WWII Peripheral Wars and Post-Election Shake Up

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show and to our weekend edition.

We like to look at something cultural, or in this case, it will be warfare.

We've been working on World War II, and Victor's going to talk about some of the peripheral wars during World War II in the middle segment.

So please stay with us for that and we're going to be looking at, of course, as we always do some of the most recent news.

It appears that LA Times has fired their entire editorial staff so we'll start with that.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

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

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Lots of good stuff there, either for free, so come have a look.

And then there is, of course, the subscription material, the VDH Ultra articles, $5 a month or $50 a year.

So, Victor, it appears that the LA Times has replaced or is replacing its entire editorial staff.

I find that encouraging.

You do?

I think.

I don't know.

Are they just going to hire on the same people?

Well, you know, it's this multi-billionaire, Patrick Soon Xiong,

and his radical, radical daughter took it over.

They used to pick up my syndicated column.

In fact, from time to time, they actually would ask me for a special op-ed.

So they were left-wing, but they were not crazy.

I can't forgive them, though.

I know that I've talked about the USC president.

By the way, the USC president just resigned.

She did, and that was a disaster.

USC had miraculously, under the prior two presidents, Max Nicias, my friend, and the prior president, it had raised so much money and had raised so

the GRE,

the SAT scores and graduate and undergraduate, the GPAs, it was more exclusive than UCLA and it was getting right near Stanford, if not the same.

And

it was just on a massive fundraising drive.

And then when they had that incident about the gynecologist, which, by the way, they never prosecuted him, but

they went after the president because he had turned it over to an internal

committee and they wanted the DA right in on it.

And the DA, of course, eventually came on it and found no actionable cause.

So I think he's passed away now, but they never convicted him of anything.

So my point is that

I was overseas when this happened,

but

the LA Times just demagogued that case.

They were horrible.

You know what I mean?

The reporters, they were just making up stuff and going after USC.

It was terrible.

And they do that.

And during the forest fires, they were printing op-eds about biologists that said that this was, you know, that grubs and worms and dead trees were all part of the ecosystem, even though they fed the fire.

They were just insane is what I'm saying.

And

they lost a lot of their subscribers, you know, hundreds of thousands of them.

And nobody reads it.

And it used to be a very good paper, the Chandler family, you know, it was conservative.

So it's a disaster.

And this is just part of a wider trend, isn't it?

MSNBC,

I don't know how long they're going to have that racist joyread there, but she is down to about 700 or 800,000 people.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So nothing.

You know, an average Fox anchor in a comparable time period gets 3 million.

Yeah.

So

and she's just driving people away on the left.

Nobody other than the left watches it, but when you just say race, race, race, white, white, white, white, uneducated people, stupid, stupid, stupid, like she does all the time,

and they lose money.

So it's just a question these corporate left-wing conglomerates were always willing to lose a little money jeff bezos maybe 20 million not 100 million cnn not 100 million msnbc not 150 million and so why would you we talked about that before anderson cooper and all those people yeah and so this election as i said in an op-ed was about the people who lecture and the people who get lectured to.

And the people who got lectured to say, I'm done with you people.

Even Matthew Iglesias, and I've had a run-in with him before, the left, left, left-wing

writer, he came out with a manifesto the other day and said, we have to treat people the way we want to be treated.

We have to worry about the middle class.

We don't, the transgender

fixation is a dead end politically.

It was amazing.

So

I think everybody on the left is saying, we did this before with McGovern,

and then we didn't learn our lesson,

and we ran Jimmy Carter, and he got in only because of Watergate, and then we screwed up, and he was gone, and then we got 12 years of Reagan Bush, and then we came back, and that was because of Dick Morris and Bill Clinton.

And Dick Morris was a stealthy advisor.

Then he came out overtly.

That was, you know, I just want to say that, sister soldier, how dare you bring up race like that?

That's That's racist.

And then, you know, he said, and I want 100,000 police officers.

I want night basketball.

I want uniforms.

And it was all, and we, what is it about illegal immigration you don't understand?

We're going to close the border.

And we want legal, but we don't want illegal.

We've got to protect our workers.

That was the union, you know.

And he won.

He didn't win the majority.

He never won 50% of the vote.

I mean, because of Ross Perot, et cetera.

And he defeated, as you know, Bush and Dole.

and the Democratic Party was on its way, and then it started going, yee, and Bush came in.

And then the Obama thing was different.

You can't really define that politically because of his novel status and the first black person, the exotic name.

I mean, if he had been Barry Sortero, which he went by for years.

Anyway, that's a whole different story.

They are in McGovern territory now, and they're going to have to reboot and renounce all of that.

And they've got a bigger problem now because the demography is changing and the AOC people and the squad and

to rein in those lunatics,

they'll never go back to where they were.

You don't think so?

I hope you're right because what amazes me is they always just stopped short of just admitting they were a bunch of liars.

And now they're on to the accusation of there's going to be mass deportations and families.

What are your thoughts on the current?

I think there was something called mass importations, and no one said a word.

Do they care about the black people in Chicago that couldn't get medical services or get to the ER or any of that stuff when they brought in thousands of illegal aliens?

Do they care about the people along the Rio Grande River communities that suddenly had to have bilingual education?

They had gang members, they had cartels.

Do they care about the parents of the 100,000 people who were killed from fentanyl overdoses?

Why this administration let China just send in fentanyl raw product to the cartels who then smuggled across in the Joe Biden influ?

No.

Do they care about the San Joaquin Valley communities that have been saturated by illegals?

No.

They didn't care at all.

None of these people did.

They broke the law when they came in.

They broke it the law when they resided.

They broke the law with their phony IDs.

So

they just, you know, I wrote a book, The Dying Citizen, but I didn't think it would be this mad that a citizen would have to get a real ID and go through all these hoops to get it, and then somebody who broke the law would just cut in front of them in an airport and be flown by the U.S.

government at

taxpayers' expense.

So that is the aberration.

And

they're outrageous.

We'll get used to it because there were 20 million illegal aliens here before this happened.

10 million in California alone has half of them.

That's a quarter of the population.

But this was 12 million on top of that.

And when you talk about people in general of all statuses, you got 16% of the nation was not born in the United States.

That's 55, 60 million people.

We've never been here before.

Never been here before.

Not during the Irish influx, not during the Eastern European,

never.

So

they didn't care about the consequences on anybody of the middle class.

And we saw that with the Martha's Vineyard fiasco.

So they're going to be graduated.

So they're going to go after the criminals first with

any time they can pick one up in the data bank that's committed a crime in their home country or here.

And that could be anywhere from 300 to 500,000.

Then they're going to go after the people who are not working or in gangs or something, or they're on public assistance.

That will probably be two or three million.

Where they're going to get in trouble, and I don't want to use that word, is

the people who have been here

three years maybe, the first cohort, and they're working and they're not on public assistance and they haven't committed a crime.

And that will be a little bit, the employers will go after the administration and they're going to have to deport some of them.

What they need to do as they deport the 12 million that came in under Biden, they need to first of all change the rhetoric and just say, we didn't want to do this.

We don't want to do it, but we have to.

Otherwise, we have no law.

Sort of remorseful, but tough.

And we're not going to back down.

But of course, we were put in this position by Kamala Harris and Joe biden and they put us in an impossible situation because if we don't do this we have no law why if somebody gets a parking ticket or gets a traffic ticket why should he pay a fine when these people committed felonies and they get off scot-free so they have to do that and they also then have to emphasize fentanyl fentanyl fentanyl cartels cartels cartels cartels people who are not working not working not working all the time and then when they get to the 20 million that have been here from 10 to 15 years, they need to say, look,

if you've been here, let's say five years, maybe 10, and you haven't broken the law, and you're not on public assistance, and you're working, and you have no criminal record, you can go through a process where you pay a nominal fine for your crime.

You can stay here and apply for a green card, not a citizenship.

That's a lengthy process.

Then you have to get in the back of the line behind legal applicants.

And I think that if they did that simultaneously, all that,

they could get rid of the 12 million.

They could

return them to sender.

There's 25,000 Chinese nationals.

I say that because there was an odd story by an Australian security analyst because Mark Milley blathered along with Austin, when the Chinese balloon with impunity traversed the United States and it seemed to hover over strategic bases and

military sites, they said, well, we looked at the data and there was no international transmissions.

I don't know if that's true or not.

But this analyst pointed out that a lot of the controls of

A lot of the controls and the data transmissions of that type of balloon are directed from the ground in the immediate vicinities.

And her argument was, you better go check the transmissions of Chinese nationals, of which there's 300,000 students, to see if they were receiving.

If you have 1%, you've got 3,000 people who are actively operatives of the Chinese government.

And her point was a lot of that information may have been transmitted to people who deliberately were in the vicinity.

And

the other thing is there were 26,000 Chinese nationals that came in under this influx.

We don't know who they are.

How could anybody leave communist China, which is a totalitarian

Orwellian society and the government not know?

Do you think you just get in the middle in your mainland China, you just leave, and the government goes, oh, we have nowhere, we don't know who they are, no.

They either have to get permission or they were known to leave and they didn't do anything about it.

Which begs the question, who are these people?

We don't know.

They're coming from, I mean, our enemy.

China is a de facto enemy.

Do you think in 1936,

we weren't an enemy of Germany yet, but we knew what Germany was about.

Do you think if 10,000 German nationals, not Jewish, German nationals, members, maybe some of them of the Nazi Party, came to the United States, we wouldn't be worried about it?

So

it's something, and

they're going to have to address it.

And I think Tom Holman's the perfect person to do it.

Obama used to praise him to the skies because when Obama lost the midterms of 2010,

one of the issues was illegal immigration.

And he flipped for a while.

If you remember,

his speech as late as 2012 at the convention was that they had to enforce the law.

Then he became woke and he said, you know, they're going to pick up poor little kids on the street and they're going to terrorize.

But before that,

he adopted the Clinton Pelosi 1990s view of illegal immigration.

And the thing that's going to really change it is they don't have to

just say to the 600 sanctuary jurisdictions, the cities and states that say that they're not going to cooperate or they're going to nullify federal law.

They say, well, you have a choice.

You have a choice.

You can either

forego federal assistance, which won't be coming for you, because

you're defying the law.

So you don't want federal assistance.

You're not going to get it except except in times of emergencies.

Or

they can say, well, if you want to selectively to enforce the law and you do not want sanctuary cities to be sanctions for violating federal law in South Carolina fashion of 1832, then we're going to apply that across the board.

So all you red states, if you want to just violate federal gun registration laws, just go and buy a.44 Magnum and take it home with you.

No No back.

That's what we're going to do.

And you know what?

If you're going to build something, there's no such thing as a federal endangered species list anymore.

And you know the EPA, inland waterways, declaring little ponds?

No, you can just ignore that.

That's where we're headed.

Yeah, absolutely.

Victoria.

Oh, go ahead.

Well, it's all about the hypocrisy of the left.

They always want one standard for them, sanctuary cities, but not for other people.

We're going to be neo-Confederates and nullify the law, but you are insurrectionists if you do.

It's like her campaign.

You know, we were talking last time about Oprah.

It says that she got a million, but it went to her company.

And now we learn that Megan the Stallion got $5 million.

And the woman who did toenail

manicures got $5,000.

Megan, she got $5 million.

And then we've learned that this rapper got $15,000.

And it all becomes clear now.

Gladiaga, they were just hiring people people to endorse.

They basically said, because they all endorsed them, they didn't just play at these concerts, but Mon Jovi.

So it was sort of like, hey, Victor, we know what your speaking fee is.

We'll give you a lot of money.

Just show up at a Trump rally and give a lecture and endorse him, and we'll pay you.

And that's really, and especially if you're a journalist, it's really unethical.

And then they looked at

these affidavits you have to to fill out when you're campaigning expenditures.

They were using private jets like crazy.

This is the Green Party that believes in carbon footprints are destroying the planet.

And they were just flying all over.

All these operatives were.

And she went through a billion dollars.

I mean, they had a billion and a half under Biden because he had been running for office for a year.

Well, that was all gone.

I think he only had $100 million he turned over to her.

But she had a billion dollars in 100 days.

Think of that.

She was going through,

you know,

she was going through 100,000 bucks a day.

And

that was not the PACs.

That was another billion dollars.

The political action committee.

This was just her campaign.

And so

what do you think the donor's attitude?

Oh,

I really like paying Cardi B $5 million.

We needed a toenail specialist.

We needed to get a lot of net jets to jet these people all around privately.

I don't think they're going to like that.

I don't think they're going to give the tools.

Now she's talking about running for governor for Newsome.

I don't think that's going to work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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So Victor, in addition to the quagmire in immigration that has to be solved by the Trump administration.

Apparently, our Lloyd Austin, who is probably on his way out, wrote a memo and in which he said,

as it always has,

the U.S.

military will stand ready to carry out the policy of the next commander-in-chief, and, and here's the catch here, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command, as though they're going to give it yeah you think they would have done that when biden came in all lawful orders lawful lawful meaning we're going to we're right back to where we were in 2017 when rosa brooks a former pentagon lawyer wrote something for foreign policy where she said as i've quoted a number of times that was 11 days after the inauguration when she said we've got to get rid of trump 25th amendment too slow too slow

impeachment too slow military coup all we have to say is if he sends a order that you don't think is lawful, if you don't think it's lawful.

So basically, he's basically emphasizing that all of the officers of the U.S.

military will make a judgment if an order is lawful.

And where does that lead to?

That leads to Mark Milley bragging in the Woodward book, but I think he's since confirmed that under congressional cross-examination, that if he...

Dr.

Milley and Barrister Milley feels that Donald Trump was unhinged and gave him an order and his constitutional expertise was not lawful, then he called up his Chinese counterpart and said, you know what?

I've got a president that's unsteady and he may break our Constitution.

And when he does, I will call you first.

Where does that lead?

That would be, we just sentenced that Texera fellow for, what, 15 years

for giving away,

you know,

breaking out classified information and disseminating it.

And what if he had said, well, I thought it was a lawful order?

I thought that it was, and we just found this CIA analyst that had leaked all of the, not all of it, but some pertinent information that the United States government had about the nature of the Israeli attack to come on Iran.

And I guess he could say now, well, I did it because I felt that it was a lawful order.

You can see where that leads.

And so that's why Pete Hesse Heseth is there, because he knows what he has.

He has all of these self-righteous people in the Pentagon that have vastly abused

rules, regulations, uniform code of military justice, and

ethics.

Now we know the symptoms of that.

The symptoms of that is we are short 155 millimeter million shares by year.

We are behind

seven years in restoring our javelin missiles.

We can't build submarines on surfer ships.

We don't have the capacity to do it.

What needs to be done?

We

know from the Ukraine war and the Middle East conflicts that we're in a new age of cheap stuff, just like World War II.

Cheap stuff, lots of it.

Lots of Sherman tanks, don't build a Suit King Tiger.

Don't do it.

Lots of four-engine B-24s and B-17s,

bang for the buck, 20 times cheaper than a V-1 or V-2 rocket.

Lots, lots, lots of

P-51s, P-47 fighters, great fighters, not so much ME-262 jets.

That's what won the war.

Lots of good stuff, and yet we're not building...

cheap $4,000 or $5,000 drones.

We should have remote platforms at sea, maybe with a skeleton crew and on their flat deck.

They should have a thousand drones, right?

All automated.

We should have drone

submarine.

We should have all of that, but in huge numbers.

And we don't.

And part of the problem we don't is what we're talking about the Pentagon.

Not only do we have people who

have obstructed orders like Milley and others,

But we have a whole retired group of generals that are out of control.

When you have General Hayden, and

he's tweeting that Donald Trump is like the architects of Auschwitz for building cages, which he didn't build, Obama built.

And we have General McCaffrey that says that the president is a liar or Mussolini.

That was McChrystal, said he was a liar, and McCaffrey said he was Mussolini, and I could go on and on.

And that is completely out of control because they're all subject to Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Military Justice.

And then we have Austin, who's giving these lectures.

He came right out of Raytheon.

Big surprise, where he's going to go when he's going to be out in January.

Where do you think he's going to go?

I bet you he's going to go right back to Raytheon.

And then he's going to say to Raytheon, I got a lot of subordinates in procurement.

All I got to do is pick up the phone.

And we can get, you know, more Patriot batteries

with their one or two million dollar missiles.

Yeah.

So it's corrupt.

And

the DEI where you

basically

predicate promotion, retention, tenure in the military on the basis of what?

Your race, your gender, your sexual orientation.

Not the old days where you make sure that nobody uses those for negative reasons or to hurt people.

Now we're using it in just the opposite but still racist fashion.

And that means we're not looking at military utility and meritocracy.

Think the Chinese do that?

No.

No.

Russians do that?

No.

And

I'm not suggesting their militaries are better than ours, but we need to get back to merit.

We need to tell our commanding officers, if you want to be a four-star general or admiral, you're not going to go right out at retirement at 55 or 60 and go make $20 million advising your new employers how best to sell their junk, not junk in the sense of bad, but their stuff, to the Pentagon.

We're going to have open, overt, transparent procurement, and we're going to go in a new direction of quantity rather than so-called quality of, you know, that takes years to build and too few numbers to make a difference.

And I think we're going to have to have a big shake-up there, and that's why we have Pete Heckseth, and I'll see what he does.

And the thing, you know, we talked about that last podcast.

They're going crazy about Getz, and I'm not a big fan of that appointment, just because I don't know if he has the expertise and the prosecutorial experience

and tried and true record of successful prosecutions as a lawyer to go after what he needs to go after to be an effective advocate for the United States people which would be to stop the weaponization of the DOJ but we'll see I want to withhold judgment but my point is these people are so self-righteous

And they keep yelling and screaming the last 72 hours.

And,

you know, Austin was a very good Pete Heckseth.

Look at the.

No, Austin, as I said last time, he was AWOL.

For seven days, he didn't tell people that he was not in control of the Department of Defense.

He oversaw, whether he wants to admit it or not, expelling people from the military who had COVID and natural immunity because they did not trust the mRNA vaccination.

8,500.

He was the one that testified about endemic racism and demagogued that issue

and didn't tell people that their own Pentagon studies saw no organized white racist cabal.

And then he did not release the data on the people who are short in recruitment, and that are white males from the middle class.

So he's done a lot in Afghanistan, of course.

He never took full responsibility to that.

He should have resigned at that.

He should have said, Mr.

President, if you pull out just to meet a September 11th, 20-year anniversary, so you can demagogue that you were the big guy that got it.

You're going to get people killed, and we're going to lose a billion-dollar embassy, a $300 million

rehab, Bagram Air Force Base, and $50 to $70 billion in military equipment.

Don't do it.

And he did it.

And if he had said that, Biden might not have done it.

And then if he did it anyway, he should have resigned.

Yeah.

Victor, we need to go to a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit more about World War II and the peripheral wars in World War II.

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

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This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show and

you can find Victor on X, and his handle is at VD Hansen, and then also on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So, Victor, I'm looking forward to this, just like last week, because we don't hear a whole lot about the peripheral wars.

So,

go ahead.

I'm excited to hear about it.

Thanks, Sammy.

Remember, we are trying to work through conflicts, and the biggest conflict in history was World War II.

So, in a series of eight or nine previous segments, we've talked about what caused World War II, the outbreak of World War II, the respective strengths and liabilities of the Axis and the Allies, and then

the air campaign, the Blitz, invasions of Poland, invasions of France, and then the...

We spent two segments on the Russian front.

We're basically, if you think the Russian front went from June 22nd, 1941, all the way to the fall of Berlin on May 8th or 9th of 1945.

What was happening during this Russian quagmire in the Pacific and in Europe?

Let's look at it.

So the bombing campaign, as I said earlier, was the effort from April 1942

until D-Day of June 6th, 1944, to offer the Soviets some type of relief.

That is, they were not able to go into France on the ground, so they were going to

draw off from Russian pressures

German assets.

Okay,

but that wasn't all they did.

And we talked about it.

It wasn't as effective as they had planned until mid-44 with the advent of fighter escorts and

drop tanks or fighters for long distance, the capture of France, so you had friendly territory to fall,

to fly over.

And then changes in radar and improvements in aircraft, the Lancaster coming online, improved versions of the B-17 and 24, et cetera.

But

what was striking is that

Pearl Harbor's December 7th, we were completely unready for the war.

And yet,

11 months later, the United States and Britain decide to attack Vichy France as the first campaign.

Now, the Americans kept saying, well, this is not what we did in World War I.

We went right into France.

We landed 2 million people.

And

we got the war over with basically in a year and a half.

And the French said, yes, and we had France then, and the British were here, and the Germans never got 80 miles.

They own France now.

So you're going to have to make an amphibious landing, and that requires naval supremacy and we don't have it given the U-boat menace and the pins from the French coast, the U-boat pins.

And more importantly we don't even have air supremacy which is crucial for an amphibious landing.

So the Americans are pushing, pushing, pushing.

The British remember the Somme.

and Passchendaele and World War I, and they remember the defeat of France in World War II and they said, you don't know, you've never fought the German army.

So the Americans say, okay, what do you want to do?

Well, let's go divorce the Vichy's from

Germany.

And so the idea is that you can't assault the mainland of Europe and head into

veteran German territory, German-occupied, but maybe on the periphery you can do

some good.

And one would be to knock off

Vichy France from the Axis

alliance.

Remember, these are the conquered French who

still own their colonies.

Now,

in Indochina, it's been appropriated by the Japanese, but they are nominally still on the side of the Axis under General Petan.

So, just 11 months later, they have this huge convoy.

Some come from Britain, and

they land all the way from

Algiers, Algeria,

800 miles

east at pretty much where Casablanca is in Morocco.

So it's a huge front and the convoy, the so-called Western task force, leaves the east coast of the United States and sails 3,000 miles to drop off 30,000 troops.

And then in the middle,

between Casablanca and Algiers, at Oran, they're going to bring a task force, an American task force from Britain, and then another British, largely British, and go all the way to the east at Algiers.

It's a huge effort.

This is the first time we've ever met German troops.

The Vichys are supposed to fight with Germans.

Within a week, the Vichys have flipped.

They have given some stout initial resistance, and then they think, you know what, we want to be on the Allied side.

George Patton was in charge of the, he's only a major general, a two-star general.

He was in charge of the Western Task Force.

He makes very good progress.

However,

probably the worst general in American history was Lloyd Friedenhall.

And he's commander of the Center Force.

It's kind of stagnates.

And then

he creates a massive bunker 50 miles behind the front line so he can be safe.

People had suggested he was drinking.

He was Ike's guy.

Ike said he looks like a general.

He talks like a general.

He was one of the, along with General Lucas, one of the most incompetent American generals.

And at the Kaiserine Pass,

3,000 Americans are killed, they're routed, Rommel defeats them, and they make a lot of changes.

And the great change they made was to get rid of Reid and Hall and bring in a true military genius to command the center force,

Lucian Truscott.

And then George W.

Patton is put in command of all Allied troops in the North African campaign.

And they start to move all the way into Tunisia and they're meeting, remember at the Battle of El Alamein, in the first battle in July and then August, September, Montgomery has defeated it and the British are coming from the east and they're going to meet the Americans from the west in Tunisia

and by July 1943 all Axis troops will either be evacuated or captured.

And the captured number was larger than Stalingrad, 250,000.

One of the ironies was that there was a time with the fall of Tobruk

in summer 1942

that Rommel, he inherited

5,000, 6,000 trucks, tanks, artillery, rations, oil.

gas, everything, lubricants, water, he got everything, and he was on his way to El Alamein, and he would have taken it

in the first battle.

Had the Germans backed him, and they said, No, no, no, no, you know, we're stuck, we're doing the case blew, we're doing the big invasion of this Army Group South in the Soviet Union, we're going to the oil fields.

Rommel said, I have

a better trajectory.

I can go right through, take the Suez Canal, cut off all British imports through the Mediterranean, and get into Saudi Arabia.

And they said, no, no, no, no, no.

And they didn't supply him.

He lost the Second Battle of Al-Alamein and then Montgomery met the Americans.

And then what?

In July, almost immediately, this was Operation Torch.

Then they went right into Operation Husky and they took Sicily.

Pat, remember, was a subordinate commander to Montgomery, and he was supposed to go to Palermo and stay in the west of the island.

Then he made a what-you turn along the coast and got to Messina quicker than the British.

And yet the British and the Americans, no fault to George Patton, let the majority of the 300,000 German troops get into Italy.

And then we had

the invasion of Italy very quickly in August, September.

The British went on the eastern side of the Apennine Mountains.

The Americans went on the western side.

And unfortunately,

The British had good commanders,

especially

Alexander, who was our theater commander.

We had terrible commanders.

General Lucas stopped on the beaches

when

the road to Naples, and then later we stopped on the beaches outside of Danzio.

And Mark Clark did not take the Gothic line.

He was if you look at it, he could have easily taken

German lines and been behind the retreating Germans instead of on this very day, 4th of July, he wanted the glory of taking Rome exactly like Kesserlin had thought he would do.

And the result is we're going to have a million British and American troops, we're going to have 80,000

dead,

and we're never going to get to the Austrian border.

And by

August, September, they've thought up this crazy idea, at least the Americans and the British in Italy thought so, of diverting almost what would become a million men to invade southern France, Saint-Topaz, and there, and then go up and get the Mediterranean ports of Marseille and Toulon so that they could bring in supplies.

But the problem was once they landed,

and they were very successful, but

the

Averane-Falaise Gap campaign had already transpired.

And guess what?

The Americans and the British were already pretty much

eastward, so that that southern landing at France just met them up.

It didn't trap German troops from the rear, but it did free up the Rhone Valley, and they had Mediterranean ports.

And then they were set,

they were on their way under George Patton, they were on their way, and Montgomery and Omar Bradley, they were on their way to the German border by late 1944.

So

let me just recap.

The idea was the Allies were going to gain experience and they were going to knock out

two of the

key allies of Germany, the Vichy French in North Africa and the Italians.

Did they succeed?

Yes.

They flipped the Vichy French.

with Operation Torch in North Africa, then by taking Sicily immediately there was a coup and the Italians declared allegiance to the Allies.

Mussolini was dethroned.

He went up and created some puppet socialist government up in northern, near Milan.

But everybody thought the war would be over, and guess what?

The Germans then under Hitler decided to put a million men in Italy and to fight a bloody defensive war.

And it never panned out.

What never panned out?

Churchill's idea of attacking the underbelly of Europe and getting into

Eastern Europe before the Soviets.

He didn't trust Stalin.

He thought that if they were occupying Eastern Europe, then the Russians wouldn't be able to take over

Hungarian land, Romanian land, Polish land, Czech land.

And he was right about that.

They did break their word, and

it's too bad that they couldn't have got through to Austria.

At the same time,

after Pearl Harbor, the Americans thought they had to do something in the Pacific, but they only had three carriers: Lexington, Enterprise, and Saratoga.

They wouldn't get the Hornet and Wasp till later at Pearl Harbor.

And the first six months were an utter disaster.

We lost Wake Island.

The Japanese took Singapore in February.

We lost the Corregidor, Philippines, Bataan by

April.

We were completely defeated.

There was a series of naval battles where the Dutch fleet was destroyed, the Australian fleet was neutered, the British and the Americans were defeated for the first six months of the war.

The Battle of Jalvasi, which is now Indonesia, we were just a disaster, underman,

under-shipped, so to speak.

We only had one bright spot.

We had a genius named Jimmy Doodle who figured out how to take B-25s, medium bombers, and take the off from an aircraft carrier, the Hornet, with the Enterprise, and they had bombed 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.

Remember that book?

And that had terrified the Japanese, even though the actual damage was marginal.

So the main components of the Japanese fleet were now mobilized to destroy what they thought was the American fleet before

this huge building program could be actualized.

Remember, when the war started, thanks to Carl Vinson and the Vinson Naval Acts, we had, and thanks to Franklin Roosevelt, we had created a fleet on paper that would be the largest fleet in the world and would be larger than all of the other fleets combined.

And we're talking 25 Essex carriers, what would be 120 light and escort carriers,

the North Carolina and Iowa-class battleships, best in the world, a huge submarine fleet, cruisers, heavy cruisers, but they were all under construction.

And we were dealing with the assets we had, the 1935-38 fleet, and it was outgunned and outmanned by the Japanese.

So they wanted to finish us off before and then create an iron wall, so to speak, in the Pacific so we couldn't and they were going to take Pearl Harbor as well.

The first item was taking Australia and they bombed Darwin and then they were going to land in New Guinea.

And then the Americans got

Lexington, and they had Yorktown.

Yorktown and Hornet and Wasp were small carriers.

They were fleet carriers, but they were about 20 tons.

Saratoga and Lexington had been battlecruisers.

They were large, 35,000 tons.

And Saratoga was torpedoed at the Battle of Coral Sea of June 4th to 6th, right

off New Guinea between Australia and the Coral Sea.

Believe it or not, the Americans got a tie.

They stopped the invasion.

They sank a light carrier.

They lost the

famous Lexington was

bombed and blew up, torpedoed as well.

The Yorktown was heavily damaged, and they brought it back to Hawaii.

The Japanese had a damaged fleet carrier and they had

so many naval losses that they were not able to field six fleet carriers that had appeared just six months earlier at Pearl Harbor.

But under Yamamoto, they said, now we have to do something.

After the Doolittle Raid and after Coral Sea, we've got to lure the Americans out and have a colossal final battle of the Pacific.

And we will have four carriers, and they will only have the Enterprise,

and

they will only have the Hornet and they will only have the Yorktown.

But the Yorktown is so crippled or sunk, it probably won't be there.

Remember, Saratoga is torpedoed, Lexington is sunk.

And guess what?

They bring in the Yorktown, it's crippled, they shut down the power grid in Hawaii, and they fix

the ship up

to be able to be navigable.

72 hours.

They have workmen, they show up off Midway Island.

The Japanese try to bomb it.

They send their crews.

Admiral Nagumo is not such a great admiral.

And the Americans

under Admiral Spruance, who Bill Halsey has, I think, I guess you could call it some type of nervous disorder that manifests itself with a skin disease.

People don't know whether it was histamine or whether it was shingles, but he's incapacitated.

So Nimitz gives command to sort of an unknown Spruance who turned out to be a very bright guy.

He made all the correct decisions, and the result of the Battle of Midway was

the Americans sink all four fleet carriers.

They only lose the Yorktown that was damaged anyway.

And there was some heroic, if

Walter Lord wrote a really, it's a popular book, but...

Incredible victory.

It's about the Battle of Midway.

It was written about 50 years ago.

It's a very good book, though, and it's been in several issues, but it really shows you the heroic

heroism of the pilots that were flying obsolete planes.

The Dauntless die bomber was good, but it was soon to be replaced by the Avenger.

And the torpedo bomber, the

devastators were devastatingly bad.

Most of the pilots got killed.

When you put the torpedo on, they flew in the wind.

They didn't go more more than 90 miles an hour.

They were wiped out by the Japanese as sacrificial lambs.

And then the dive bombers came undetected and hit the carriers right when they were being rearmed and very vulnerable.

And the Wildcat fighter was inferior.

It was not as bad as everybody had said, but it was inferior to the Zero.

All of those will be replaced within six months.

And you will see the Hellcat,

you will see the Avenger, and you will see

Marine Corsair fighters.

You will see P-38 Lightnings doing long range and the Americans will have air superiority and supremacy very quickly.

But that's the critical year.

1942, for a brief moment, looks like the Allies have recovered in Russia and the Japanese are still on the move.

And

it looks like the Axis can still win the war.

Remember what they're thinking.

We have to defeat occupied territory, knock out the main players before the United States gears up its industrial base that beat us in World War I.

We remember what happened in World War I.

Hitler declares war on us on December 11th.

I don't know why he did it.

We talked about why he did it.

The submarine campaign was paramount in his mind.

He also figured that the United States was not as prepared as

it was.

In any case,

if you think about the summer of 1942,

Hitler did not go in, as we said.

He did not go into Moscow.

He did not try to take it.

And they thought he would go after Leningradrad in 1942

and Moscow.

And he didn't.

He surprised everybody and held Army Group North, Army Group Center just to a holding pattern and then beefed up Army Group South.

He took the Crimea.

He took Sevastopol, he was on to

Rostovsov, the Don River, the Diipner and the Volga.

He got to

Malkop and he was almost at the Caspian Sea at Grozny to get the oil of the Soviet Union.

And he was going to cut off the Volga River traffic.

And then fatally he

split his forces, as you know, and General Paulus went to Stalingrad, which I think was a critical mistake.

If they had kept their forces intact, they could have taken the oil fields and denied the Soviet Union most of its oil and also

tripled their own supplies.

But at that moment, in summer of 1942, they had climbed the

Caucasus Mountains at Mount Elbrus.

And think of it, that was the high point of the war, not 1941 or 1940.

The German army

was still only about 100, it had withdrawn, but it was still only about 100 or so miles outside of Moscow.

It had surrounded Leningrad, which was starving.

The bombing campaign had been a failure.

The German cities were intact, and they were almost at the Caspian Sea to get what is now the oil wealth of Aberbajan in their possession.

The Japanese

had run wild.

They had taken Waika Island.

They had taken Singapore.

They had taken Malaysia.

They had taken the Philippines.

They had taken Burma.

They were bogged down in China, but they were still, they had taken Beijing.

They had taken most of the major Chinese cities.

And

it looked like they were, right in May, they were ready to take New Guinea, and with it, they had bombed Darwin, so it was almost useless as a port for a while.

And they were going to invade the north and eastern coast of Australia and cut the supply lines.

and get the material wealth of Australia.

And

at the same time, if you looked at the Mediterranean, the Americans had not invaded Operation Torch at North Africa, and Rommel, after the fall of Tobruk, was

90 miles from Alexandria, not much farther from the Suez Canal.

So what am I saying?

In that brief moment where the war was starting to tilt toward the Axis.

They had control of parts of Egypt, all of Libya, all of Tunisia, all of Algeria, all of Morocco.

They had control of Spain and Portugal as pro-Axis neutral powers.

They had plans to take Malta.

They would have taken Malta

had they succeeded at El Alamein.

They had Italy was still

a viable ally.

It had about a half a million troops in North Africa helping the Germans.

After they had recovered, they were working with Rommel.

They had the, remember they took the Balkans, the Greek coastline, all of the Balkans were in their hand.

Turkey was a

neutral power and pro-Axis.

And the Japanese at the same time had most

just

you could make the argument that maybe a hundred miles east of Pearl Harbor is the Americans had some control of the sea, but they had sunk our first carrier, the Langley.

They had sunk the Hermes, the British carrier, was one of the earlier ones.

And

after the Battle of Midway, the Saratoga had been torpedoed.

The Wasp and the Hornet are going to be sunk in those five terrible sea battles off Guadalcanal in September, October, November of 1942.

And there is a point where we only have the Enterprise.

Now we have 25 carriers that are coming in December and then all of 1943 and 1994.

So it looked like for a moment Russia might still fall

and Germany

looks like

it's got control over all of Europe

and all of the EU, all of the NATO countries, and all of the Mediterranean.

except for two places I should say three.

They can't get Gibraltar, they can't get

Cyprus, and they can't get, more importantly, Suez.

And the Germans are working on that.

And

then, as we'll see next time, everything changes.

In late 42, as the American Colossus starts to supply oil and

rations and trucks and jeeps and tanks and planes and ships, more than ships, just a whole fleet after after fleet after fleet comes off the American shipyards.

Kind of sad to think that a recent Pentagon report showed that we can only build a submarine or two a year, and our shipyards are in terrible disarray.

It takes years to build a fleet-sized ship when this country mastered the art of liberty ships and victory ships and military ships, warships.

It's sort of sad, but it's a situation where where

I'll just finish with this note.

Hitler, remember in Mein Kampf that he wanted to destroy the Jewish people, and he blamed them for losing World War I, even though Jewish soldiers had been very heroic.

One of the tragedies of the Auschwitz

among the great tragedies was that people who had had iron crosses around their necks showed them to the death keepers of the ovens, and it didn't make any any difference at all.

They were going to kill every Jew.

They thought they could kill 12 million Jews.

But originally they thought, we're going to win very quickly and we'll send them all to Madagascar.

But they didn't have control of the sea.

Then they said,

well,

we want to get rid of the Jews of Western Europe, half a million to almost three-quarters of a million.

That's harder because they're assimilated and they're indistinguishable.

So we'll have them wear yellow stars and we'll send them to.

Let me start that again.

They're indistinguishable from

Jews.

So we will put stars on them and we'll send them to the cities of the East that we have occupied.

Kiev

We'll send them to Belarus and we'll just let them starve.

And then the Reich minister said, no, no, we don't want them.

We don't, it's, we're just crowded.

They said, well, we're going to take Russia very quickly.

So we'll put all of the Jews

on trains and we'll send them into Siberia and we'll just, at the last depot, let them walk into the frigid Arctic and they'll die.

But they never got past the suburbs of Moscow.

So then they came up in late 41 and 42, they decided that some of the special groups that had been slaughtering Jews had killed at this point about a million Jews by shooting them.

And they came up with mobile gas units where they had trucks with gas chambers.

They'd march people in one door of the truck and then out.

The bodies were carried out.

It was pretty gruesome.

And then at Wassey, it's a suburb of Berlin.

You can go there today.

It's a very scenic place.

The final solution is hammered out.

And the idea is that

It's not so smart to put Jews on cranes going into eastern Russia because we're losing Eastern Russia.

So we want to kill as many Jews as possible and we want to do it on areas that are secure.

So the idea is then

let's put most of the new extermination camps in Eastern Europe, at places like Belsen

or Auschwitz or Treblinka.

And let's use zygon B,

which is the forerunner of American pesticides, organophosphates and

organochlorides, things like dimethylate and things like that, or parathion, both of which I've used, and they're very deadly just to,

just the sight of them used to scare me to use parathion.

It should never be used.

It's a deadly chemical.

But it came out of

the German petrochemical industry, and it was an off,

I don't know what you would call it, an offspring of the lethal gas issues at the death camps.

So those decisions were made

as

the Germans and the Russians got into a deadlock.

The Germans thought the idea of exiling Jews or sending them on trains and then washing your hands of them was not going to work.

And more importantly, just to finish today, they came up with this narrative that in the first year of the war on the Eastern Front, they had lost 160,000 dead and 500,000 wounded.

That was never expected.

They thought they were going to win the war in three weeks.

So Hitler began ranning to the two

architects of the Holocaust, Himmler and Heydrich, who would be assassinated, remember, by Czech teams.

He said, I warned the Jews, I warned them that if we have a world war, they caused it, just like they caught it, they didn't cause it, he caused it, but he said, I told them that if we have a world war and America and Russia and everybody gets in it, they're going to be wiped out.

And now Russia's in it.

And

America's in it.

And people went to him and said,

this is some people in the Reich said, you know, what do you do about people who are intermarried?

Jews that are indistinguishable, Jews that are central to the economy.

He said, I don't care.

And we're going to liquidate all of them because they caused World War II.

And why would I I worry about 12 million Jews when 160 Germans died because of Jews?

It was a very deranged view of the world.

He was now blaming

Jews for his own imbecilic,

crazy invasion of the Soviet Union and the death of Germans for the first time in the war on a massive scale in 1941 and 42.

And that was kind of the catalyst that really triggered the mass extermination element of the Holocaust.

Holocaust started in some sense.

The Holocaust started in some sense in 1939 when he went into Poland.

In some sense, I don't mean intent or actuality, but magnitude.

But

Auschwitz is a 1942 production, as are most of the death camps.

I think one

went into operation just in the end of 1941, briefly, but mostly they come out of the Wassey Conference.

And then

by 1943,

Auschwitz is liquidating up to 10,000 Jews a day, a day.

So it's an industrial project.

And they don't talk about it, they just use the word final solution or Jewish question.

Even the minutes of these meetings have been

censored.

So next time, we're going to talk about the Allied comeback.

especially in Germany, the invasion D-Day, the magnificent

trek, or I should say it's not a trek,

it's just a sprint by George Patton and the Third Army over 400 miles in about 40 days near the German border, the Battle of the Bulge, and on the

Japanese front, what the British were trying to do to relieve China and supply it over the Burma Road, so to speak, free the Burman Road, protect

India and the Americans' terrible battles to take the Philippines, Okinawa, Ibu Jima, Okinawa, and then finally the B-29 program that ended the war along with the two atomic bombs.

And that'll be it.

So we'll see you next time on that.

Thanks so much, Victor.

I haven't learned so much about World War II, especially those things that we don't often hear about.

So that was exciting.

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

And Daniel Penny is on trial now.

Stay with us.

We're back at the Victor Davis-Hanson show.

So, Victor Daniel Penny, the man who

acted as a good Samaritan trying to prevent a guy from killing other people as he was threatening to do on a subway, and the young man that he restrained died.

And now they're putting him on this big show trial.

And I was wondering what your thinking, your thoughts were on that.

Well, if there had been a homeless white person with 42 or 43 prior arrests, many of them for violent offenses, and he was on a subway and he was screaming and yelling and threatening to kill people, and a black Marine veteran came up behind him and said, don't worry, and restrained him.

And then two people helped that person.

But in the process, maybe because the person was on drugs, if he is, we wait for the toxology report.

Or maybe the ill health that accrues from being homeless, whatever.

Then he died after he, I think he died, he let him go and then he died.

He didn't kill him with the chokehold.

That's right.

He maybe have choked him and led to some of the problems that killed him.

Do you think they would process, Alvin Bragg would prosecute that person?

I don't.

I don't.

I think he would be a hero.

I say that because New York state law has a statute, and it's specifically designed for people who harass people on the subway.

And it's kind of dubbed the Good Samaritan statute.

And it basically says, if somebody is attacking people or threatening them on the subway, you have a right to defend yourself and to step forward for the public good.

And the benefit of the doubt will be on the person that tries to protect people from serious and legitimate threats.

So he knows that statute.

But just as in the case of the Trump

campaign violations where he just abused the law and distorted, he's distorting this too for rank political advantage.

I just think that he and Letita James and Fannie Willis, all of those people who are full of racial hatred, Trump hatred,

and contrary to the spirit of the civil rights movement, and they're all incompetent.

I don't mean that just in a...

blanket generic sense.

I mean, Letita James campaigned on getting Donald Trump.

You cannot have a prosecutor running for office as Attorney General to say,

a priori, I'm going to go in there and I'm going to get this person.

That's the person.

I'll find the crime.

That's the person in Berea fashion.

And Fannie Willis,

you can't hire your boyfriend at

an above-market fee and then go on a junket with him and then send him to the White House and then bill the U.S.

government for consultation.

Does anybody think that Nathan Wade had expertise to offer the federal DOJ and then have them lie about it under oath?

I can't remember.

And then we have

Alvin Bragg, who took a federal statute that was in the jurisdiction of the DOJ and they said there's no campaign violation here.

And he then said, well, I'm going to use that federal violation that you think didn't occur and I'm going to turn it into a state offense.

Yeah.

Because he didn't, and nobody in their right mind thought that that was possible except a New York jury.

So

I think everybody's tired of all this.

They're tired of the acrimony.

They're tired of the DEI.

They're tired of the racialism.

We just want to go back.

This is getting back to Matthew Iglesias.

He kind of said what I've been writing about, that we should look at ourselves, our race, our superficial appearance, our gender, our sex as incidental in comparison to our essential humanity and shared humanity, shared humanity.

And there's a good book out by

John Ellis.

It's an essay about Encounter Books.

It's about 100 pages.

He's a retired German professor at UC Santa Cruz.

And basically, the argument of it is that around 1500 with the introduction of the printing press and transatlantic navigation and the rise of the Protestant Reformation, there was a new effort to

make a common humanity the ideal.

Not that they actualized it, but that people throughout the British Empire, our people throughout Europe,

were starting to see that there were commonalities

and technology helped it with the printing press.

And the West was becoming more affluent than the rest.

But the point was, for all the racism and prejudice and bias, which is innate to human nature, there was this ideal that people all over the world had a shared humanity.

I think he's right about that.

And so

we all know that

you're not supposed to regress to tribalism.

So as I said, when you see an Alvin Bragg or a Joey Reed,

What it is is an elite group.

I don't think it's representative of the African-American community.

I don't.

And I think they feel that gain

their racialism

gains career advancement and advantage.

And who does that come from?

The people who are dealing with illegal immigration in the inner city of Chicago?

No, it comes from two types of people, the Obama professional DAI class and the wealthy white liberal elite

that have a similar class interest and they're almost identical in their political, cultural outlooks.

In an ironic fashion, if you're a very wealthy, wealthy, wealthy Joey Reed or you're a very powerful Alvin Bragg, your white counterpart, your white anchor, or your white prosecutor who's a Soros-backed prosecutor, you're actually the same thing.

They're just using the race thing.

They don't really believe it.

What they really want to do is get the prestige and power of their white counterparts and vice versa.

And so it's just a little squabbling between these groups at the top, but they don't really care about the people in the inner city.

And if you're an African-American in Chicago and you say, listen, they're across the street, there's 50 people in this hotel floor, and they're members of the cartel, and they're endangering my kids' life.

They say, yeah.

You have false consciousness.

You don't really know what your interest is.

You're a racist.

I can't believe that you're falling for this mega racism.

That's not, that was what the election was about.

Yeah.

About stopping that.

Yeah, let's hope that it does stop in the future.

I'm not

sure.

I can trust our leadership on the left to self-reflect, I guess.

Well, there was another incident this week, and it was that Trump went to the Congress and then he went to Joe Biden's house, the White House, to just talk about things, I guess.

But Maelania didn't show up with him.

And she said she's getting more assertive, and I kind of like this.

That she didn't go.

So, yeah, she didn't go because she thought that Jill Biden's comments showed a lack of concern about the assassination, that it wasn't genuine and it seemed very insincere.

The raid on Mar-Lago that went through her underwear drawer.

Yeah, everybody's been talking about that too.

But I think that maybe she was a little offended about the colours.

And I think also

if I could psychoanalyze, which I don't usually do because I'm incompetent in that field, but here it goes.

I think as she looked at Donald Trump the last years, she was getting alienated from him because the more he ran in the last nine years, he's been in the public eye.

So they have

the PUSSY grab him.

Remember,

TV with,

what was his name?

Billy Bush?

Yeah.

The 2016 campaign that made Trump look very vulgar.

When he was in talking to a guy in the, I guess, the trailer that they had for

going around.

And he said it was just locker room talk.

And then they had the Eugene Carroll farcical suit.

And then they had the Stormy Daniels.

And I think she thought she was being humiliated.

And these tawdry details came out about his fallacies.

And she just said, well, they're probably just doing it for political reasons, but he gave them the ammunition.

I'm done, and I'm just going to...

She was distant.

She wasn't on the path.

And then as she started to digest all this,

she started to see that the way they treated him, they were treating her.

So she was a wonderful First Lady.

She wasn't even on the cover of Vogue, which every First Lady is on.

They demonized her.

They said she couldn't.

speak English.

They said she had terrible hit.

Remember her red Christmas decorations?

Yes.

They said they were tawdry.

And then the Mar-a-Lagolaid, they went into her private quarters, except, and then I think she's come to,

you know, and then they were running all the nude pictures when she was a model.

They had pieces when she was semi-nude kissing other women or something.

And basically,

by the way, Putin ran those too recently.

And then she just defended herself in her memoir and said, you know, I don't have anything to apologize for.

So

I think now she's at the point where

she's re-looking at Donald Trump and re-looking at First Lady.

Not that she's going to be happy, married again, and all that stuff, but I think she's going to be a lot more empathetic to Trump

because it's happened to her.

And most of the charges against him were during his Randy

earlier days, but no one has ever made the accusations he did anything wrong while he was president.

Unlike Bill Clinton.

And so I think there's some good signs there that she'll be prominent again as a First Lady.

Yeah, and I bet you, I'm going to make a bet with you, Victor, that she's going to be on the cover of Vogue and the other.

I bet those magazines are going to turn around.

That's what I'm saying.

Well, the left, remember, is ideological, but it's also greedy and materialistic, and it's insecure.

So my experience with it is they're very cowardly, and once they feel that the majority of people where the people and the power and the influence of the money is, they flip.

They really do.

I mean not that there's not some that don't, but yes, I agree with that.

That if Donald Trump can be successful

and these people he's appointing, they all have one thing in common.

This ain't going to be 2016-17.

We know these people.

We flipped this other side of this one-eyed jack.

We've seen Mueller and we've seen Andrew Weissman and we've seen what Anthony Blinken did with the 51 authorities and Jake Sullivan with the Bank Ping.

And we've seen Jack Smith.

We know these people backwards and forwards and what they're capable of and what they'll try.

Two impeachments, all that.

And we're not going to let them do it.

So we're going to go in here.

We're not going to be vengeful, but we're going to,

we understand they think they're in a war with us.

So I think it's going to be a lot better for Trump.

And he's going to be prepared for it.

And I think they may not win.

And I think if they don't win, they're going to come over.

They did that with Reagan.

They hated Reagan, and they hated Reagan, and they they hated Reagan.

And then he got elected in a landslide, and they tried to do Iran-Contra and impeach him and all that.

It didn't work.

And then they elected George W.

H.W.

Bush for a 12-year regnum.

And then they named National Airport Reagan Airport.

And they would have never got that through without Democratic support.

So that's...

You know, I think that Trump has a chance of being very successful, and if he does, they'll be quiet for a while.

Yeah.

And they'll celebrate the beauty of Melania Trump, which she is probably the most beautiful woman in the world or at least is up there contending for it.

And then we had the Massachusetts congressperson who said, you know, one of the reasons we lost, we were fixated on transgenderism and I have two daughters.

I don't want them being clobbered by a biological male.

He used the word biological male.

You'd have to apologize.

We have interns at

Tufts University and we're not going to send them anymore.

And he said, nah, I don't care.

I'm not going to apologize.

I'm a Democrat.

That's what Democrats are, the new Democrat.

You're the old Democrat.

I'm the new one.

Sorry.

And then the president of Tufts said,

well, I think about it, and we don't want to be one partisan.

So, of course, they didn't speak in my name.

We'll still have interns going to congressmen.

So, yeah, they make the necessary adjustments.

Yeah, you always say that, that these academic turncoats, I just hope more of them get fired than are allowed to do the little turncoat act like that.

Well, they have tenure, so

I know, it's tough, hard.

I think

if you saw that speech, that little preliminary speech about the education, that was very

much ignored.

That was a blockbuster speech that Trump gave.

Yeah.

Where he said he was going to attack endowments and he was going to cut off money to

federal aid for people who did not allow free speech and the Bill of Rights and due process.

And

he was going to take a hard look at any of the Department of Education and all these grants.

So he's basically saying, if I could put it in the context of where I work, hey, Stanford University, you've got almost a $40 billion

endowment and, you know, at 8%,

over $3 billion in income, and it's all tax-free, predicated on the idea that you're non-partisan, and yet you've got a BLM Antifa, all these

BLM slogan over your library, and you let

Hamas camp out for, what, four months and spew hatred, and you had a lecturer who told the Jews to go on one side and you ransacked the President's office, and you defaced historic sandstone columns, and you were,

according to your own internal investigations,

abjectly and overtly advanced.

I just don't think you're nonpartisan.

And by the way, why should the federal government give you a discount when you have 16,000 graduate and undergraduates and you have

16,000, but you have 15,000 people classified as staff or administrative?

So does every student need one counterpart that's not teaching or doing research or scholarship?

I don't think so.

So basically, we, the taxpayers, are paying for you while you tell everybody you're private and you can do whatever you want.

If you want to do whatever you want, go the Hillsdale route.

Hillsdale is honest, true to its beliefs.

It says we don't trust the federal government to come in and tell us what to do.

Therefore, we are not taking one dime.

And then the federal government under Obama said, well, We're going to fix you because how about all these, you like the military and you like all these people in the GI Bill and that's a federal money.

And Hillsdale said, well, we're talking about taking direct money.

I mean, you would actually rob a veteran of his support because he went to Hillsdale?

Oh, yes, we would.

And Hillsdale said, I think, go ahead then.

If you're going to cut off federal support to your own veterans, then we'll support them.

And they had a fundraising drive.

That's a wonderful model.

Awesome.

Yes.

I mean, that's exciting.

Yeah.

And I think everybody should adopt it and just get the federal government out of the tax-exempt business if

they're partisan.

And I think Stanford could try to do what Hillsdale did.

They could just say, you know what?

We're not going to take, I don't know what it is, it's $600 million in federal funds of various sorts, research grants for particular

think tanks, centers, you know,

et cetera.

Just stop it.

Yeah.

And we'll see what happens.

Well, Victor, we're on a hard break, so we're going to have to go.

But I did want to invite your listeners to listen to yours and Jack Fowler's podcast this week.

They were super podcasts.

So everybody,

everybody,

please join Victor and Jack.

And if you've got a few more moments today, I highly advise the Tuesday and Thursday podcasts.

Thanks, everybody, and thank you, Victor.

Thank you, everybody.

Much appreciated.

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