfare.

And Victor is going to talk about the ending of the war in the Pacific in our middle segment.

But first we've got news to continue with and we have the VA hospital workers were caught in an orgy and we'll start with that story when we come back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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

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So we hope to see everybody there.

So, Victor,

recently they caught

some workers at a Veterans Administration hospital and

in an orgy.

And I was wondering, this really looks bad, especially the Veterans Administration.

I felt very sorry for anybody who has to go to and then to have these doing this.

But there's strange things that we're finding out about our government.

I think they were actually exposed by bragging

about that online.

On their social media, yes.

Yeah, I mean, they said they had one, was it one person said they had 32 sex partners and 12 people in orgies?

It was right out of that.

Remember the

HBO Rome?

Yeah.

You know, that series with Rome.

Yeah, where they had all the orgies all the time.

Oh, but that was in Egypt with Cleopatra.

Cleopatra was filmed, yeah.

And

you can read the satiric on.

I referenced that again if you want to read about an orgy in the antiquity.

But the point is,

Elon Musk, this is right during their argument: people are working from home or they're not doing their job, there's no accountability, people have time on their hands, and then these stories, you know, off up.

And

we wonder what's going to happen to them, especially given veterans and disabled veterans,

you think they'd have some decorum that would respect that.

You remember a year ago

in December, there was that Senate aide for Senator Cardin, and he took all of his clothes off.

I think he had an athletic supporter on, and he went to one of the hollowed chambers in the Senate, and he got on all fours

like a quadruped, and then he allowed somebody to sodomize him, and then he

filmed it in the chambers.

And they fired him and what was striking about that was it was kind of like the defiance of the energy fuel, the Department of Injury employee that was stealing women's clothing.

Yeah, Sam

Brenton.

Brenton Benton, yes.

And he was defiant as well.

And I remember that guy

when they were making fun of him, I shouldn't say making fun of him.

They had a Tucker downloaded that.

Remember he released that tape

and he said,

he said, this has been kind of a bad time.

I think he said, this has been a difficult time for me.

And I have been attacked

for whom I pursue, whom I love.

I'm attacked for whom I love.

Oh, yes.

So you're in love with somebody.

The United States public doesn't care, but you choose to have him sodomize you and tape it without any

prophylactic protection in the age of AIDS, and you film it in a hollowed Senate chamber showing absolutely nothing but contempt.

And then he said, you know, this has been my poor judgment.

I admit that.

I love my job, and I will be exploring legal options.

And so my point is, all this stuff goes on, and there's no,

it's all in the realm now of

the abnormal.

So if you take the normal to long,

man-woman, long-standing relationship, whether exclusive or married, but normal, in the sense I'm using normal by the majority.

Maybe some of you may say, well, Rebecca, you don't know anything about the United States.

That's not the majority.

But the point I'm making is

then you take the extremes, orgies,

32 sex partners.

dressing up as a woman and stealing, getting some kind of fetish by stealing somebody's bags, dressing up, going to the Easter cage,

Easter egg hunt at the White House, pulling your shirt up to show you're transgender

manufactured breast,

getting sodomized, and that is not just abnormal, but not the majority of activity.

What I mean by that, not the majority.

But then you become the victim.

How dare you?

You're just hurting me for whom I love.

Orgies, you know, we just express ourselves sexually.

It's really funny when you look at certain Roman poetry, juvenile satires.

He wrote ten brilliant satires.

They're kind of difficult Latin, but they're worth reading.

And then there's Suetonius' Life of the Twelve Caesars, starting with Julius

and going all the way up to, I think it ends with

Vespasian.

Oh, excuse me, Titus and Domitian, maybe.

And then you read Tacitus's annals, and then the great Satyricon.

And you get this theme that affluent societies such as our own, leisured societies such as our own,

have a general sense that the ingredients or the values or the habits that made them wealthy and leisured came from a prior generation.

In the case of first century AD Rome, it was the Italian yeoman agrarium.

the people who died fighting at Canai or the First Punic War, or they built Rome.

And it becomes in a decline because they create wealth and they create a protocol how to create wealth.

So in our case, it's sort of that generation that went through the Depression, our parents, or most of you, your grandparents or great-grandparents, they went through the Depression, they fought World War II, 12 million of them went there.

They were existentially threatened by the Cold War with nuclear weapons.

They came back, they got married, they bought a house, they had two, three kids,

and then the 60s came in the 70s, and their children did not herit the work ethic that they had inherited from what their children's grandfathers had taught.

And how does that manifest itself in these, this is what I'm getting to, in this Roman genre,

in literature, in history, in the novel, in poetry?

Catullus is another example.

And it's just...

It's just eerie.

Catullus has the Athos poem where a transgender young man

gets into an ecstasy and self-castrates himself.

In the middle of the poem, the pronouns change from illy to illa.

In other words, he becomes a woman and he changes his pronouns and that is shown.

And at the end of the poem, the frenzy wears off and he's sitting there and he thought, wow, the pondera ilia, the weight of his groin is gone.

And he's...

It's a tragedy.

He's been fooled by this force into doing something that's perverted.

Now it's irreversible.

That rings a bell.

And then in the satiricon, what is one of the great themes?

Transvestism, dressing up in the opposite sex.

What's another thing?

Feigned rape and sexual assault is another thing.

And promiscuity is everywhere.

And pedophilia is a big thing in the satiricon.

There's one scene, as I recall, where there's an arranged marriage between, I think, 10-year-olds.

or a young girl is being

forcibly in intercourse by an older man, and he's supposed to be seducing her, and it's considered normal.

It's my point.

And then, when you look at the Twelve Caesars, there's an element of violence in it, with sex associated with violence and cruelty.

And what I'm getting at, and cruelty is in all of these, cruelty is the other aspect of decadence as well as sexual exuberance.

And that people

are indiscriminately and spontaneously, insidiously cruel to animals, to other people.

They like to inflict.

Kind of like, remember Game of Thrones when, was it King Joffrey?

He'd like to shoot women.

And that other character, Ramsey, they would like to torture women or shoot them with crossbows.

Hunt them, yeah.

Hunt them down.

Remember, he slapped them.

And in Rome, you remember that Augustus said to Julia, the actor, that he'd like to hit her during intercourse.

So So

what I'm getting at, human nature doesn't change.

So

what has changed, though, is the culture's reaction to it.

We don't have a Tacitus or Suetonius or Catullus or Petronius to tell us that this is a symptom of a sick, leisured, spoiled, affluent society.

And it is.

And we can't say this.

And I guess I...

To protect myself, I'll say, I'm not saying this.

I was going to say, you are saying it.

We have pompous.

I'm just suggesting, I'm just throwing it out there.

Do it with what you want.

But a society that has orgies

at a facility to care for their patriotic veterans is sick.

Yes.

And a society that has a young Senate staffer with no respect for the hollowed chambers of the U.S.

Senate and goes in there, strips down to a jockstrap, and is sodomized by his lover and then thinks he's a victim is sick.

And somebody in an Easter egg hunt where there's still children there who exposes his breast for the media is sick.

Sorry.

And if somebody is in a Department of Energy high official with expertise about what, fuel storage from spent rods or whatever he was,

and he dresses up as a woman and has a fetish to go into airports and steal the hard won dresses and clothing of another woman and steals them and then denies about, he is sick.

And he should be seen as that way.

And he's a symptom of something terribly wrong with our society.

That is true.

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So, Victor, let's move on then to the

Delaware judge who has nullified a compensation package to Elon Musk of $56 billion.

I was pretty shocked at that.

It seems to me

the state putting their nose into the business business of a company, but maybe I'm wrong there.

What are your thoughts?

Well,

it was a Delaware judge, and he's saying

Elon's, what, worth $200,000, I guess now it's $350 billion,

but he has a cash flow situation because he spent, what, was it $45 or $50 billion on Twitter?

Yeah.

So the judge is saying that he's not entitled to have his $56 billion package, which his shareholders, because he's made them all rich, is perfectly happy

to support.

And I suppose

the problem that they're arguing is that it's a public company, so the shareholders have a stake in the profitability of the company, and they expect the CEO to have a reasonable compensation package to such a degree that it will not impair the profitability and the return on the shareholders' investment.

So the judge then intervenes and says the board has been unduly influenced apparently by Elon.

Does he have a complaint complaint in this?

Yes, there are complaints, a lot of them.

Oh, saying that they didn't like the fact that Elon got this.

Yeah.

Oh,

it's referenced to them.

They're not preempting.

And

so they're not saying that.

They're not surveying the landscape, the judges.

That's not their regulatory.

Yeah,

they're just saying if somebody who is a shareholder says,

I'm worried about my investment in this company because I feel that the board did not represent the sound management of the company.

But you can see this is a slippery slope.

So then you have judges, whether

it's their initiative or not, and it's not,

that they then take it upon themselves to decide what is proper compensation for a profitable company.

What we're not talking about is what happens on Wall Street and corporate America where somebody comes in, sells off the assets, gets a big payout, gives his friends bonuses, and then leaves and the company's broke.

We're talking about somebody

who created the company, is there at the company, is going to be there for the duration and made the shareholders

profits.

And so

if the board thinks that for the conduct of his companies and the effective management of Tesla, vis-a-vis SpaceX, and Neuralink

and

X,

that he needs some cash, then that was their decision.

And if you don't like it, you can petition to run for the board or

vote the board out.

It's a publicly traded company.

But the judge is saying this is excessive.

Yeah, okay.

But the point is, would the judge say this was excessive five years ago

when Elon was a man of the left,

probably voted against Donald Trump in 2020 and earlier in 2016.

I don't want to suggest that he did, but I imagine that he probably did.

He was always a maverick and eccentric, but the fact that he came out so strongly this year for Donald Trump and he put, I think, 200 million, if it's not 300 million of his own money into the campaign,

that explains why Gavin Newsom does not want to give him a

EV rebate credit.

If you buy a Tesla.

We can buy any other EV except his, even though his is the only company that's helping California by providing jobs because his company is in California, at least part of it.

So

it's a political partisan.

Yeah, once again, don't you think?

Well, that's why the left is so strong, you see, because they tell everybody in the movies,

you want a role.

You want to be an agent.

They tell people in sports, you want to be first string or second string?

Or you want to be a newscaster when you get done, they tell the Pentagon when you get done, you want to go to General Dynamics, do you want to go to Northrop?

Do you want to go to Google if you're in the FBI, James Baker?

If you do, you can't not be far right or conservative.

And that has a deterrent effect.

And that's why we have this leftism, because the right never understood that, that when you control the institutions,

the university, the corporate boardroom, entertainment, professional sports, the foundation, the media, then you make people bend to your will.

And that conditions them, that sets an example so that other people think, I don't want to get on the wrong side of those people, or I want to get on the wrong side, the right side, excuse me.

So that's why they're so insidious.

Sure are.

Well, let's go ahead and take a break and then move on to World War II and the ending of the Pacific War.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on social media.

He has an X account.

Its handle is at V D Hansen.

His truth social handle also is at V D Hansen.

And then there is a Facebook page, Hansen's Morning Cup, and you can come join him at all three places.

So, Victor,

now I'm curious

your view view into the bombing, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And I know that the current analysis or diagnostics are that the United States dropped bombs on civilian populations, and this was an abomination of things.

And I was wondering what your view on that was.

Well, John Hershey wrote a very influential

Atlantic Monthly essay that was into a short book.

We all read it in high school, Hiroshima.

From that point over, there was a revisionism, and the revisionism said this.

There were variations of it.

The war was over.

Japan was defeated.

We created these atomic bombs.

On July 16th, we knew they were going to work in 1945.

We had two.

and maybe a third one online.

There was no need to drop them.

They were impotent.

We dropped them for a variety of reasons.

And here the revisionism splits off into various schools.

One school says, well, we only did it because under the Yalta Agreement, we had asked Joe Stalin to come in and finally pull their own weight and help us in the Pacific theater.

And what he did was he gobbled up

Manchuria and he was gobbling the northern part of Korea.

And so we had to drop these bombs to warn Stalin, this is what we're capable of.

We have a monopoly on these bombs and they work.

That was one reason.

The second was,

hey, we spent $2 billion, a billion and a half dollars, except for the B-29 program, it was the most expensive weapons

system in the world, and we don't want to know if it works.

And we ought to try it out on people.

So there was a cynical revisionism about that.

Or it was we were, and this was funny,

they never wanted to use it against Germany because they were white.

It was racist.

We were going to use it on yellow people.

All of those are

not supported by the historical record.

The historical record says this.

Japan had

millions of barrels of oil to be refined.

It had up to 15 to 20 million people who would have joined the militia.

It had 7,000 at least kamikaze planes.

It had never been invaded.

And the Americans had just on April 1st invaded Okinawa of 1945.

That island was not declared secure really,

late June, but it was actually in early July.

It was the most costly campaign in the entire Pacific War.

Over 50,000 American soldiers were killed, wounded, or missing.

More importantly,

the month

of

July 1945 had seen about 85,000 casualties.

People forget, they keep thinking, well, we were at War 42.

We didn't really encounter the might of the Japanese Empire until 1944.

1945, month by month, was the most deadly for Americans.

And it coincided with the Battle of the Bulge at the beginning of 1945.

And we lost about 80,000 dead

in that campaign in Europe.

And we were running out of manpower in early 1945.

So the decision was made.

We are losing, as we get close and we have declared unconditional surrender as our goal.

It's one thing to defeat the Germans and the Japanese.

It's another thing to defeat them utterly and go inside their country and force them to quit and accept our political demands.

That takes a lot of American lives.

At the same time,

Japan had killed over 14 million million

Chinese.

They were killing in June, July, August, 250,000 Chinese a month.

They were killing 50 to 60,000 Asians.

It was a killing machine.

The Potsdam Agreement had warned them in July of 1945 after the surrender of Germany, we warn you,

we are going to continue to firebomb your cities until you stop.

They had dropped 65 million leaflets on Japan.

65 million saying you should surrender.

We have B-29s in Napalm, and we're going to bomb your industrial cores and your population centers if you don't quit.

They didn't quit.

So after Okinawa, with that 50,000, the United States military planned to invade in November and then the main Honshu in

March of 1946.

And they used the calculus from the Okanagawa campaign in this sense.

How many

Japanese versus how many Americans.

It went in the Pacific

from five Japanese were killed for every one American to two Japanese were killed every American of actual combats, combatants.

You read E.B.

Sledge with the old read,

even a less, not a very good book, but Goodbye Darkness by William Manchester on the Okinawa Campaign.

It is horrific.

And so the Americans said, we're not going to do this.

We're not going to invade Japan.

They've got 20 million people.

They've They've got 7,000 cruise missiles.

We call them kamikazes.

They call them, you know, they call them,

they were cruise missiles.

And it's going to be a bloodbath.

We'll lose a million casualties.

Everybody laughs at that.

That was accurate.

Number two, we know that the Japanese had big arguments over the firebombing, and they were intent

that they would not surrender.

Togo, maybe one person was a civilian on the War Council.

And so the Americans are thinking,

we dropped one bomb, a uranium bomb in July.

I don't know whether the plutonium bomb will even work.

We can create more plutonium bombs quicker than we can uranium.

So we're going to try a plutonium bomb for the first time, and we're going to drop it the second bomb.

And the first bomb

is uranium bomb.

But we're not going to have another one one until December.

And we might have another plutonium bomb in a month after this.

They had three.

They dropped one as they didn't drop it.

They used it in New Mexico in July 16th.

And then they had two ready and they would have had another one in a month or two.

So think about their mindset.

We've got to drop these bombs to shock them into inaction.

They did not take our surrender term.

We mined all the harbors.

They wouldn't stop.

They have no ability to have commerce.

We bombed 65% of their urban cores.

They haven't given up.

It's not only they haven't given up.

We're attacking the head of the octopus, but the tentacles are killing over 245,000 people a month.

And we just fought them in Okinawa, which was not declared secure until a month before we dropped Hiroshima.

So you've got to go to the mindset of the American people.

I was a smart,

I shouldn't use that word ass, but I thought I was really smart in high school.

We read John Hershey, and I came home to my father, who flew, as I said, 40 missions.

He was right next to the 509th composite group that dropped the bomb.

His pretty baby plane was in eyesight, and everybody got angry at the composite.

They said, they're not flying missions.

We're dying like flies flying 1,600 miles to Japan and back.

And these guys are not fighting in combat.

Well, they didn't know what they were doing.

They were training to use this super bomber to drop these bombs at some point.

So I asked him, I came home from high school.

I said, wow, dad, would you, how do we drop the bomb and kill all these people?

And he got so angry at me.

I thought he was going to.

And he said, what would you like to do?

I said, he was angry that,

think of this logic.

He said, well, we were angry.

But Victor Hansen, who we named after you, was killed on May 19th on Sugarloaf Hill.

And we knew that the bomb was going to be tested very quickly.

We know now.

So they didn't know if it was going to work, but they were pretty sure it was going to work.

So he was mad that they even went into Okinawa because they had the Mariana bases and the idea with Okinawa, they were going to be able to bomb

very quickly at 375 miles rather than 1,600, but they knew that it would be fiercely contested.

It was really the first Japanese homeland island.

And so he said, if they had just stopped, why didn't they invade two months later after they knew the bomb was going to be,

why didn't they drop it August 1st and then invade Akina?

And we wouldn't have had to go into Okinawa.

So their point was, not that we shouldn't have dropped the bomb, but we lost 50,000 casualties.

when we knew the bomb was probably going to work.

And it did work just

two months later.

The other thing is, they did not want to invade Japan.

Everybody said that.

They were very, and yes, it was true, they were terrified of the Soviets.

They had broken all the agreements at Yalta.

The war had been over since May 9th in Europe, and guess what?

They were not allowing free elections in occupied Eastern Europe.

We already knew who Stalin was.

We knew that he was going to hold on to make a North Korean communist government if he could take the whole peninsula more power to him.

We knew that he was fueling a revolution in China, that our allies and our friends that we'd given billions of dollars to and who were being butchered by the Japanese were going to flip, and we had a gut idea that Shang Kai-shek was going to lose to Mao Zedong.

Okay,

so we wanted the war over as quickly as possible.

We were terrified of the Soviets.

We did not want to lose a million people and have,

I guess you'd call it, 20 Okinawas.

The American people were sick of the war.

They were running out of soldiers.

And the alternative to the bomb, and there was an alternative, and it wasn't just the invasion, it was Curtis LeMay.

And as soon as they got into Okinawa, they were building runways on Okinawa.

And as I said earlier, with the B-29 program, they had another 2,500 B-29s on order that were being delivered.

They were going to keep the Mariana bases at Tinyin, Saipon, and Guam.

But they were going to have 2,500

four-engine bombers, and they were going to bring Lancasters and B-24s and B-17s.

There were 10,000 idle planes in the European theater.

Can you imagine 12,000 heavy bombers just 350 miles away dropping napalm?

They didn't need the bomb.

And so they were, and they would have done it in September or October.

And the bomb then saved lives.

It not only saved the invasion, it saved the Japanese people from being firebombed.

And if you think, well, why did they have to firebomb them?

After they dropped the bomb on the 6th of August, the War Cabinet, we didn't give them time.

Yes, you did give them time.

They had no intention.

They even threatened a coup after the Nagasaki bomb.

And then some people say, well, it was just gratuitous.

No, it was very tricky.

Nobody even knew if they could do it.

You had to have a modified B-29, and you had to have a genius pilot like Paul Tibbets, who was one of the best pilots in the entire Marianas B-29 force.

And he flew all the way over

with a uranium bomb that was wired to go.

And he had to fly 16 hours to Hiroshima, and he didn't know if it was going to work or not.

They had never dropped a bomb.

The one they did in New Mexico, it was a laboratory species.

It was wired.

They had no idea if it would work or not.

And they had no idea if they did drop it.

Some people said, well, why didn't they drop it in Tokyo Bay?

And then they could have seen it.

Well, they didn't know if they dropped it, they didn't know if the Japanese would say, Well, I just killed a big bunch of fish, it wouldn't have killed people.

We didn't know what you're just afraid to use it.

And when you did drop it, they didn't surrender.

They had three days, they didn't do it.

They had actually six months after the Potsdam, they were said, Don't do this, quit.

They weren't going to quit.

They wanted to kill Chinese, they wanted to kill Asians, they wanted to kill British, American, and Australian troops.

And take over in the world.

And they wanted to have India, They wanted to have this empire.

They started the war and they were not going to stop.

And so

they tried to plead with them.

And so they dropped, they didn't know the next bomb.

They didn't have another uranium bomb.

They had a plutonium bomb, Fat Man.

Little boys were, they wouldn't have another one for until December.

But they had two or three of these plutonium bombs, but no one knew if it would work.

These were very tricky.

They were wired.

They did not have a trigger mechanism.

They were live.

And Paul Tibbets did not fly Box Car the second flight.

It was by Sweeney, who was, there was not, the hardest thing to do in the Army Air Force was to be a B-29 pilot.

Experimental plane taking off on cliffs, overloaded, 1,600 miles, 30,000 feet up to drop this bomb.

And they're saying, well, they hit the civilian centers.

Why didn't they hit them?

Just the military.

These were both military targets in Nagasaki, especially Nagasaki and Iwashima.

But

are you going to take a billion-dollar bomb and at 30,000 feet think you're going to hit a base right on the edge of the ocean and go and miss the target?

Of course you're not going to do that.

Not with the Japanese who were butchering, have no such consideration.

If they're doing three Hiroshimas every month in

Japan, and no one who's criticizing you is saying,

well, the Japanese are killing three times the number they lost in Hiroshima and China.

They don't care.

The Japanese people are not protesting.

So the point is, it was very hard.

The second mission was almost an ungodly disaster.

They went to the primary target, and the three-plane armada, there were planes that were the Great Arist, and I think there's a couple of more planes that were supposed to be observer planes.

They were late.

They didn't coordinate.

They got over the target too late.

Sweeney should have gone immediately to Nagasaki.

He didn't.

He circled with this huge 10,000-pound bomb that was wired to blow up over the target.

He waited too long.

He couldn't see the target.

He made a last-split decision to go to Nagasaki.

He went there.

He didn't have the full armada.

He had exactly one bomb run over the target.

If he had missed that, he was going to run out of gas.

So he couldn't do another bomb run, and he would have had to drop the wired plutonium bomb, 18 kilotons, in the ocean or blow himself up in the whole island if he tried to land.

He wasn't even going to make it to Iwo Jima.

At this point, the only chance he had was a loaded, crowded runway on Okinawa, which was only six weeks old.

So he went over the target, and he dropped the bomb.

It was cloudy and he dropped it.

He missed the target.

It did do a lot of damage to a military base and the Mishibishi Steelworks and aircraft, because these were both military targets, even though Hiroshima didn't suffer much military damage.

Then he flies and decides, can't go to Iwo.

I'll try to go to the new runway at Okinawa, which was just swarming with planes.

So this B-29 comes in,

and he goes down the runway at full speed.

And the engine, one engine cuts out.

He gets down, the other engine's out of gas, and then he has to make a 90-degree tour.

You can imagine if he came back with that bomb, he almost would have blown up the whole island.

So

LeMay chewed him out, and he never recovered.

But the point I'm making is

when you take experimental weapons and you're trying to stop the bloodletting,

and you're flying 1,600 miles to drop them on a killing machine.

that is butchering people.

And again, read what happened on Okinawa, the type of combat that was going on there.

And you don't know if these bombs are going to work, and you don't have very many, and if you think they're going to call your buff.

And the Japanese had a dispute in the War Council.

We think they're out of them.

We've had our scientists, they said there's not enough uranium.

They were right about that.

They calibrated how much uranium the United States was producing from their espionage and

how much uranium was needed for two uranium bombs.

And they said there will not be another uranium bomb until the end of the year.

Wow.

But they didn't understand one thing, that they had a plutonium bomb, an artificially enriched radioactive material.

And they had two or three of them.

But even those would have not been ready for September.

So if the Japanese had said, we call your bluff after Nagasaki, what we were going to do?

Well, if we had dropped a bomb in Tokyo Bay, we'd only have one bomb.

And then they would have said, so what?

Then what do you do?

You wait around, or you get more Americans killed flying over to Japan or you do try to invade.

I'm sorry, but

50 years later criticizing humans and saying they should be deities because they

killed about 150,000

civilians on two military targets because they weren't very accurate with an experimental bomb from 1,600 miles away they flew attacking a country that had killed about 20 million civilians in Asia, China, and butchered American prisoners starting with the Bataan death march and beheaded people they found in the waters at Midway.

I don't think the American people had a lot of compassion for them.

No.

So

that explains why we dropped the bombs.

We're going to talk about how the war ended next time to finish World War II.

It's very interesting

how we ended up letting Russia take Berlin and and these French-British-American war zones and why Patton could not go and free Prague and why we had the ability to cross the Elbe River and maybe keep at least Czechoslovakia and why Austria, for example,

Austria and Finland were not completely dominated by communists, but they weren't part of NATO either.

And how we saved Greece and Turkey.

It was all done at the Yalta Conference, but it had a lot of criticism.

Yeah, and a lot of impact on the future of those states

after the war was over.

Victors, thank you very much.

Let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about the news.

Stay with us.

Welcome back.

So just on some small topics in the news, and was wondering your thoughts on.

We hear rumors

Ron DeSantis may replace Pete Hagseth if it doesn't look like he's got and at this point it's Wednesday night.

We haven't heard anything about Pete Hagseth leaving or

refusing the nomination.

But what are your thoughts?

Do you think that that's a good idea, Ron DeSantis?

Or do you think it's even plausible?

Are they just going to move forward with Pete Hagseth?

It's hard to know to what degree this is a trial balloon,

but

whether Trump people designed it or not, it kind of weakens Pete Hegseth's efforts to win over four or five swing rhino senators because they will vote for Ron DeSantis.

But there's a lot of things at work here that we are all confused.

I know your listeners are confused because I am, because

if you say that Ron DeSantis

will take his place, think of that for a second.

Ron DeSantis

is an Iraqi veteran.

He is an Ivy League person.

He's run an entire state.

He's been a congressperson.

He is an

Ivy League trained lawyer.

So he has a superb record

and he has the experience that Hexsex has but he also has executive but more importantly he's happily married he has three children he's an ideal family man

so he is he has a resume or profile that would appeal more to the four or five swing

the mega people think no no Victor Ron we like Ron DeSantis, but he's a politician.

We want a renegade because these people are out of control in the Pentagon.

We want somebody,

and I'm not sure Ron DeSantis is not a renegade.

I think he would decapitate DAI and woke in the Pentagon.

He's done it in Florida.

Yeah, I was going to say he's probably going to

make Chris Ruffo as chief of staff or something like that.

Say, Chris, go ahead.

Chris is a wonderful person, so it would be a great thing.

But it weakens that.

And then there's the other calculus.

What's in it for Ron DeSantis?

He's got two years left on his governorship, and then he's out.

He was traditionally the person in the primary

who loses.

The leading contender is a prime rival the next time around.

He's young.

He's in his 40s.

So given his superb record, he was re-elected overwhelmingly.

He came in second to Trump.

He beat Haley.

But what's his future?

Because J.D.

Vance is the MAGA-anointed candidate, and he's vice president.

We don't know what's going to happen to Vance.

This is all speculation, but

they might be saying to him,

I don't think you're going to be competitive now.

Ron, you're in your early 40s.

JD or something could be president for eight years and you'd only be 50-something.

So you've got a long career.

And the more you help the MAGA cause, the more you're going to be solidifying your support.

And you could get a very high profile as a Secretary of Defense and do these reforms that Pete was talking about.

And he might be horse-trading.

He might say, well, Marco Rubio left.

I get to appoint a senator and Laura Trump wants this job.

Maybe they can say, if you point Laura as this, we'll do it.

You don't know what's going on in Zachariah.

And I feel

somewhat bad for Pete Hekseth because he's fighting.

He's not going to give up.

I know him a little bit, and he's not going to give up.

He's going to fight.

His attitude is,

I know what exactly has to be done.

I can bring in the expertise to carry it out.

But what they don't have is the bulldog will that I have.

And I know much better than any other person the mind of the left.

I've written about what they've done to the Pentagon.

I've written four books on this woke stuff.

I have the vision, I have the willpower, I have the energy, the intellect, the training.

I know what the military is like.

I'm a combat veteran.

Just let me go, and I'll get the people to carry it out.

And I can win this.

I'm not going to give up.

I can win over these senators.

If the Republicans have the power, remember that.

They have 53 senators.

If they can stick together like the Democrats, I guarantee you on all of these nominations, with very few exceptions, maybe for Sinema and Joe Manchin, but they're not Democrats anymore.

They're going to be out.

They're not going to be able to vote anyway.

I mean, they're interviewing people, but they're completely irrelevant because they are out.

They're not part of the.

After January 3rd, the Senate flips and the Republicans have a 53-vote margin.

If they can just stay as disciplined as the Democrats, there will not be one Democratic senator that will defect on these controversial appointments.

And RFK and Tulsi and Pete and Cash, they will all vote against them.

Why can't the Republicans just say, you know what?

We're going to do the same thing.

Because if they're voting lockstep, no matter what the candidate is, then we're going to vote lockstep yes, no matter what the candidate is.

Because the president has a prerogative to pick his own people.

And if they can do that, Pete will be in.

But this weakens the case, this rumor monger.

And I don't know to what degree it's sanction or it's a trial balloon.

Yeah, there's a lot of momentum behind MAGA for the people, so maybe their senators will be more likely to go.

I don't think why you, yeah, I don't understand because you have, you can talk to Ron DeSantis privately and then you tell Hegseth, go ahead, but I don't think he's at the point of no return yet.

Yeah, I don't think so either.

You've got to wait another week and he may win them over.

And then you take your losses and you have, you can have Ron DeSantis, but when you bring him in prematurely, then you weaken what could be your second defeat.

I mean, he's not...

Goetz was a special Suey Ginneres.

It was a different case.

And that's not Pete Hegseth.

Yeah.

Victor, you have some, I don't know if you want to talk about it.

If you don't, you can just say no.

But you have some

plans for books

to write in the future.

And I was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about those plans or books that you are writing and or are

thinking about writing.

Yeah, I am.

And

I've been with Laura Heimert, the publisher and editor of Basic Books.

I did four books in six years.

I wrote The Second World War.

That was a big one.

It was 250,000 words.

And then I did The Dying Citizen.

And what was nice about that contract, she wanted contemporary books, but not all contemporary.

She wanted histories.

And she said to me, you are a historian, you're not just a popular contemporary pundit.

So we alternated them.

I did a book on World War II, and then I did the case for Trump, which

she was right about that.

My title, Why Trump Won, was kind of banal, they thought, by sick, so that was a more dramatic title, although I had

more problems with the title in academia.

And then I did another one, The Dying Citizen, which is contemporary, but then I finished with A History, The End of Everything.

So they have that same format.

And so

I might write a book in six months, four months, called The Return of Trump,

how the Renaissance of the MAGA Agenda, subtitle, something like that.

Yeah.

Explaining the greatest comeback in American political history, how Trump went after January 6th as persona non grata, and people were disowning him and crashing him, the January 5th losses in Georgia, and how and why he was able to make this amazing comeback,

why he won the 2024 election.

over enormous odds and the implementation.

And I'll be writing the implementation as it unfolds in January and February if I do this.

And then the second one, I've already written it.

It's called The Lost Agrarian World or Growing Up in an Agrarian Society.

I have different titles, but it's about

reminiscence about

growing up free-range.

In other words,

what it was like to be on 135 acre farm with people who ran it from the 19th century, my grandparents.

And they're talking non-stop about their parents and their grandparents who lived in the house that I'm in now and all of the lore.

Things like,

Victor,

you better house up.

The wind change that's coming from the south.

The birds are now in the trees.

We're going to have a big whopper storm and we've got the raisins out.

That natural world that you were told or your mother saying at six years old.

Okay,

put your shoes on.

You're not allowed to go near the paved road.

We'll see you at 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

On your way, stop by and talk to the hired man.

Check in with him, Manuel.

Go see Joe Carey, Native American, great guy who grew up with us.

He was a hired man.

I want you down at your grandparents.

Check in there for milk and cookies and your grandparents.

And then be sure you help your grandfather pick walnuts or persimmons.

And I was six or seven.

And then the idea of turning over, I don't know, a 22,

we call it a carnival gun.

It was 1896 Winchester pump.

I was seven or eight years old.

Whoa, really?

Yes.

I was given this list.

Do not ever shoot a mockingbird.

Do not ever shoot a predator bird.

You can shoot a crow.

You can shoot a blackbird.

You can shoot a blue jay.

You can shoot a squirrel.

You can shoot a jackrabbit.

Ask your grandparents if you can shoot the cottontails.

If you do, you have to eat them and skin them.

And you can shoot possums.

Wait, can I ask a question?

There was no worry from them that a young seven-year-old would start to shoot at something and he wouldn't realize what was behind it.

Like it may have been a human or something.

I was seven years old, and I had to go to hunter safety at Reedy College.

Oh, okay.

And we had to take the whole course my father made us, and then he drilled it into us.

You point your gun down or you point it straight up.

You never point it level.

You never have a bullet in a chamber,

even until the moment you're firing.

And, you know, a.22 short can kill a person and go a mile.

But I also had

a.22 pellet and a 177 caliber.

And you can crank those things up so they have almost the same velocity in those old pellet guns.

I had that.

I used to shoot possums with a pellet gun.

Wow.

And then we had shotguns, but we were fully hunting at 9 or 10.

And then, you know what happened?

I started shooting rabbits a lot.

I give it to my grandparents.

They would cook them, and Saturday night my grandfather would dress them up.

But

they shriek when you hit them.

I didn't know that when I was young, and then I would start shooting them, and they'd go,

and it just was eerie.

And then

I would shoot doves and quail, and then something happened when I'm 12 or 14,

and I never shot again.

I just said, I'm done.

I couldn't take it any longer.

I shot a lot of stuff.

Yeah.

And

I

and the only thing I ever shot since are flicker woodpeckers that destroy the barn.

They go in there and they make huge holes, and I'll go out and shoot them.

Even then, I

we have all these blackbirds.

I wrote an article, they just come and they defecate over every, I'd like to shoot them, but I don't want to.

So I kind of got sick of it.

And I have a whole upstairs with, you know, I've got a.306,

I still have my dad's armor-piercing, armor-piercing.30 caliber machine gun bullets he got from Warsaplus when he came out of the Army.

Can't really shoot it in the gun because it heats up and it's bad for the barrel.

I've got an 1896, as I said, 22.

I've got

an 1894

Springfield 12-gauge shotgun.

Yeah.

I just gave, I was giving a talk to a wonderful group of wood chippers, the Wood Chippers Association, and they gave me a present and I got to the airport and I opened it and it was a Beretta shotgun.

Wow.

And I didn't know how to get through security.

So they came, they actually accompanied me and met me at the airport and got me through.

And then I gave it to my son-in-law.

He just moved up near Auburn.

And they've got coyotes and everything that they're afraid about their pets and kids.

So I have a lot of guns.

I think I have nine of them.

I have a Flintlock gun.

My friend Larry Woodlock made it.

And he was a gunsmith, as well as being a brilliant classicist.

So that book is all about these stories of growing up and working on the farm and the ethos that you, and that it's gone, it's completely gone.

This is all corporate agriculture.

Nobody lives on their farms anymore.

It's economically unfeasible to be a 40-acre, 100-acre farmer.

And then the third one,

oh, it's getting me tired thinking of trying to write all this at 71, but there was a famous classical general, Apaminondas of Thebes, and I wrote a novel once called The End of Sparta about him.

I've written a lot of refereed academic articles about him, and I don't think anybody wants to read them.

They're very esoteric in classical philology, books like

classical antiquity.

But I'm going to write a biography of him because I think he's in antiquity people thought he was the most important man,

more important than Pericles,

more than Alexander.

Cicero, who was looking back 400 years earlier, called him Princeps Graeciae, the first man of Greece.

And he did the impossible.

He

overthrew the oligarchy at Thebes.

He made it a democracy.

He then created a huge Pan-Hellenic army.

He marched down in the mid-winter.

He destroyed the Spartan army at Leuctra.

He went down into the Vale of Laconia.

He tried to burst into Sparta and cross the Eurotus River.

They turned him back at the last moment.

He went over the Mount Tyegetus, which is 6,000-something feet.

He went into the Spartan Helot Messenia.

He destroyed the Spartan Guardians.

He freed 250,000 Mycenaeans.

He built these three fortified cities.

You can go there today.

Mantinea,

Megalopolis, and Mycenae, these huge cities.

And they made them democratic, and the Messenes ex-Holots.

And then he invaded three more times.

and he emasculated Sparta, whether that was wise or not, because they really needed the Spartans.

There is a deity, and there was always Nemesis.

The sad thing is, 40 years later, when Alexander the Great came and conquered Greece, Thebes revolted.

Wait, didn't Philip II

died?

But he did, but when he died, his son Alexander invaded Thebes in 335, and they needed help.

But you could argue that Epaminondas 40 years later destroyed the Spartan army and the Spartan system.

There were no Spartans that were able to help them.

And the Athenians are Athenians.

And so

Thebes was raised to the ground.

But it's a fascinating story about him.

And I want to try to write one last history book.

But

it's easy to say you're going to write books.

And it's another thing to spend 6,000 hours of your life.

That's what it takes.

It takes about 2,000 hours if you think about it.

And you get older and you're...

Those hours are valuable.

Well, I mean, when I was younger, I would teach four classes at Cal State Fresno.

I would teach from 8 to 5.

I'd come home.

I'd do an hour of tractor work.

Then I'd go inside, three kids to help raise, and then I'd go up,

I don't know, 9 o'clock and start drinking Dr.

Pepper and write for three hours.

And then correct papers the next morning and four or five hours' sleep.

It was easy.

Yeah.

But not now.

Yeah, it's harder, much harder.

Well, I don't know if I I want to do that, but that's what I'm, I think I'm going to do it if I can.

I have a wonderful agent, Glenn Hartley and Lin Chu.

It's funny.

I was their third client.

It was a wonderful man.

I really worshipped him, Donald Kagan.

He was a classics professor at Yale, very famous.

I got to know him.

He was one of the nice.

And then Stephen Osmond was a professor at Harvard.

They were just...

So nice to me, and they were wonderful people, teachers.

They were not like most academics.

They were very conservative, too.

And I was the third

client of a new agent, Glenn Hartley, and I've been with him

30 years.

We've never had a contract.

We've never signed anything.

And

I get offers, you know, to go to different, I've always honored that my handshake 30 years ago with him.

He's done every single book that I've sold.

Yeah.

And he's a wonderful agent, and so is his wife.

Well, Victor, thank you for that today.

I know that we're on a hard break here, so break, a hard ending.

So thanks to the audience.

We appreciate each and every one of you for joining us today.

We had a lot of different topics today.

I didn't know you were going to ask these questions about my books.

I should have deferred.

They're mirrored.

I haven't sold them yet.

I don't know if anybody wants them.

We're negotiating.

You gave the game away, Sammy.

It's good to put the ideas out there, even if they don't come to fruition.

But I have a feeling they won't.

Well, I don't want to because

when I was on tenure committees, I was always, the candidate would come in and they'd say, you have three books here.

And he said, in progress, in preparation.

And I said, well, then don't put the title down if it hasn't been written and published.

Well, it's under consideration.

It's out for review.

And you're so tenure.

And then when you would tenure them, if you were stupid enough to do that, and we always were, then the book never appeared.

Yes, but we're not applying to our audience for a job, so we're okay.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks to everybody for joining us today.

Thank you, everybody.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Hampson, and we are signing off.