Revisiting WWII and Israel's Strategic Dilemma: Leaks, Allies, and the Path Forward

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition when we do something a little bit different in the middle segment.

We are on the start of World War II and Victor will be talking about the invasion of Russia on the middle segment.

But first we're going to talk a little bit about Israel and the current news of the war going on there.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is 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.

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Victor, so Israel, there's a lot going on, but I think the biggest news this week is that the Biden administration leaked plans, war plans, of the IDF.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

Well, I mean,

they, being

Karen Jean-Pierre or official John Kirby, they didn't seem - I mean, they gave pro forma answers, but what they

I don't think the media

understood what had happened.

Israel has been the target of over 500 missiles and drones in two separate attacks, and it should have responded to the latter one with 182 ballistic missiles, and they have been suppressed by the Biden administration from act the longer they wait, the m the l greater the distance is between the original assault and provocation by Iran and the retaliation.

So it seems like Israel then is just preemptively attacking Iran rather than than retaliating.

And the message is lost, that they have suffered, again, 500 missiles and drones attacking their homeland.

They've only sent three back.

It should have been disproportionate.

The side that attacks first should have been disproportionately responded to, and that hasn't happened.

So it's almost like they've been rewarded.

And so now Israel is preparing what we've been told by journalists to have access to the idea of is it's going to be overwhelming.

And the Biden administration is trying to stop it.

They're trying to stop it for a variety of reasons.

Long term, they're trying to stop it because they have

people within the administration that have this anti-Israeli venom.

And two, they're captives of this bankrupt Barack Obama-Ben-Rhodes ideology and strategy for the Middle East that says the underdog, Persian, Shia,

Iranians have never had their full voice

in the Middle East.

It's time to kind of level the playing field as community organizers at home.

We'll do the same thing abroad.

So the Gulf monarchies with all the oil money, the Sunni Arab majority that exploits the Shia, the Israeli interlopers, it's time for them to deal with the new axis of Tehran,

Damascus,

the West Bank, Beirut, Gaza, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Assads, the Iranians, etc.

And we're going to level the playing field.

So they're anti-Israeli.

That's what they want to suppress this attack.

Second, they don't want it before the election.

Because if they go in before the election, the Israelis do, it confirms that this administration with its appeasement and its loud talk

destroyed the peace.

What do I mean by that?

During the Trump administration there was no Russian army leaving its borders to invade Georgia or Ossatia or Crimea or Donbas or Takiv.

The Middle East was quiet.

There was no serial threats from North Korea and China.

And now there is.

And that only reinforces it, that everything is in chaos because of their weakness.

And it will hurt them, especially if it becomes a month-long quagmire, which I think it will.

They'll be tit for tap, and they don't want that.

And so they're leaking.

They're trying to tell people.

I think

it was leaked to an Iranian news source.

So the idea is that the message goes to Israel.

You don't really have an American partner that can protect you because we will leak if you tell them anything.

And they want you to tell them things.

They want to know where the sites were.

So far, the leaks apparently were the type of aircraft and the type of munitions that will be used, which are very valuable to the Iranians.

But they didn't actually give them the precise targets, as I understand it.

But the message is,

the leaker's message is, and the lackadaisical response to the leaker's message from the government is

You can't consult with us, and that endangers your relationship.

So if you think you're going to go in there and you're going to have to tell us stuff, we're going to leak it.

And that's going to get a lot of your people killed.

It will.

So it was really important, existentially important, what they did.

It was very detrimental to Israel.

And now they're in a quagmire because if they say, you know what, we can't trust the United States anymore because they're deliberately trying to leak to our enemies, then people in the IDF will legitimately say, yes, but we have their THAD anti-missile battery right here, and we're going to have to then count on the institutional and public support of Israel that transcends this bizarre administration, the Biden-Harris that hates us.

In other words, if we go into Iran and we don't tell them exactly what we're going to hit in advance,

maybe our broad support within the United States will prevent Biden and Harris from cutting us off from

needed munitions and anti-missile batteries.

So they're in a tough spot.

I think they're going to probably go in.

They're waiting and

they're deliberating right now.

If you go in,

will you be punished by the United States?

It'll be better to go in now before the election, but will you be punished by Biden and Harris

as if you were trying to stage an October surprise.

However, if you wait after the election

and she wins, you will be punished.

You will be told in no uncertain terms, they won't care about the Jewish vote, they won't care about anything because they have won the election.

They will say to them, if you go and attack Iran, we're going to cut you off.

Not just 2,000-pound bombs that they've already suspended.

If they lose, it'll be the same.

Biden will say, you know what, I'm a lame duck, and you guys wanted Trump, so I'm just going to cut, you know, I can do whatever I want.

And it's not even Biden, it's the people like Harris and the Obamas around Biden.

So either scenario

is bad.

The only scenario they have

is if Trump wins to wait until January 20th.

And then they will get full support of the United States.

But in that period, Iran can do a lot of bad things.

So I think they're just weighing every type of scenario, and there are myriads of them.

They're very complex.

What if this, and second, and third, and fourth, and fifth deliberation, level deliberation?

If they do this, then why not?

And if they do that, then what do we react?

And if they react to our reaction, what do we do?

And it depends a lot about the politics of the United States.

Yeah,

it seems to me that it would be to Bibi's advantage not to give information to the U.S., but the U.S.

has its forces out there that could mistake a missile or something coming.

So he has to give them information about what they're doing.

He has to do it within 24 hours because he has to warn the Arabs that they're going to retaliate.

And I don't know how many ballistic missiles, but they have a lot more than 182.

We still don't know the nine or ten missiles that got through, whether the Israelis had

tracked their trajectories and said, you know what, they're going to bounce out in the countryside anyway, so why waste a million-dollar missile taking them down?

But about eight or nine of them went through.

But what if they were to send 500?

And what if one of them was nuclear?

If they were to send a nuclear, I think they probably, I don't know if they've miniaturized it yet, but they're getting close.

And Israel doesn't know the exact level of their nuclear ability.

And

if we would say, well, they would never do that, Victor, because Israel's got 200 deliverable nuclear weapons, and that would be the end of Iranian civilization if they did that.

And

yes.

But the remnants, the Shia communities or the remnants outside of Tehran or whatever it is, they would say, we, not the Arabs, not the Palestinians, not Hezbollah, we destroyed the Jewish state.

That's what they would think.

Yeah.

And that can't be, their irrationality can't be dismissed, or their nihilism, I should say.

And Israel knows that.

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And we thank Tax Network USA for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, I wanted to ask you on Israel, just if we can stick on this subject for a bit, what it seems to me that Joe's been kind of MIA and that Netanyahu and the Israelis have been able to finish up in Gaza and move to Hezbollah relatively freely.

And that's what it seems to me, but I'm not really sure if I'm looking at the war

in reality.

Well, they did not want them.

The Biden administration's position was this.

They

were basically saying to Israel, yes, you were a surprise attack and 1,200 people were butchered and raped, mutilated, 240 hostages taken, but we do not want you to apply in force to Hamas.

in Gaza because

you are civilized and their leadership that did this with full support of the population, I might add, are under hospitals, mosques, and schools, and so you can't do anything.

You just have to take the, I think Biden said in the context of Iran, you got to take the hit.

I'm quoting him literally.

And then the thing with Hezbollah, they sent over 8,000 rockets, they have, since, or more than that, since October 7th.

And the idea was, you know, you're in a rough neighborhood.

Sorry, BB, but you know, I know you got 100,000 people that can't live near the border, but what are you going to do?

Go bomb places, hospitals, and schools and stuff in Lebanon?

Why in the war?

I don't think so.

We just can't give you 2,000-pound bombs.

We've suspended them.

And so that was their attitude toward the whole thing, is to restrain Israel and say, take the hit.

And their view is, we will help you with anti-missile batteries.

And with your batteries,

we're going to punish you because you're competent.

In other words, you can't go back tit for tat because they can't hurt you and you can hurt them.

In other words, just let them hit you and hit you and hit you and hit you and hit you.

And then we will condemn them and the world will see that you're a victim.

Well, how did that work out in the Holocaust?

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So they don't trust, and they're right.

They're just saying, we're not going to be punished for being good at what we do.

So every time they try to hit us, we're going to hit back twice as hard because if you don't, you'll never achieve deterrence.

So here, let me just sum up.

They have essentially now destroyed Hamas.

They went under Rafah and they said, you can't go in there.

Or in the words of Kamala Harrison.

I've looked at the maps, the great geographer of military strategy, Kamala.

And what did they do?

They got Sinmore because they did that.

And they've destroyed most of the tunnels that were really important to

import

weapons from Egypt.

And Egypt, the Egyptian government's been shamelessly pro-Hamas.

But once they did that, then they turned their attention to Hezbollah.

So with the Walkie-Talkies and the Pagers, and they've gone down that list, they have masculated most of the Hezbollah leadership.

And they have, from what we understand, of the 150,000 rockets, missiles, they've taken out 100,000 of them.

That's why they're in Lebanon right now.

And as we said earlier, the exploding walkie-talkies and pages were geographical points that somebody was doing something that they shouldn't have when they were blown up, and that something they shouldn't have was probably inspecting or monitoring or being stationed at a missile site.

So they've got enormous intelligence abilities.

And they're halfway done dealing with Hezbollah.

And they're looking at Iran.

They've already taken out the port facilities of the Houthis.

And the United States has hit them too.

And I think once the Houthis have not sent more missiles, but I think they've told the Houthis, you send more missiles, you're not going to have any electricity.

I'm sorry.

No power, no water, nothing.

And

what was the result that we've told them?

The result said, you're going to be hated.

You're going to be like a lunatic.

You're unleashed.

This is.

No, the opposite has happened.

The Europeans are admiring them.

The

Gulf monarchies are saying under the, I just talked to someone who had just come back from the Middle East at work the other day, and they said they were told by an unnamed person, they didn't name them, and I didn't ask for the details, high up in a government that if Israel is going to do things, they've got the entire support of the Gulf monarchies on the condition that they do it, and they don't do enough

to

induce a response against the Arab world, but not enough to mitigate or destroy that response.

In other words, the Arab world is saying, okay,

these people are lunatics.

They've threatened us, they've threatened us, they've threatened us, they've got missiles, they've got more wherewithal, they've got a bigger population.

If you want to finally deal with them, Israel, go ahead.

And we're not going to attack you from your rear.

We're going to give you information and intelligence, but you've got to finish the job this time.

Yeah.

And I think they will.

Yeah.

Didn't this week Iran threaten the Gulf monarchies or something?

They do.

They went back, they met and they said, any any of you, any of you who allow Israel to use your airspace, and that's Saudi Arabia, will consider you culpable.

You know, two big ballistic missiles hitting the refinery complex could wipe out

30, 40 percent of the world's oil supplies in those countries.

And so they're very worried.

But you don't really need, you can go by sea and you can go through Syria.

And the Syrians can't stop the Israelis using their airspace.

So

I don't think that's going to stop them.

Yeah.

Last question.

How do you think that this war that we're watching right now measures up against, for example, the Six-Day War or the Yon-Kippur War?

Well,

the difference this time is it hasn't been a convention.

There's a lot of differences.

It hasn't been a conventional land war,

and it has not been a conventional Air Force war.

And the reason why is

over the half century, since 1973,

we've had wars, we've had the intifadas, we've had the 2006 wars, but they've been different.

And what is the difference?

The Arab world has come to the conclusion that you cannot fight a conventional war against Israel with armor, infantry, and air support.

If you want to do that, you will be wiped out.

And so Jordan has gotten that lesson.

Syria has gotten that lesson.

Egypt has gotten that lesson.

Lebanon has gotten that lesson.

The Gulf has gotten that lesson.

So there's not going to be a conventional war as we've seen it with the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War.

So what does that mean?

There's either been in the ensuing period since the Yom Kippur War,

there's terrorist, there's hostage taking, there's terrorist activity, there's missiles fired.

And so it's a whole different war.

And it took Israel a while to adjust to that.

Sharon did pretty well.

I mean, he destroyed Arafat's compound,

etc.

But

more or less,

they have not been in existential dangers.

But during that interlude,

Iran, under the theocracy with all of this oil, decided that the way, the next phase of the war would be an aerial war through missiles.

And they equipped the Houthis, they equipped Hamas, they equipped Hezbollah.

And their strategy was to make a ring of what they called a ring of fire around Israel and not to get involved in themselves.

And what was the purpose?

The purpose was,

along with

these terrorist incursions,

was to destroy the Israeli tourist industry, to make the IDF call up a sufficient number of young men to hurt the economy, to isolate it in the United States, to count on expatriate students and large Muslim populations in Europe, the United States, to weaken and sinoir, weaken support for Israel.

And Sinoir said it.

He said, collateral damage, we just, we've seen some of his communiques, do not negotiate.

The more that we have collateral damage, the more that

we put people under hospital schools and mosques, and the more that they get killed, the better we are.

This is why his wife has been photographed with a supposed $33,000 purse.

And he's got all this, what was bullion.

The Hezbollah, now we learn today, has all this bullion, cash, and all of these quasi-banks that Israel's exposing.

He had all this money stuffed in his tunnels.

So this elite

has this,

I don't know, they're on Iranian money and U.S.

money and Europe money.

They're completely cynical.

And their strategy is that the Hamas elite and the Hezbollah can do this forever because they have all of this money.

they've got gutter to go to, they're protected by EU and American elites, the UN, and they're just going to wage a war of attrition with missiles and terrorist incursions and avoid a full-throated response.

The problem with them was

They didn't recognize what October 7th was.

That shook up the left in Israel and said, you know what?

These people want to kill us.

These are people that were in our kaboots.

These were people that we took to the emergency room when they got hurt.

These were 20,000 people that said they wanted to have peace with us.

It doesn't work.

And we have to destroy these enemies, and that's what they're doing.

It's kind of like

Wyatt Earp's revenge riot or something like that, or the Godfather, let's take care of final business.

And I think BB thinks, you know what?

I'm going to destroy Hamas and I'm going to free up the Palestinians.

Maybe some people will say, Do you want to end up like Hamas?

And maybe the Gulf money will come in and do something.

And I'm going to free the Lebanese from Hezbollah.

I'm going to humiliate them, ridicule them, make them look weak, make them look silly.

I'm going to do the same thing to the Iranians.

I'm going to tell the Iranians we can do anything, anytime to you.

And that's going to remind the United States and Europe that we are the stronger horse.

And I think that China and North Korea

and Russia are really, really upset about this because they look at this and they think, wow,

the United States and the West are not that weak.

We gave weapons.

I don't know, as I've said again, I don't think we can go into Mother Russia and equip an army to go in there.

But I do

want Ukraine to defend itself.

And Russia so far has not been able to take Ukraine.

And it's had an ungodly military disaster.

I think eventually there'll have to be a settlement, as I've said many times.

But you look at their success in saving most of the Ukrainian homeland and what Israel's done by going on the offensive, and I think it's sent a strong message to China and

Russia.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

It really has.

And I think it's given a lot of encouragement to the Europeans and the Americans that

And Israel, the lesson is when Israel is weak and it listens to the American left wing and it does half measures, the Arab world loses respect for it.

It doesn't mean that the Arab world wants it to gratuitously kill people, but if you attack Israel and they respond disproportionately, as we are trying to tell the Ukrainians to do, then

they get respect and they re-establish deterrence.

Yes.

I think Iran is terrified of them.

They are absolutely terrified because their whole wing of fire strategy is on fire.

And they've lost thousands of terrorists that they've trained and they do not know how to get missiles back into Yemen and into Lebanon and into the West Bank.

And they're losing public support.

If you look at polls in the United States, the support for Israel has either stayed firm or it's gone up.

And if they take out Iran, And what does that mean?

That means to take out their nuclear facilities or to damage their oil exportation or to create dissension among the population.

And I don't know why we're not supporting them.

The smart thing to do, if it was Biden was smart, he could go ahead and say, I'm neutral, and we don't want to have, you know, we don't want to have inordinate influence in this war.

We're trying to be a peace broker and then give them everything he could.

But I don't think that's the case.

No, I don't think so either.

But thanks to the IDF and BB Netanyahu, they are doing a good job out there.

So we would like to thank both of those.

Victor, we're going to take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the invasion of Russia.

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

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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So Victor, I welcome this discussion of the invasion of Russia.

It's one of the central pieces of World War II, and it's amazing because I think only the Mongols had a successful invasion of Russia.

And

Napoleon, of course, was in his entire military rundown.

All right, so I look forward to hearing you on this topic, and I'll just let you have it.

Thank you, Sammy.

And where were we on our history of World War II?

We're right around early 1941.

Just remember, everybody,

the Yugoslavian government has been replaced.

A brief revolt against Hitler failed.

Germany occupied in April

of 1941.

They occupied Yugoslavia.

They then went into Greece, tidied up Mussolini's mess.

Meanwhile, they have have sent German troops down to rescue the Italian effort in North Africa.

And we finished with the Battle of Crete, in which

in May 1941, with some losses, the Germans took Crete.

Then they wanted to go into Russia.

Now that is something that no one had expected under

the Molotov-Ribbentrop

non-aggression pact of August 23rd, 1939.

they had this mutually supposedly beneficial relationship.

Raw materials to Germany, oil, minerals, food,

mechanized goods in the sense of trucks, some military equipment, and industrial machinery to Russia.

The idea was that Hitler then would be free to take Western Europe.

Russia would watch as the two capitalist powers, the Axis and the democracies wore themselves out.

So it was built on mutual hatred and suspicion, but also mutual interest.

So why did he go in on June 22nd of 1941 under the auspices of Operation Barbarossa?

Why did Hitler go into the Soviet Union?

He was completely victorious at this point.

As I pointed out, all of Europe was under his control or allied to him.

Russia was a partner, if not an ally.

And there's short-term and long-term causes.

If you read Mein Kampf, he says that the only way Germany could expand was eastward.

The West was too sophisticated, too developed, too industrial, but the East had rich natural resources, but more importantly,

it was backward.

And it was the logical place to colonize, make into what is now Belarus and Ukraine would be part of Germany.

And the population would either be exterminated or it would be enslaved.

That was one reason.

There was also rumors, never proved.

A historian Suvorov, Suvarov in the 1980s suggested that he was worried about, Hitler was worried about a preemptive Russian strike.

That's a very debatable thesis.

I don't think that Stalin was ready to attack Hitler.

And

the other reason, of course, why he went in, because he had conquered all of Western Europe, and he could not invade or bomb during the Blitz the United Kingdom into submission.

So, what a funny idea to say that we can't take Britain, we control all of Europe, and the way to take Britain is not to build more U-boats necessarily, or to,

I don't know, starve it out by sea, or use the Air Force to, the Luftwaffe to attack shipping,

but rather

to invade Russia, take Russia and get so many materiale,

so much material and resources that the UK would then, Churchill then would

capitulate.

Russia didn't think they were going to do this because they knew that Hitler had preached

for over a decade, you cannot fight a two-front war if you're Germany, and that's what doomed them in World War I.

But Hitler, contrary to reality, believed that he didn't have a two-front war because Britain was all but vanquished.

So those were the

long-term considerations why Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union.

But there were short-term other factors.

One was

he had used World War I calculus that it the Russian army had folded, as you remember, in November of 1917 under the Tsars and the the Russian Revolution.

He never got more than 80 or 90 miles into Belgium, maybe a little further, and France.

They could never crack the indomitable French army.

That army dissolved in six to eight weeks in World War II, in May and June of

1940.

And

so, under his calculus,

if the French army and the Western Europeans, the French with the help of the British, had held out and never was conquered, but the Russians had collapsed in two and a half years, well then if he went in again and replayed the Western theater and they both collapsed in eight weeks, then Russia should, according to that calculus,

surrender in three weeks.

Because they did in World War I.

They occupied over a million square miles.

And so that was one of the reasons.

The other was he'd seen the Russians go into Poland when they they divided the country up in September and October of 1939.

And the Russians came in late.

They were not very impressive, Hitler thought.

At least his generals told him that.

But more importantly, in November, Russia of 1939, Russia immediately invaded Finland, little tiny Finland.

Two million people in their military versus about 450,000, and they couldn't take Finland until April.

And even then, they had to have a negotiated settlement, to their benefit, no doubt.

But nevertheless, they looked very unimpressive.

And of course, Hitler understood that Stalin had executed in the purges of the military about 30,000 to 40,000 officers.

So, summing up,

Hitler said, Well, it's part of my larger plan to exterminate Easterners, take over land Lebensraum, create the great German Empire, get rid of the Untermenschen or

lower class or lower genetically people, very crazy ideas that he had.

And more importantly,

it'll make England capitulate.

And more importantly,

short term, the Russian army has performed sub-par in Poland, was not impressive in Finland.

nowhere near the reputation of the Wehrmacht, what he had done in comparison.

So this will be, according to World War I calculus, a done deal.

And it turned out that was not true.

There's a lot of controversy why he waited till

June 22nd, given the fear of the Russian winter coming on in six months.

It was scheduled to go

38 days earlier in May.

People still fight over why he delayed.

People say, well, the Yugoslavian unrest and the Greek Italian mess, that

derailed him, and he had to send over a million people into Yugoslavia and Greece and station them there and then that retarded the schedule for Barbarossa.

Other people said, nah, not really.

The problem was

that there was an unusual wet spring, the roads were impassable.

Another school says, well, this was the largest army in history of invasion.

Still is.

Almost 4 million people.

4 million soldiers.

And it was not a German invasion.

It was a 3 million German invasion.

But there was over a million Finns and Romanians and Hungarians and eventually Spaniards and even Italians.

So it was a multi, it was much more multi-nation, multilateral, what would you call it, multi-allied than the Russian effort, which is mostly just Russian soldiers on the ground.

So Hitler thought there would be no way in the world that even Russia with three times the manpower of Germany would be able to withstand this.

They had somewhere around 5,000 planes, 3,000 or 4,000 tanks, 75% of the Luftwaffe strength.

They thought that the Russian army was no larger than 2 or 3 million.

In fact, it was almost the same size, 4 million, in the West alone.

And eventually, within the first year, it would put into the field 6 million, and eventually 14 million people would go through the ranks of the Red Army.

And at one time, they were over 12 million at any given time after 1944.

So they completely miscalculated the ratio needed to invade Russia.

They had no idea, believe it or not, the caliber of Russian roads, the long supply lines that would be necessary.

They thought people might greet them as liberators, especially in Belarus and Ukraine.

They might have if they had not started exterminating people almost immediately,

following the so-called

commissar and Hitler directives.

Just incidentally, you know, that Sammy, that Daryl Cooper said that it was just, they were just overwhelmed and then stuff happens.

No, it was not that way.

There were explicit orders for special groups, Waffen-SS, but also special killer groups, to target commissars, to target Jews, to target Slavs, to exterminate them, but more importantly,

to

ensure that food,

minerals, strategic materials were stripped from the countryside and sent back.

That was everything from pigs and cows to grain to steel, anything they get their hands on, and that led to additional starvation.

So, in the first year of this campaign,

They would take almost 4 million Russian prisoners.

They would kill almost 2.5 million Russians.

There's going to be 28 28 million Russians dead when the whole thing is over.

And they would kill eventually a million and a half Jews and civilians and Slavs and communists.

So it was planned from the very beginning to be a genocidal campaign where rules did not apply.

This came up in Nuremberg because most of the generals,

Army Group North,

von

Lieb, and then of course Army Group Center von Bach, He would be killed in 1945 in a strafing attack, so he didn't go to Nuremberg.

And then Army Group South under the famous von Rundstedt.

But they all claimed, as did their Army Group commanders,

such as von Manstein

or Model.

Model killed himself, but

they all claimed either during the latter part of the war when Germany's defeat was imminent or at Nuremberg that they just got orders from

Jodel or Howder or Keitel or Hitler himself.

So they were just following orders and letting the special groups kill with a bandit.

But that's not quite true.

They themselves, regular army groups,

systematically executed prisoners, starved people, raped, killed, et cetera, et cetera.

So anyway,

on June 22nd, a month and a half later, this motley, it's kind of motley.

They had

French trucks, they had

Italian trucks, they had cars from France, they had everything.

It was just kind of an all of Europe, occupied Europe.

They had volunteers to Nazi sympathetic groups and volunteers.

They had this huge army from Finland all the way down to Romania and the Black Sea.

And they invaded in unison.

And for the first two weeks, it was a bloodbath.

They completely surprised Stalin.

He went into shock.

He went to his DACA.

They thought that

when people came to rescue him on the 11th or 12th day, they hadn't heard from him.

He thought they were going to execute him for negligence.

He had been completely fooled.

The first 200 miles was a wasteland.

They

destroyed about 5,000, 5,000 Soviet aircraft.

They took over a million and a half prisoners.

They killed a half a million Russian soldiers and huge envelopments.

And they were well into Belarus, well into Ukraine.

on their way, Army Group South was to the Crimea

and Army Group North under

von Lieb was on his way with brilliant people like von Monstein.

They were on their way to Leningrad, St.

Petersburg.

So the plan was in the first year to go to

St.

Petersburg.

Leningrad, take the city, cut it off, and then create a barrier with Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland, who were all pro-German.

And by Christmas, they would have been in winter quarters, and they would have basically occupied most, if not all, of northern European Russia.

As far as Russia up near Finland, near the Arctic, troops from the occupation in Norway along with the Finns would either neutralize those Russians or actually defeat them and take about 120 miles into the Arctic of Russia.

And then Army Group Center would take Moscow

under von Bach, who's a pretty good commander.

And then Army Group South would go into

Crimea and then keep going

with the eventual target of the Caspian Sea and especially

the oil fields at Grozny, etc., along the Caspian Sea and then the Dipner and Don and Dipner rivers and cut cut off Moscow from all transport, maritime transport along, should say maritime river transport.

They would stop commerce on the rivers and cut Moscow out.

And then at the end of December or November, the first campaigning season, they would more or less make a fortified line

from the north the Baltic Sea down

to Moscow and then down all the way to the Caspian Sea and that would be what they would call European,

even though part of it was now well into Asia, but this would be European-occupied Russia and they would then start exterminating people and developing it and then the Asiatic

peoples beyond the Ural Mountains, they would let them, you know, just deal with them.

And it almost worked exactly according to plan.

A couple of things to remember is that

when you,

there were some problems that they had about 180 divisions,

the Germans alone.

But the problem was they only had about 20 panzer or armored divisions and maybe 10 motorized divisions.

So that meant they were walking 1,700, 1,800 miles.

And they were dependent entirely on horses.

They had 600,000 vehicles, but they had almost 700,000 horses.

So just imagine you have to have pasturage, and and the Russians are retreating.

And they're not just retreating, they're blowing up rails, they're blowing up roads, they're blowing up telegraph,

they're killing their lives, they're doing everything, so it's a waste.

And Hitler, thinking this is going to be over in two weeks, has no winter clothing

prepared for the

Germans, and it's going to be very cold as early as late September.

He has no

supply reserves.

He has only two or three divisions to relieve worn-out divisions.

And you can see what's happening if you're walking that far and you're under constant assault and you have partisans attacking you from the rear, the army is worn out.

It's lost

about 180,000 dead.

Think of that.

More than all the other fighting from 39 onward.

And yet they keep looking at the Russians.

So they keep saying, well, we've killed or captured four to five to six million Russians, and we've destroyed now 9,000 planes, and we've wiped out 3,000 or 4,000 tanks.

But the commanders are coming back and saying, they may have 250 divisions.

We've never seen so many people.

We're capturing people with patches on their shoulders.

We don't know what, we've never heard of this division.

And they have, by December, the Luftwaffe has lost about 30% of its aircraft.

They can't get parts.

It's hard to find fuel.

The pilots are worn out.

The planes are worn out.

And

the Russians are creating factories on the other side of the Ural Mountains.

And they're starting to get lend-lease from Britain and the United States.

Things like

the Aerova.

It's not a great, the Bell plane.

It's not a great...

plane, but it has a 30-caliber anti-tank weapon.

The Russians like it, and they're starting to produce very sophisticated planes of their own.

And then Guadari and the armor people come back and they tell Hitler, we've encountered something.

There's this KV-1 tank,

and

you can't stop it.

It's huge.

It's 40 or 45 tons, 50 tons.

It's huge.

It's powerful.

And our Mark IV 50 millimeter gun just bounces off.

We need something better.

And then we have this new thing called the T-34.

We thought they were in experimental stages.

And although they're only 20% or 30% of Russian armor, Russian armor is a lot bigger than ours.

And we don't know how it happened.

These people are supposed to be Mongols, inferior, but the T-34 in every aspect is much better than our top two tanks, the Mark III and Mark IV.

It's got a

76-millimeter gun.

We only have a 50-millimeter.

It's got more armor and it's sloped.

Ours are not.

It's got wider tracks.

Ours are not.

It's got a Christie American suspension.

Ours are not.

And

our shells bounce off.

It doesn't.

Now we have one thing

to our advantage.

They're telling Hitler we're much better trained.

We have better organization where we refuel the tanks.

We have better communications with the Air Force, and so even though it'll take us a while to match the T-34, and that would be the Panther and the Tiger,

we're in trouble right now.

So as the year ends,

Hitler's made a couple of very controversial moves.

Army Group South does not have enough soldiers to get to the Caspian Sea the first year as planned to get the oil and cut off the Soviets.

And the Americans are bringing in vast amounts.

They're starting to,

even as early as the fall, through Iran and through Archangel and the Arctic, and Britain is helping them.

And eventually we're going to supply 20 to 30 percent.

I don't think the Soviet Union would have won without Anglo-American aid.

And it was critical.

It was not just American

Anglo-American aid, it was designated to fill the gaps that Russia could not fill, like aviation fuel and aluminum and things like K rations and clothing, uniforms, radios, and that allowed Soviet industry to specialize in what they were good on, heavy, heavy, heavy artillery, tanks, armor, etc.

And so everything is not working out well, so then Hitler makes a critical decision in

July, August, and he thinks that he does not have enough troops.

Four million is not enough apparently.

So he diverts Army Group Center,

which is on its way to taking...

They would have taken Moscow in August.

And it goes south under Guderian

motorized panzer divisions.

And it helps the Army Group South make the largest up to that time envelopment in military history.

They trap The Russians said they only trap 300, the Germans say 600, we don't know, but somewhere in between half a million people.

Soldiers are trapped, most of them will die as prisoners, and then the entire army group south, and this is being aided by Romania,

the Romanians,

they now

have all of Russia, what it would be now Ukraine, almost all the way to Crimea.

And then they're going to have to stop there for winter.

But the problem was that by diverting this critical force and stopping in August the onslaught of Moscow,

they're now off schedule.

So they have to turn around and send back 200,000 motorized divisions and panzers, restart the attack on Moscow.

And lo and behold, they make another envelopment about

100 miles outside of Moscow, and they capture another 600,000 Russians.

And they think the war is over

and so as November they're getting closer and closer to Moscow.

There's only 90,000 soldiers left even the Russians are running out of them.

They probably have no more than a couple of hundred tanks and everybody wants to get in.

Everybody wants to get in.

The Japanese

they say you know what

you guys are right outside Moscow, you're going to win.

We hate the Soviet Union

and we were willing to attack from the, at least some people said they were willing to attack from the east, and that would have been very valuable.

But at this point, Hitler thinks it's a done deal.

He doesn't want scavengers, vultures, they call it, pigging the bones of his victory.

So Japan, in a very fateful decision, turns its attention to the United States, thinking Russia will be out anyway.

We won't have to deal with them.

They were our big threat in Asia.

We can now just deal with the Americans, and we can handle the Americans because they're going to get in probably after we attack them.

And

they may declare war on Germany and they'll be tied down.

And Germany will soon finish the Russian campaign and have no enemies.

And the Americans will be in big trouble.

But think of it.

They had a non-aggression pact with Russia in April of 1941, kind of a retaliation for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

And they were probably willing to break that.

And the Germans do not want.

them to do that.

They want to get sole credit for knocking Moscow out of the war.

And they're going to rue that for the rest of the world.

They really understood that was a terrible mistake.

That if they had cultivated the Japanese and enlisted them from the beginning to attack from the east, that would have been very valuable.

And what happens is the Japanese will not touch

any Russian flag shipping coming from Portland, Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, Port of Los Angeles

on its way to Russian ports or Russian allies

because of the non-aggression pact.

And that'll drive the Germans crazy.

So Moscow is saved.

Japan looks at it and mistakenly thinks it's not saved.

It will then divert its attention to Pearl Harbor.

That will bring America in.

And once America's in, the Lin-Lease will really accelerate.

More importantly,

once Japan is clearly clearly not going to invade Russia, and they have it on pretty good authority they won't,

about 200,000 of their best troops,

specialist in winter warfare, will now take the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Siberia from eastern Russia and arrive just in time for the defense of Moscow, giving them about a quarter million defenders.

It's the coldest winter in 50 years.

The Germans have no winter clothing.

Their horses are freezing to death.

Their vehicles are frozen.

And they're going to lose about 90,000 soldiers, and they're going to be forced back 150 miles.

And up north, they cannot take Leningrad.

Hitler's frustrated.

He says, well,

They're supplying it across Lake Lagoda.

It's very hard to get the Finns to cooperate.

And we'll just starve out Leningrad.

So we won't take the city, we'll blast it with artillery, and they're going to kill over a million Leningrad residents, but they never take it.

And so that's where everything stops.

And at that moment,

World War II becomes World War II because after

Pearl Harbor, the United States declares war on Japan on the 8th, and then Germany

and Italy on the 10th beat America to it and declare war on us.

I don't think we would have declared war, at least not immediately, had they not.

And so suddenly, look at the situation.

Just two months earlier, in June, it looked like the war was over.

And Halder, as I said earlier, famously wrote in his diary that one could say the war was over in 11 days.

It's not now.

There is over a million German casualties.

They're in a war with an army twice their size that's being supplied by Britain and the United States.

Now they're in a war with a resurgent Britain that is starting to bomb them and a resurgent United States that will join the war and within a year be bombing the fatherland of Germany and supplying Russia.

And everything will go downhill.

So we'll stop there, Sammy, but keep in mind that

there's still 1942 and 1943 and 1944,

and what's going to happen to the German army, they're going to start to see that they have some of their army group commanders are actually the more adept.

So you're going to start to see people like Walter Model and von Manstein take prominent roles.

There's going to start to

see the appearance of tiger tanks, more 88 millimeter guns, Panther tanks, and it's going to be very hard to defeat them when they're on the defensive.

So,

their lines will start shrinking, their interior lines as they start to fall back, and they're going to take an enormous toll over Russians.

And we'll stop there today, and we'll do one more session on the Soviet, the invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, and then we'll take a pause

from the European front and go over to Asia and see why Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and what happened the first year of the war, and then at the same time

what the United States can do to actually fulfill its promise to go to war when it's not prepared.

I had no idea Pearl Harbor was going to happen despite conspiracy theories, but

one thing they can do because of B-17s and their confidence in strategic bombing.

By mid

six months, they think that they can operate daylight bombing raids over Germany, and that's going to be a disaster.

And we'll talk about the bombing in Pearl Harbor next time.

Thank you, Victor, for that discussion of the

invasion of Russia.

It's a most fascinating piece.

And one has to ask the question of whether one really wants to invade Russia or not,

if you're any power.

But I appreciate your discussion of that.

That's one of the reasons I've been suggesting politely that the idea that Ukraine is going to occupy 500 square miles of mother Russia or send missiles into is a mistake.

Well, having mentioned that, stay with us.

We're going to go to some breaks and then come back and talk a little bit about the Ukraine.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So, Victor, thank you.

The Ukraine subject is

very interesting this week.

It appears that they are trying to recruit troops from North Korea and that at least stories in the mainstream media are NATO is warming up to the Ukraine except Germany.

So I was wondering your thoughts on the war in general.

Well, Germany is not warming up to the Ukraine for a variety of reasons.

And some of them are legitimate.

I mean, they Germans don't have a source now of cheap natural gas.

Winter's coming on, it's the second winter they actually it's it's going to be the third winter that they have not had cheap natural gas.

They stupidly, insanely,

suicidally had shut down coal plants, nuclear plants, and relied on renewable energy in cold, cloudy, sunless Germany.

It's not even, I've been to Germany so many times, it's not even always windy there, right?

So that was insane.

Merkel's going to go down in history as one of the worst prime ministers in German history.

She single-handedly helped destroy German competitiveness.

So Germany is angry that it has no natural gas.

It's angry at Ukraine that they blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.

And that's going to be a problem if the war ever ends to restore it.

Germany is economic.

It was the powerhouse of Europe that drove the entire European Union economy.

It's now like the 19th century Ottomans.

It's the sick man of Europe economically.

It's not competitive because its energy costs are 30 to 40 percent higher than its competitors.

And so it wants that war over with.

It really does.

And more importantly, Germany is

in the environment of the war.

It's to the east.

It's not France.

It's not Britain.

It's easy to be an island, they think.

It's easy to be on the Atlantic coast.

But if you're right there and they have dark, dark, dark memories of what we just talked about, Operation Barbarossa, when three out of four German soldiers in World War II were killed by Russians.

So there's all sorts of historical complexities that you can understand.

Germany's just not got its heart into it.

It's terrified of Putin, and it wants NATO, NATO, NATO, NATO, but it does not want to go out on limb.

It's kind of like Finland in 1941, where Finland had fought the Russians heroically, but they did concede the Winter War in April of 1940.

And part of that arrangement was if there was ever a war, they would not go into Russia.

So when Hitler was counting on the Finns to help them with Leningrad and maybe go, they Mannerheim said, Look, we have a half a million soldiers, we'll help you from our side of the border.

We are not going into Russia.

People, so there's a lot of historical fear of Russia.

And,

you know,

what's the plan?

They've made a lot of mistakes, the United States and the West,

vis-a-vis Ukraine.

They should have never flown Zelensky in and put him in a munitions plant in Pennsylvania the day that Early in mail balloting started, and then have him give an interview to the New Yorker and trash Vance and Trump.

That was an October surprise that blew up in their faces.

Support for Ukraine has gone from about 65% and less than 50%.

We're running a $36 trillion deficit.

We have a wide open border.

So the argument that why are we sending $150 billion to Ukraine when we don't even enforce our border or we don't have billions of dollars to rebuild

hurricane plague northern Georgia or the Carolinas, these are all legitimate questions.

And

why do we, as I said before, why do we tell Ukraine, be disproportionate, you've got to win, do not negotiate no ceasefire.

It's okay to get rid of martial law.

It's okay that Zelensky is a de facto dictator now.

Don't worry about collateral damage that much.

Just win, baby, win.

And we tell Netanyahu coalition government, watch out for collateral damage.

When are you going to have that ceasefire?

You can't win.

Don't be disproportionate.

No one can figure out the asymmetric treatment of our closest ally, Israel, and Ukraine, which is not a formal ally.

Before this invasion, we were considered Ukraine an interferer in U.S.

politics.

Remember, in 2016, the ambassador wrote an op-ed

against Donald Trump.

And then we had the steel dossier that was heavily reliant on Ukrainian ability.

We remember the expatriate Lieutenant Colonel Venman, who was the source of the Trumped-Up First Impeachment Writ, etc., etc., etc.

And then, of course, the cherry on the Sunday was Hunter Biden's barisma and the Biden family being enriched.

The Biden boasts that he fired Victor Choken, the prosecutor who was looking into the Biden skullduggery.

You put it all together and

people are ambiguous about what's going on and they want some type of settlement that does not reward Putin and puts him back where he was prior to February 24th of 2022.

And to do that, you're probably going to have to say what was the policy of Obama, Trump, and Biden.

We want you to go back out of Crimea and Donbass, but we do not want to go to war to force you out.

So, de facto, you have taken the Donbass and Crimea, and they're historically ambiguous anyway.

And if you can just stop it there, we'll have a deal.

Well, you say that what the people want with Ukraine.

Recently, in this week's news, Donald Trump said that it's a, what do you say, the war is a loser and Zelensky is to blame.

Do you think that's a winning campaign position?

If he explains and offers just a little smidgen of context, could I be so bold as to give Donald Trump ex-president and Republican nominee some advice?

I would modify.

If he thinks it's a loser, how about this?

There are now over 1 million, more like 1,000, 1,200,000 young men who have been shredded, that are dead, they're wounded, they're missing.

And for what?

And this is insane.

And we understand Vladimir Putin started it, and we have a methodology to stop it.

This is insane.

It's a loser.

If he said that, fine.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, last topic.

Elon seems to be challenging the formidable California Coastal Commission.

We all know how that formidable commission is verges almost on making law, generally speaking, for Californians.

But they won't let him use Vandenberg or they haven't given him permission to yet with his SpaceX.

And Governor Newsom said he's on Elon's side.

I was wondering your ideas on that.

I think they're really pushing it because they are trying to prohibit the military from using SpaceX technology, missiles, et cetera, to launch,

what, satellites that are in our own security interests from Vandenberg.

Air Force Base, right?

And the Coastal Commission is saying it's in our jurisdiction.

But that's a wider question that's never really been adjudicated by the Supreme Court.

Can you set up a commission,

a governor or something, and just say these unelected people have absolute control over the lives of people within, I don't know what it is, a 50-mile

proximity of the coastline?

In other words, they can tell a private owner,

your local city ordinance, your zoning law, they don't matter.

So your elected governments don't matter.

If you want to put a second story, you've got to get our permission.

If you want to put a sign on a road, you've got to get our permission.

We

overrule everything.

We have no sovereignty.

You have no local control.

In the military, I know you have no control.

The military is a federal entity.

That's like saying that you could make a commission that says, you know what, we think there's too much traffic up to Yosemite, so we're going to stop State Highway 41.

We'll just close it down for a week and we'll do, you can't do that.

That's federal property, Yosemite, and they have a right for access.

So this is a very complex corpus of law, and I think he will appeal it, and it will go to the Supreme Court eventually.

And I think they're going to lose the Coastal Commission.

And pray God, if they lose, they abolish it.

Because I have enough confidence in local communities can make decisions for themselves that control their area of the coast.

You don't need a bunch of left-wing, unelected, utopian bullies.

And the only reason they're going after him, and it's their own words, not ours, not the listeners, not mine, theirs, that he is considered pro-Trump.

And therefore, they want to punish him by saying to him, you may have fled California and you may be beyond our grasp and we can't get you now.

But the military is still within our jurisdiction, and we're not going to let them do business with you.

And we don't care about the national security of the United States.

It's sort of like the version of sanctuary cities.

We're sanctuary cities, we're morally superior to anybody, and we can nullify a federal interest in law anytime we want.

And so we do with the illegal alien.

And so we're the Coastal Commission, we're liberal, Utopian, we're morally superior.

And we can go into a U.S.

federal base and say to them, Hey, inside your base, this missile pad, you're not going to launch any more missiles.

We can tell you to do that.

I don't think they can get away with it.

And I hope they cannot get away with it.

Let's hope not.

And what about that little.

Oh, go ahead.

Gavin is

siding with Musk,

and because he knows that

the people,

the public opinion in the country want that, and he's sick and tired himself because his friends all call him up non-stop.

Hey, Gavin, I gave $5 million to your campaign.

I'm down here in La Jolla.

All I wanted to do was add a deck to my upstairs view of the San Diego Sea maritime, and they won't let me do it.

Hey, Gavin, I'm over here in Half Moon Bay.

I'm going to build a big, beautiful home on my 10 acres of coastal property, and they won't let me do it.

Who are these people, Gavin?

And so he understands what what the elite don't want that.

You know, it's so funny, I teach at Pepperdine occasionally.

So sometimes I go along the Malibu coast, and the Coastal Commission has said that at various spaces, every public person has a right to access to the beach, even though that access then intrudes on public property, private property.

So they declare a corridor, you can see the, and they put a little step, so you're walking along the PCH.

Ah,

it's, I've been, you know, quarter mile from my last access.

I'll just get my towel and walk on this person's property down to the beach, because that's not his property.

I have an easement.

And you know what these wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, elite, elite, Trump-hating stars do?

What do they do?

I can imagine.

They start growing things like Bougainvillas, and they think, oh my God, I haven't proved my Bougainvilla.

Its thorns are kind of looping over that pathway.

Oh my God, I planted a bunch of some,

maybe there's some poison oak there.

I don't know what it is, but they're trying to make it very difficult.

Oh, yeah, of course.

And

so they don't like it either.

No, nobody likes that California Coastal Commission.

Well, Victor, I have just one comment by a reader of your website, and it comes from Comments on the 15 ways to destroy democracy and I'm only going to read part of Miles D's comment here.

It's a little bit extensive but it has an interesting question.

As usual,

a great essay to understand

a great easy to understand explanation by VDH.

I have had the opportunity to express my opinion to younger lads about the Electoral College.

When they have asked me how I can support such an anti-democratic institution,

a very basic comparative point I've made is this.

And then he goes on to make his point, but I was wondering about your response to those youngsters who find it anti-democratic, the Electoral College, and either why you think they're doing that or

what might become of it to have the younger generation thinking.

Well, they believe we're an Athenian democracy because who's against democracy?

They don't know anything about their history.

They don't know all the founding fathers were well versed in the Florentine and Venetian republics.

They had read Machiavelli, they had read Livy,

they had read

Rousseau, Voltaire, they had read the pro and con, they had read Thucydides, they had read Plato, Xenophon, and what did they come up with?

They came up with the idea that the radical Athenian model did not work.

And that the so-called mixed constitution, what the Greeks called politeia, between a legislature of two bicameral, you know, upper, lower legislators, Senate house and our terms,

and a chief executive and representatives.

In other words, the people just don't meet in the Ecclesia and say,

let's kill all the Middle Enians today.

Oh, that's a bad idea.

Let's send another ship out and say, let's not kill all the Middle Indians.

Oh, let's execute all the generals at Argonusa.

Well, that was our greatest sea victory.

So what?

They're culpable.

They didn't rescue the surviving seamen.

So they didn't want that.

And so we are a constitutional republic.

It doesn't say the United People of America.

It's the United States.

So to get the Constitution ratified, they said to each state, we're going to respect your autonomy and integrity and independence, sort of.

You're going to give first allegiance to the federal republic, but

two senators are going to be, first they're going to be appointed by your legislature.

Then we change that to popular vote.

But those two senators are not predicated like House members on population in the United States as a whole.

They represent you.

And if you have 500,000 people in your state, then 250,000 have a center.

If you have 20 million, then 10 million do.

So what?

It's the state.

It's not going to be a big House of Representatives.

And part of that effort to disperse power and slow things down,

and especially, what did they look at antiquity?

What were the two places where they said there was an auclos or what the Romans called a turba?

Rome and Athens.

They said, we're not going to turn New York and Philadelphia or later into a turba or an auklos.

In other words, the cities are not going to determine a bunch of people who don't own property and have never been out in the nature

and they're stacked up, as I'm quoting directly.

Jefferson said they've stacked on top of each other.

We're going to have some way of allowing people in the geographical interior where oil, what would become oil, food, minerals are produced, the lifeblood of the country.

And we believe as agrarians, and they were agrarians, that the agrarian lifestyle is superior to the municipal lifestyle.

So they said,

you will vote in your states, and that vote will be reflected with electors, and the electors will determine it.

And almost always the popular vote will be similar to the electoral.

I think there's been four cases when it hasn't happened.

And so,

second, they thought they were very worried about rigged elections.

And they said, you know what, if you want to rig a national popular vote

solely in control of the federal government,

then you could swing the whole thing.

But to rig a vote when you have electors and you're one step away from the instant popular acclaim, then you have a second level where you can't get Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York all on the same page.

There's too many states.

And that was always, I thought, that was one of the reasons why the left who tries to corrupt these elections has a problem because you can't corrupt every state.

So you can't go into Texas and say, we're going to get our activists out of Illinois and New York to come down to Texas and warp the vote.

And that was the idea of the Electoral College.

It was too diverse to

get a conspiracy to rig the way that people vote.

And that's why the Constitution says the primary responsibility for balloting shall rest with the states, except from time to time federal government can come in, you know, suffrage or eighteen-year-old vote, things like that.

So there were reasons

they wanted to get candidates to get out of the cities and campaign throughout the country, get acquainted with the rural nature of the country, understand the importance of

mining and farming and construction and railroad, all of that.

And so it's worked pretty well.

And the left,

the left has no consistent, when you say the young people, what do you mean?

You just mean they're reacting to the election of 2016.

Before 2016,

it was called the Blue Wall.

And they said, you know what?

We love the Electoral College because before we even start, we have 104 votes in.

Illinois, never going to be

never going to be read again because of Chicago.

And we have New York, never going to be red because of the 10 million in Greater New York.

And

we have California because LA and San Francisco areas control the entire state.

And all we have to do is win three other states, basically,

in addition to our solid blue enclaves, but three swing states.

And now we've called it the Blue Wall, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

And we do that because, look, Wisconsin's controlled by Milwaukee and Madison.

And Michigan's controlled by Grand Rapids and the Ann Arbor-Detroit corridor.

And Pennsylvania is controlled by Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

So we're always going to be blue.

But when the blue wall shattered, then suddenly it was the Electoral College.

And now they want it gone.

Trust me.

Crazy.

Trust me.

If Donald Trump were to win the popular vote, and it's possible,

I think it's probable, and he loses the Electoral College, and they will sing the praises.

They'll say, The Electoral College was brilliant.

It was designed to stop demagogues.

It just got masses of people.

Just like they did with illegal immigration.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And this will, if, just like they did with illegal immigration, if you come from Cuba, you get back there to Cuba.

We believe in federal integrity.

We don't want any Cubans.

They're too right-wing.

So

everything's operational,

conditional.

They just feel there's no such, there's no set principle.

The border is open.

That's great.

We get constituencies.

However, in 2024, if the Latino, Hispanic, or whatever you want to call it vote is 55 Trump, we want to shut that border down immediately because we're not going to cultivate new anti-left-wing voters.

Victor, thanks so much.

I know we're at a hard stop here today, and I would like to thank your voters.

Your voters, sorry.

I would like to to thank your listeners for joining the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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