Forgotten Battlefields of WWII and Campaign Craziness

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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

We're on the start of World War II, and Victor's talking about the period between the battle for Britain and the invasion of Russia today.

So that will be our middle segment.

We're going to look at some of the news from the week, Harris's plagiarism, and the UN's complicity with Hezbollah as they fight Israel.

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

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

The website is called The Blade of Perseus.

And please come join us there for lots of good material that's free, some of it.

And then also the VDH ultra material that comes out three times a week.

And so lots of good stuff on the website.

So come join us.

So Victor, I know that you and Jack talked a little bit about the plagiarism of Kamala's.

Kamala Harris and the latest news that the plagiarism wasn't so bad, according to the left, who has hired an expert to look at it.

And I was wondering, I know you wanted to talk a little bit more about that.

Well,

I think it's because of something about the internet age where people cut and paste or whatever.

But when I was a student, plagiarism was loosely defined if you use three words in succession that are not yours, that are uniquely identified as someone else's.

Or you quote something, even if you footnote, if you say, footnote C.

Smith, History of the World, but that citation does not excuse you if you use a block quote without quotation marks.

You know what I mean by that?

Yes.

So that's what Harris did in this co-authored book.

She had blocks of direct quotes from a particular book, but she footnoted it in some cases and thought that was okay, but as if she had written it.

But that's plagiarism.

And then, of course, she borrowed wholesale

material from things like ads for I think it was Goodwill Industry, you know, like a publicity.

And the point I'm making this is that this expert Jonathan Bailey that the New York Times hired went on this new formula that if I suppose that I think it's if you if 15% is plagiarized, then it's not actionable plagiarism.

That's not true.

Joe Biden had to quit.

Well, I mean, he said that there was twenty, I don't know, 40 instances, but it was 270-some pages, so it wasn't that much.

That's a lot.

So she did a couple of things.

She stole things from Wikipedia verbatim.

She stole things from ads.

She quoted, she footnoted

without putting quotation marks.

She made up a page number as if that was a source when it wasn't.

She had false sources.

So she the point isn't the actual volume, which was still considerable, but

the manifestation in so many different ways of dishonesty.

And

the media has just basically said the following:

right-wingers, they always use that verb seize, seized on plagiarism, and it's an October surprise.

So we're just not going to cover it.

And she's not going to be asked that.

This is important because she's going on interviews, and they are billed as tough interviews with Joe Rogan and Rhett Barron Fox.

And if they don't ask her about this, I think they're going to lose all credibility because all you have to do is say, you've been accused of plagiarism.

Did you borrow intellectual content that was not yours?

And

what's she going to say?

The only answer that could excuse her says, I do, and I feel like I was sloppy.

She can use the Doris Kern's good one when she said,

my research assistant did it.

Or you can, you know, Stephen Ambrose's defense.

Well, I'm not going to talk about it.

I'm Stephen Ambrose.

So, or you can do the Joe Biden, oh, come on, give me a break when he stole Neil Kinnock's speech.

But he resigned for that.

Martin Luther King plagiarized his thesis.

And so it's just another

nail in the coffin.

I mean, what's she going to say?

So I just hope these are the type of questions about plagiarism, like her gun and like

her McDonald's that will come up in these interviews that she's doing.

And they're going to come up again and again in a very

wide variety in the last 21 days.

And the caliber of the interviewer will be adjudicated by the degree to which they ask her about her biographical mythologies.

And she's a mythographer, she is.

And she cannot be trusted to say the the truth.

And just today,

she has that anecdote that she's repeated on more than one occasion that I was a little girl, you know what, let me tell you something.

My mommy just asked me, what do you want?

And I said, freedom.

That came out of Martin Luther King's own

anecdote.

I mean, he wrote about it, that he met a girl in Birmingham, Alabama, I think a seven-year-old, and he said, what do you want?

She said, freedom.

I don't know if that's accurate, but that's who first created that anecdote.

And does anybody believe that

in the 1960s that somebody in the Bay Area, like a place of predominantly black Oakland, if she actually did grow up there, which she didn't, but in Berkeley, the most left-wing place in the United States, that she was denied freedom?

I don't think so.

And her parents are both PhDs.

So those are the things that should come up in the last 21 days.

Yeah.

Well,

let's stick with Harris then.

We've been watching this all hands on deck because the polls are not looking so good for Harris.

So they've brought out the actors and the politicians, but they're also, and this is what I'm more interested in, raising suspicions of Trump's election interference or possibly that he will interfere.

And at the same time, they've got this big campaign against Donald Trump has to accept the election as it is and all of the people around him.

And it's very strange.

Well,

it's in Solinsky's Rules for Radicals.

It's part of the Marxist Handbook.

What you do is you get a narrative and then you flood the zone with it.

So remember there was a narrative that Tim Waltz,

they're just weird.

They're weird people.

J.D.

Vance is weird.

Remember they made this lie that he had sex with a couch?

They just dreamed of it.

And then all of a sudden, MSNBC, CNM, and MSNBC, NBC, they all said, he's just weird.

Well, now the talking point that comes out of the DNC and the Kamala Harris

for the last few months is that election denialism, that he's not going to accept the verdict because, and then he's a fascist.

He's a fascist, he's a fascist.

And that's to try to scare everybody, of course, but of it's always with the left projection.

So Jeremy Raskin, who's a prominent Democratic representative, just said the other day that he's not sure that he would certify the election if Trump wins.

And believe me, if Donald Trump wins the election, and I think he's got a very good chance of winning the Electoral College, you're going to see a lot of election denialism circa 2016.

If he wins the Electoral College, they'll bring out that Group C list of Hollywood actors.

We beg you, we beg you, please, if you're an elector in Nebraska or

Ohio, just don't vote the way that your state voted.

Reflect the patriotic thing.

Reflect the national vote that Hillary.

Pledge your votes to Hillary.

In other words, act unconstitutionally and throw the election.

That was election denialism.

Nobody got mad at that.

But I've noticed in every aspect of the media this week the narrative is, even where I work at the Hoover Institution.

Suddenly, it's election denialism, election denialism.

Also, I think what's interesting is we've heard a lot about Tim Waltz, and he's getting out there and doing strange things like trying to load a gun and shoot it, etc., to resonate, I guess, with the white male population.

And people are forgetting about his record in Minnesota, that the population has been declining in the last four years in Minnesota, that the per capita income is below the national average in Minnesota, and it wasn't always that way.

Energy prices.

Yeah, go ahead.

Crime-free, very affluent.

It was an influx of people rather than an exodus.

He's turned everything the opposite.

And then, you know, then he quotes one quote, we have the best health care.

I'm not going to answer any of that question about the crime explosion.

He's been a disaster.

Yeah, he should be.

And, you know, when he said that,

Well, you know, we got to get rid of the Electoral College, but that's not the view of

the campaign.

Well, it's your view.

You've signed the law and the National Voter Compact to get rid of the ⁇ that's basically a way of getting rid of the electoral cost.

He's been a disaster from A to Z.

They know it.

He's a liability.

They thought they were going to send him out as an experienced, hands-on governor from the Midwest.

Turned out to be a buffoon.

They can't let him go out because he'll do another J.D.

Vance type of debate performance.

But you can see their desperation when they're putting him on.

Tim Waltz has been on Fox two weekends weekends in a row, and then they put

Camela on Brett Baer, and then, as I said earlier, Joe Rogan, and they should have been doing this 90 days, because if they screwed up, and they will, they had time to rectify it or improve.

But

when you take a hitter and you put him in the dugout for 90 days, and then he doesn't get any hits or warm-ups, and then you put him in a clutch hit, he's not going to do well.

And that's what they're doing now in the last 21 days.

And they're looking at the playbook of joe biden in 2020 20 they think we can outsource it to the medium that martha raditz that interview that she did with joe um jd vance where he eviscerated her when he said you know look at you look i mean can you should hear you you know it's okay for just a few apartments to be taken over by armed venezuelan gangs well

why why was she so angry, Martha Raditz?

She was just livid, you know, and Dana Bash just gets livid.

And the people in the view get livid because they see it slipping away.

They really do, and they think this cannot be true.

And so

they think the country is going to be run by the interior that we cannot stand.

So we've got to talk to these people.

We know best.

So we talk to each other in Georgetown, we talk to each other in Beverly Hills and Silicon Valley.

We know what the pulse of the country is.

So let's go get a bunch of actors and have a big fat guy with a cowboy hat and another guy saying that he changes carburetors.

And Jack and I talked about that.

And

we'll just say that we're middle-class people and we want, you know,

we can lift 400 pounds and then we braid our daughter's hair.

And that's what we leave notes to our girlfriends and wives.

And I think that that's going to appeal.

Well, people, I saw that I thought it was a Trump, as I said, and that's how sheltered they are.

So they're going to get very, very desperate.

All the October surprises are exhausted.

All the surrogates have been used up.

Hillary's been out there.

Bill, Bill, I didn't even know who Bill was.

He was at a counter at McDonald's.

Are you Joe?

Yeah, I saw that.

And then she was like, oh, you're Bill.

And she went from unhappy Joe to happy Bill.

Yeah, it was a double whammy.

It was insulting that she forgot who he was.

And then when she found out she remembered the name, he was better than the president.

who, by the way, I think is still president, but he has just disappeared from the scene.

And

he just seems to be doing one thing, and that's just get off the grass with attitude toward Netanyahu, the new demon.

He's the new Trump overseas.

You know,

500 projectiles sent to Israel in April, and then again, the last 182 of them, 320 and 182.

And you can't do this, you can't hit the oil installations because we're in election year, and we don't want the price of oil because we've drained the petroleum strategic reserve.

Don't spoil it.

And you can't hit the nuclear sites because we want to get back in the nuclear deal.

So, what you can do is what?

Hit military installations?

I don't know.

Yeah.

So Israel is in a really hard spot because they're systematic.

They've lost a few soldiers now in Lebanon.

They're fighting a full-scale war in Lebanon.

And now they're going to have to deal with Iran.

And this administration is

really pressuring them.

You don't do something dramatic.

The last thing we want 21 days before the election is a bunch of Netanyahu heroics taking the attention away from us, showing our bankrupt Middle East policies, having violence on the screen, just when we're trying to find Senoir in this tunnel so we can negotiate with our hostages as an October surprise.

That's their attitude.

Yeah.

It really is.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break because I know you need quite a bit of time for the middle segment

on the period between Battle for Britain and the invasion of Moscow in World Moscow, of Russia in World War II.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on X.

His handle is at V D Hansen and on Facebook

at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So join him there.

Victor, you want to talk about that long period between that battle for Britain and

going to war with the Soviet Union, which must have took some prep for

Germany.

Generally, it's considered that the missions that the Luftwaffe failed to achieve a decisive result, in which they did, ended around the end of August of 1940.

They didn't invade the Soviet Union until June 22nd of 1940.

What was going on in the war this time?

Well, Italy, remember, had piled on once France looked like it was doomed on June 10th to get in on the last two weeks.

They did that little incursion into France.

And then,

right after the Battle of Britain, on the end of October, they invaded from Albania that they absorbed.

They thought the Greeks would be like the Albanians.

And they got bogged down October, November, December,

right?

January, February, March, April of 41.

So

this is going on this whole time.

Meanwhile, the British are fighting the Italians in East Africa and now in North Africa, and they're winning.

And so all of a sudden,

this blitzkrieg and these nine wars that they've won become problematic because A, they couldn't bomb as they bragged or invade Britain into submission.

Two, Mussolini has gone haywire and invaded

Greece and it's not working well.

He's bogged down.

C, he's losing the war in North Africa.

D, Britain's all alone, but they're doing pretty well.

And the solution Hitler thinks of all these little screw-ups is to do what?

To attack his ally who's providing all of these strategic

fuels, ores, food for the Wehrmacht.

And he's planning to go in.

And he thinks, my God, I got to clean all this up.

And so then

at the end of October, you know, he went into Greece and he's bogged down.

So now all of a sudden, Hitler is trying to assemble an army of three and a half million people.

And I mean, it's not just a German army.

He's got Italians.

He's got Spaniards.

He's got Eastern Europeans.

He's got volunteers from occupied Western Europe.

It's a huge force.

And it's this surprise.

But all of a sudden, the next shoe that drops is that after finally

the English take away 50,000 people from North Africa they could have used to end out the North African theater.

And that gives the Italians a little breathing room and soon Rommel's going to be sent down there and revive the whole North African theater.

But

the point is that now suddenly Mussolini has caused a full-fledged war.

There's 50,000 New Zealanders, Australians, Britons inside Greece helping the Greeks.

They've got about 15 divisions.

So

what does Hitler have to do?

He has to divert.

He can't help Rommel and North Africa.

He's got about a million people in Eastern Europe.

And he's got to go into Greece.

And he goes in in April.

It's getting pretty close to the expected.

It was going to go in

May 20th.

He's getting really close to the jump-off period.

And now he's fighting a full-fledged war.

And he wins in about two weeks.

And he forces all the English people to evacuate.

Pretty good evacuation.

And where do they go?

Crete.

If you're looking at the Mediterranean, there are five key places that determine the fate of the Mediterranean.

Number one is Suez.

Hitler does not have Suez.

Number two in the eastern Mediterranean is the large island of Cyprus.

Number three

is Crete,

right between Europe and Libya.

Number four is Malta.

He does not have Malta.

And number five is Gibraltar.

So if you look at the countries that ring the Mediterranean at this point, this key point in April of 1941, it looks pretty good.

Spain, Portugal on the coast, fascist ally,

though neutral.

Spain, Spanish coast of the Mediterranean.

Fascist ally, though neutral.

Next country, occupied France, Vichy, you know, on Hitler's side.

Then you go to Italy,

ally.

Then you jump over to Greece and the Balkans.

Either all, they're now occupied.

You go around the Turkey.

Turkey is pro-Nazi.

It says it's neutral, but it's still pro-Nazi.

And you go down and there's the British Holy Land and that's going to be contested and Egypt.

and Suez.

That's the only thing left.

Libya, Italian, Tunisia, Italian, and then Algeria, Morocco.

So they have the whole Mediterranean, but they don't have the five stepping stones that control it.

So he says, in May, I'm going to go take Crete, and then I will have an air base.

And everybody says, Meinfeuer, we're going to go into Russia.

That's where the whole war is going to be decided.

We're already diverted in North Africa, bailing out the Italians.

Now we're diverted, we just got diverted in Greece, and now the Yugoslavians had a coup, and our fascist guys have been thrown out, and the British subverted us, and now we've got to go into Yugoslavia.

And they did, and they fought April and May, and

you add up all of these losses.

It's not great, but it's about 50,000 dead, wounded, or missing.

And it's about 1,000 planes, and then suddenly the Fuhrer wants to go and take Crete.

Well, of all the five key points I just mentioned, the Mediterranean, that is the least important.

Malta is the key.

It's the most strategically located.

It's closer to Gibraltar.

So anyway, they have Operation Mercury and around May 20th they try the biggest and really the last airborne operation on the Axis part.

And they drop

about 18,000.

They land some, but they parachute about a total force by sea and by land, 18,000 into Crete.

And the British and the Greeks have about the same number, but General Freiberg is unfortunately not a very good general.

And in two weeks, the Germans take the island, but there's a horrific sea battle between the Luftwaffe flying from bases in newly captured Greece, and they are attacked.

They sink, I think they sink six cruisers, they sink destroyers, and they evacuate, the British evacuate about, they get about 40,000 people off the island.

You look at the casualties, dead, wounded, or missing, the Germans lose about 5,000 just taking the island.

And then

it plays no strategic role in the war other than to harass ships that come around Crete.

And they have a terrible insurgency of Greek people in the mountains.

They have terrible atrocities.

It's just a no-win for Hitler.

And he says later in life, you know, later in the war, I'll never do that again.

Parachuting is a suicidal operation.

And the importance of that Operation Mercury that was costly, although they do win because of the ally ineptitas and they're not able to be supplied and they have no air cover,

is very controversial.

And that is when people look at why Operation Barbarossa failed,

They have about three exegesis why it failed in the first year.

It almost worked in the first year.

Number one, they got to Leningrad, as promised, St.

Petersburg, and they could have taken it, but they did not go into the city right away.

They thought they could starve it out and they made a blockade and the Finns they thought would help them coming after the winter war and the Finns said we will not.

We will help you from Finnish territory, but we're not going into occupied Russia.

because you may lose and we're going to pay the price when you're defeated.

So we will help you, but not going into Russia.

So they never take Leningrad,

second biggest city in Russia.

And then they're on their way to take Moscow by August, and then all of a sudden Hitler says, you know, Army Group

center, it doesn't have enough troops to take all of Ukraine in the middle of the Soviet Union, so we're going to divert Gwyderia and then you're going to go down to the south.

And they have two huge envelopments, the most famous at Kiev.

That was where Babayar atrocities happened.

33,000 Jews shot.

And that thing was not just one occasion.

It'll keep going on and on and on, killing Jews.

But they capture the largest number of people in history, and it's almost 700,000 Russian soldiers.

And they're going to do it again when they turn around to go to Moscow.

But the point I'm making is they get right to about 18 miles outside of Moscow on December 7th and 8th.

They can see the dome of the Kremlin, the spires.

They claim they are at the first subway station in the suburbs, and then they have the coldest winter in 50 years.

And

they don't have winter clothing.

They're summer and they're stalled.

They think it's going to pass.

It doesn't.

And then the blame game goes.

Why didn't we take Moscow?

And they say, well, it wouldn't have mattered.

Napoleon took it.

He still lost.

Yeah, but that was Napoleon.

This was the center of the whole communist apparatus.

Why didn't we take it?

Oh, Hitler should have never diverted Gudarian.

He could have taken Moscow in August.

Yes, but he got the biggest bag of prisoners you've ever had, and he took Kiev by diverting it.

Okay.

Oh, it wouldn't have mattered anyway.

It was muddy in May.

Even if he hadn't had to go into Crete or hadn't to bail out Mussolini in Greece, didn't have the coup in Yugoslavia, he could have started in May 20th.

And then he would have been

outside of Moscow by November, and it wasn't snowing.

He could have taken the city.

Yeah, but he couldn't have really gone in May because it was too muddy.

So they argue back and forth the degree degree to which the Yugoslavian campaign of April, May 1941, the bailing out of Mussolini in Greece of April and May 1941, and Operation Mercury, that is the German airborne assault on Crete, took away

probably about a thousand airplanes and probably

50,000 dead, wounded soldiers.

Not a lot compared to three and a half million that went in, but it was a distraction.

And that, and more importantly, it gave a message to the Soviet Union when they're attacked that the British

were all alone when you were on Hitler's side, and they didn't give up.

And they were fighting in Egypt, they were fighting in Greece, they were fighting in Crete, and they were fighting all alone.

They had fought in France and the United States, and looked at this and said, you know what?

Joe Kennedy, the ambassador to London, and a peaser and pro-Nazi, basically, if I can be so blunt, he's wrong.

They're not going to fall.

The Battle of Britain failed, and the British went on the offensive.

And they may have lost Greece, they may have lost Crete, they may have lost ships, but they're still in the game, and they're still fighting in North Africa, and they're worth saving.

And the Soviets are not...

They're going to need help too.

And it just changes the whole complexion, those campaigns.

And Hitler's starting to realize that industrial, in terms of manpower, Germany's only got 80 million people.

The Soviet Union's got over 200 million.

The United States has 150 million.

So he's starting to say, I've got to get this war over very quickly and take Moscow and then take European Russia, build a wall or something.

I don't even want to go into Asia.

Just take the oil fields of the Caspian Sea and call an end.

And I do not want to be in these backwater countries fighting wars of attrition.

That's not what Blitzkrieg is.

So

it's not the beginning of the end, but it's starting the end of the beginning.

Of course, when he goes into Russia, as we'll talk about next time, General Halder, who was the commander of the Wehrmacht, said the following.

One could say, he wrote in his diary after 11 days, one could say, one could argue that after 11 days, Operation Barbarossa is essentially over and won.

And that was because of the two million prisoners and they were all halfway to Moscow, etc., etc., within two months.

We'll talk about that.

That was probably the greatest error of many that Hitler made in World War II.

Meanwhile, just to finish, the Japanese are cleaning up on the

they're very careful.

They're not going to provoke the United States and Hawaii.

They're not going to provoke, they say, the Philippines.

They're not going to provoke the British and Malaysia.

They're just watching, watching, watching.

And they want to take the Dutch East Indies and they go into Indochina and get the rice belt.

And they're going to have,

We'll see next time that Admiral Yamamoto, the poet, the haiku, the artist, the philosopher who didn't really want to go to war.

No.

He said, if you don't let me attack Pearl Harbor, I'm going to resign.

Everybody says, oh, Yamamoto was a sane.

He said he could raise hell for six months.

I don't know if he actually said that.

But after that, I can't guarantee it, i.e., the war makers are making me go.

No, he said, you know what?

The Air Force is not up to European standards.

The Army is not up to European standards.

The Navy, we have a bigger Pacific fleet than either Britain or the United States.

And our carriers and battleships and cruisers are better.

We've copied everything they have and we've improved on them, and we have better planes than they do.

So you've got to let me a chance to win the war in six months.

And I can do it if I can attack Pearl Harris.

If you don't let me do it, I'm going to quit.

So that's what we'll talk about next time.

Okay.

Before we go to break, I was wondering, you said that Hitler realized that Blitzkrieg was not going to

work eventually.

How soon in the war do you think he realized that?

Blitzkrieg was dependent on short communications with Germany and European roads, Western European roads, and plentiful supplies of gas.

When he went into the Balkans, the mountainous areas of Greece, when you go into Greece from Albania or Yugoslavia, I've driven those roads.

And from the Albanian roads up by Metsovo and then near Yannina, I mean,

they're one-lane roads at, you know, six, seven, eight thousand feet cliffs.

And you can't just, and there's no gas stations in Greece.

It's not like France.

There's no refineries.

So you have to bring your fuel.

You have to bring your parts.

It's dusty.

It's dirty.

There's no asphalt.

And that is a piece of cake compared to going in the Soviet Union.

The railroad gauges are different.

You have to change all of your material and put them on a different Soviet system.

And that famous

in 1942, when they went to the Caspian Sea, Army Group South, that famous comment by a German commander, he said, no enemy ahead, no supplies behind.

In other words, in the vast expanses of the Soviet Union, Blitzkrieg was shown to be a joke.

And it was designed to shock, it's really shock and awe.

You're very fast, you're motorized, you have limited numbers of supplies, you have complete air supremacy, you're in contact with the dive bombers, the Stuttgas, you've got the 109s protecting you,

you take bold risks going into Belgium, France, or Denmark, or Netherlands.

Boy, you get into the rough and ready.

You can win, but you can't blitzkrieg.

Maybe in Africa, Rommel can do it when you have flat terrain and you have some supplies.

Even then it peters out.

But once they go in June and July, they're starting to see that you come up against anybody who's motorized and on defensive, like the Russians with Russian tanks and vast expanses to retreat, and Napoleonic

consequences when just like the Tsar, you know, he retreated and let the French come in, come in, come in, come in, come in, and when they were out of supplies, entirety counter-attack.

That was the blueprint for a Russian general.

Well Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about Israel and left politics.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor,

I've been looking at this war in Israel and actually I was looking at the Times of Israel and they reported that 25 rockets and missiles have been fired at Israel from installations right next to the UN interim force in Lebanon.

And that the IDF forces are finding caches of weapons near UN facilities.

It seems like the UN is being complicit in this war of Hezbollah.

And I was wondering your thoughts.

Yes,

50% of most UN resolutions in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, 50%

were aimed at the tiny democratic country of Israel.

50%.

They weren't about Mao Zedong's genocide.

They weren't about Soviet Union's destruction of Czechoslovakia or Hungary.

They were about Israel.

And so the UN has historically hated Israel.

In addition to that,

They not only hate Israel, they put peacekeepers, and who do they hire as peacekeepers?

Who would want that job?

They hire Pakistanis, many people from Muslim countries, quote-unquote, neutral.

And they fratinarize and they are in close contact with the locals, whether it's Hezbollah or Hamas.

And we found out from the Hamas war that there were many people who work for UN

relief organizations that were affiliated with Hamas.

Same thing is true of Hezbollah.

So what we're seeing now is

all these pundits keep saying, oh,

it's going to be like 2006.

It's a dirty war.

You never win.

They're not trying to go into Lebanon.

It's not like the early 80s either.

They're basically saying that we need a belt, a demilitarized belt along the Israeli border.

And in that belt, we're going to destroy all their weapons caches.

We're going to

go through all of their safe houses, all of their launch pads, and just get rid of it

at least so that the short-range missiles, the cheap ones, will not be fired every day into Israel.

Now, are they going to escalate?

Well,

if they start sending 20, 30, 40 a day, I think we're going to see what we saw in 2006.

They're going to just say, you know what?

I think you should all leave Beirut.

You should all leave Tripoli and every single apartment building we're going to blow up that has missiles in it.

Anything that has missiles in it or headquarters, we're going to blow up.

And we know where they are because of the Pagers and the Walkie-Talkies.

They've already claimed that of the so-called 150,000 projectiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, I don't know if drones are really calibrated in that total number.

They claim they've got rid of two-thirds.

Wow, that's amazing.

And so that's amazing.

And if they were able to get rid of the last third and neutralize Hezbollah after what they did to Hamas, and then there's...

And they've already taken up the dock facilities of the Houthis.

Have you noticed the Houthis haven't sent many missiles at Israel?

Because they have told them the next thing is your power grid.

And you can go live and be, you can hate us.

Basically, the Israeli message to the Houthis is you can hate us from the Dark Ages, because that's what you're going to do.

And now Iran,

they know the blow is coming, and they're frantically using all of their contacts, many of whom, you know, they have contacts with people in the Obama administration, they have contacts with John Kerry, they have contacts.

Robert Malley had contacts, they have Pentagon people.

Please, please, please, please, please tell the Israelis, no, don't hit our nuclear facilities.

That's the only leverage we have.

Do not hit the oil.

It'll just spiral oil prices.

And they're trying to kill Trump, from what we understand.

Trump mentioned the other day.

And finally, Biden said that would be considered an act of war.

So we'll see how desperate they are.

But it's kind of the eye is starting to turn toward Iran as these surrogates are eliminated one after one.

And they're being humiliated and destruction.

And you start to see news stories from the first time that these polls that say the Hamas or the Lebanese are one with Hezbollah are not true.

Those are all fake polls.

Because, I mean, you can't do an honest poll and live if you were a pollster.

But there are indications that the average Gazan blames Hamas for their problems.

Not that they like Israel, they despise Israel.

But the argument is,

we had a job in Israel, we were getting

above wages, we had a nice home, and you destroyed it all by slaughtering a a bunch of Jews.

Why did you do that?

Why did you do that to us?

And same thing with Hezbollah.

We had a house in the countryside, and then you moved a bunch of missiles into our barn.

Why did you do that?

We had no part of it.

We didn't have any problem with the Israelis.

And then you came in, you hijacked our government, and then you killed people.

So

what's the subtext of that?

You're losing.

If they were winning right now, and Hamas had staged three or four more raids, and we know that the Operation Galilee raid that Hezbollah was planning, you know, to go trump the Hamas, like, how dare you only kill 1,200 Jews?

We can top that.

We've got an operation.

We've got all of our safe houses.

We've got all of our armaments.

We're going to go into Galilee, and we're going to kill 2,000 Jews.

That was their attitude.

Well, as long as they were winning, people, you know, like you saw those clips after October 7th where everybody was spitting on corpses and let me at them.

And, hey, I hear they're raping Jews and killing them.

Let me just tag along.

not when you're losing it's why did you do that we had no part in it so they're changing public opinion and now everybody's turning to iran and they're saying you know what you caused all this you were the ones that gave you said you were going to be with us you were nowhere to be found the only reason that you came in is because you're afraid israel is going to take you out there'll be a lot of people

in the Arab world that will be delighted if Israel takes out Iran.

And what do I mean by take out?

I mean hit their military really hard, their ports, their navy, their airfields,

maybe not their oil exporting, but make the population pay.

And that would be something that the Arab countries would do.

I don't even think that Hezbollah and Hamas would care at this point.

And I think they will do that.

Yeah, and they may.

And the biggest question that everybody has is, we've got 21 days.

So what are they going to do?

Are they going to wait?

Is Israel going to wait?

They're under enormous pressure from the Biden administration not to act in the next 21 days.

And they're losing some

strategic initiative because the memory of what those 182 projectiles meant, i.e., we're going to try to destroy and kill Jews, and we sent 182 ballistic missiles, cruise, drones at night.

People forgot all that.

So when Israel retaliates, the longer they wait, they say, look at them, that was an offensive preemptive attack.

No, it wasn't.

It was 500 versus 3 missiles have been shot into the respective homelands of the belligerents.

So I think that everything is

on the table after the election.

Do you think that if Israel decided to go before the election, that the United States wouldn't help to defend it?

I mean, up till now, when the Iranians have shot missiles and sent drones, the U.S.

has been part of the force that has brought down the military.

Well, you can see what Biden is doing.

Why does he send a THAD anti-ballistic missile battery, our most sophisticated system, with 100 Americans to operate it when they've already sent in 500, right?

Why didn't he send it before?

Well, you know what the message is.

Hey, Metanyahoo.

You're not going to go before the election and blow up the Middle East.

He calls blowing up the Middle East legitimate retaliation.

Because we're going to do this.

We're going to make a high-profile arms transfer to you to show everybody that we are helping you to protect Israel.

And that would look like you were

such ingrates after we bought our most sophisticated missile system.

You deliberately attacked right before the election to embarrass your benefactors, the Biden administration.

That's what they're doing.

Wow, okay.

And I don't think it's going to work.

I don't think at this point, after the election is over, if Trump is elected, they'll move.

But even if he's not, I think they'll have no choice.

It'll be a different spirit.

It will be, we're going to move and we're going to get a lot of help from the United States very soon, just 90 days from now.

On the other side is, what more can we have to lose?

We've never counted on them, really.

Yeah, yeah, they seem to act on their own just perfectly well.

Last thing about this war.

We haven't heard anything about Gaza lately.

Are they all done?

Have they cleaned up operations there?

Or have you heard anything?

No, they're still looking for Mr.

Sinmore.

He's in the tunnels.

They still have,

what is it, 100 and something hostages?

Usually when they find out there's going to be a rescue operation, they put a bullet in the head of innocent civilians.

I don't understand this, though.

I was thinking this.

So we hear every day that Gazans are starving, right?

But nobody ever says...

They're starving and they have no rockets.

They're still sending rockets.

So why do they have ammunition ammunition and plentitude, but they don't have food?

Shouldn't it be the other way around, that food is more important, that they don't have any ammunition, but they have food?

So, either somebody is supplying them with ammunition, or they robbed all of their food stores years ago to stockpile ammunition.

And

the one thing that's weird and is a new development about this whole thing is the campus protest.

not,

they've evaporated.

Remember, we were told that there was going to be these huge October 7th, that nothing, and at Stanford, the Stanford Review printed the pictures of all the students that raided the Stanford president's office last spring and trashed it.

Guess what?

They're not going to, none of them who are seniors are going to graduate.

And they're suspended.

And they're facing felony charges.

And for the few that are on mid-lease these visas, they could be deported.

And the new president has already made it clear, as I said to Jack, it's a whole new game now.

And I think all the other presidents being people of little initiative, look at him.

They'll say, wow, Stanford was one of the worst places and now it's calm.

And he's got a lot of alumni support for being forceful.

And he's not biased.

He's just...

He's just following the rules.

This is somebody that I think is a winner.

I better adjust my behavior to emulate him.

And that's happening.

And you know, the thing about the Hamas students, when you really get down to it,

take, yes,

take over the Manhattan Bridge.

Yes, shut down the Oakland Bridge.

Yes, desecrate a cemetery and lost veterans' cemetery.

Yes, desecrate the Lincoln Memorial.

Yes, desecrate the wall outside the White House.

We get it.

You know, chase Jews out into a library, hit Jews.

We get it.

We get it.

But you know, you're still only about 250,000 students.

And your population is still about 1% of America.

Still much smaller than the Jewish population.

And especially much smaller in terms of financial resources, which is almost entirely dependent on the Middle East.

And

the polls show just the opposite of what we were told by the left.

We were told that sympathy would be growing for Gaza and sympathy would be declining for Israel.

Israel is just steady at about 65 solid support from American people, 70.

And there hasn't been no,

there was a surge for empathy for the Palestinians, but not now.

And so I think people are starting to say, you know what?

We came over here.

We have kind of an unassimilated community, and we have Rashid Tlaib and people like Ilian Omar representing us.

This is not good.

This is not good.

We've lost the goodwill of the American people.

We're looking at ingrates.

We should just stop it.

And we can stop it by two things.

We'll either vote for Trump in Michigan or we'll just stay out of it.

And I think there's a lot that may be

consequential.

Well, that mayor

of one of the Muslim cities said that he was voting for Trump.

He endorsed it.

Even Jory Reed, when she was talking about all the black treats at Kamala Harris, she was bragging on that.

Wow.

But she's very,

I'm not saying she's stupid, but something's wrong with her.

She doesn't have a rational mind because she said she was trashing

black males

for not pledging Pavlavian support for Kamala Harris.

And then she hears that they might get $20,000, a $20 billion giveaway program.

They might get overt support for reparation.

And then she said, this is what should happen.

Once you, what, what, Joy?

Once you, what?

Once you say that you're no no longer an automaton for the Democratic Party and your vote's up for grabs, then people try to bid for it the good old American way, and that blacks have really been hurt because they unthinkingly pledged their support to bankrupt leaders,

and they were 95% for the Democratic Party that never did anything for them.

And Donald Trump's four years were the best four years that happened to the African-American community in the last half century.

So as long as they can be independent, and they'll have a lot more power.

And I think that lesson goes to the Arab American when you go 95%.

Same thing with women.

Women are 55%

now

ahead for Poll for Harris, but more importantly, they're 54% of the people who vote.

So, when you ask yourself,

why is Trump dead even when he has made huge inroads among black males, Hispanic males, young voters, independent voters, union voters?

But he's still dead even.

Well, one of the reasons is that 55% of the elected are female and 55% of them are voting for Harris.

Yeah.

And they're kind of,

you know, if you're a young urban woman, you've pledged your fealty without any exceptions to

Joe Biden.

So, if you lose, and I think he will, that constituency is not going to be very influential.

Your YouTube influencer, the young, unattached, sex in the city type of young woman who goes six years to college, that kind of person, you're just losing your political capital when you just pledge it to one party regardless.

Yeah.

And

especially when you live,

most of the young women, unattached voters, live in urban areas, and they're very dangerous now.

And the downtowns are trashed.

And the only people who are talking about

the problems with looting and

green lighting, shoplifting, and crime that's rampant from illegal aid are the Republicans, the mega people.

Those are the people who are trying to help you.

But if you don't want their help, then they're not going to, they don't really care.

If Trump gets, you know, what's going to happen if Trump gets elected?

A delegation of now is going to, or something, that's an archaic firm, they're going to go to Trump and say, we want this, we want that.

No,

they're going to have zero influence.

Which is good because people should be represented as individuals, not by your gender or race.

Well, you're talking about all of their constituencies.

And my last question for you today was, is the left's identity politics constituency building, their intersectionality imploding?

Are we at a historical moment where all of that is imploding?

Yes, and for a variety of ways.

Number one,

we have so vastly increased the social service entitlement industry since the days of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan that we have got people that are,

I mean, they used to, Elvis and Johnny Cash, and everybody used to talk about welfare Cadillac and all.

Now it's welfare BMW.

There are people who have crafted whole livelihoods.

We have 7 million million American males who are able to work that are not working.

So my point is that it's very hard to say that you're persecuted and you're a victim of some ism or ology when there's such a huge avenue of social support.

So the victimized class has it very hard to prove they're victimized.

Second is...

Who created intersectionality?

Who created diversity, equity?

It was all upscale white people and upscale minorities.

It was the Kamala Harris's, it was the Barack Obamas, it was the Joey Reids, it was all the millionaire and upper middle classes, the Martha's Vineyard crowd, all those people, the university crowd, the Silicon Valley crowd.

So it was very hard for people to see that they were victims.

So let me give you an example why it's crashing.

In the old

lockstep, fealty days of intersectionality,

Barack Obama would go out and talk to some black people.

He said to himself, All I got to do is drop my last accentuation on my syllable.

Hey, y'all, it's Barack here, you folks.

And I'll use a little vocabulary.

It's the brothers, turning a little narcissism.

When I was in my day, you all voted for me in a way you're not doing it for Kamala.

That fake accent, and he's half black, and bam, bam, bam, he's intersectional.

He's one of us.

Not now.

Now it's he's from Martha's Vineyard.

He's from

the beach of Hawaii.

So what I'm getting at is class

is starting to creep in as more important than your superficial appearance.

I've said that before.

So you're a Mexican-American tree cutter.

I talked to a guy today.

He's very hardworking.

And I can tell you that his interest in the election is the same as a white truck driver and a black restaurant owner.

They're all the same.

They can't make it in this hyperinflationary economy.

and they can't make it with this government regulation, and they don't want to ban gas stoves or to be forced to buy an EV or that their daughter's going to go to school with a man with a phallus and testicles changing.

So I think that's happened.

I think

the left blew up their own DEI

because

finally people are people and whatever

solidarity they find through their genitals or their superficial appearances, it's not as important as their class interest.

And that's starting to destroy that.

And then the affluence of the people promoting it and the hypocrisy involved in that.

Well, that's good news.

Yeah, it is.

The corporations are firing DEI people.

If you have 10%

fewer students than you had 10 years ago, you're losing about a 1% 18-year-old cohort every year because of a 1.6 birth rate.

Then you're in competition for bodies, right?

And you have hyperinflation and you've chacked up and if Trump is elected, there's a very good chance he's not going to give that student loan 1.7 trillion overhead.

You know what I mean?

He's not going to subsidize those loans.

And so these universities are starting to see, you know what, do we really want to hire this guy at 275,000 and a staff of eight costs us probably a million bucks?

For what?

A guy that goes through faculty syllabi to say that somebody's racist and he doesn't find racism.

he's out of a job.

He's a Soviet commissar.

And we don't really need these people.

So the corporations and the universities are quietly letting them go.

I don't know what happens to them because they don't have an academic degree up there in the university.

Would you hire somebody whose job has been to find racism when it doesn't exist in most places?

And what are you going to do?

Oh, we're getting rid of the Boeing DEI office.

We're going to transfer everybody over to the jet engine division to design better engines.

Oh,

we just got rid of the Harvard and Stanford DEI.

Now, Mr.

Smith, you will go to the linguistics department and use your PhD in linguistics.

And Mr.

Jones, you will go and you're a classicist and you can go teach Thucydides in Greek.

And Miss,

I don't know, Ms.

Green, you can go back to your anthropological study.

That's not going to happen.

That's not what they were degreed in.

They have no expertise.

Their expertise was race hustling and finding perpetual systemic racism and microaggressions and trigger warnings and all that stuff.

It's too expensive.

Finally, money is money.

That's what destroys these superfluous things.

You just went from good news to scary, Victor.

What's so scary?

Scary the idea that they would start putting those people into positions where they would need to have expertise.

I don't think they can.

I think they're out of a job.

I think, I hope so.

Let's hope that they don't just say, well, we can just switch you over to this.

You've got to remember about democracy, and that's what I go back to, that famous quote by Herodotus when he's trying to convince people to go all the way to Ionia.

And he says, you know what?

You wouldn't believe it, but it's much easier to convince.

I'm paraphrasing.

But the Ionians go to Sparta and they say, we can't, you can't.

There's just two of these stubborn kings and these oligarchs.

We can't convince convince them to go all the way across the Aegean in some foolhardy expeditionary.

Will we go to Athens?

And we mention that we're canvid to the...

Yes, let's go.

And 30,000 say on to Ionia.

And what he's saying is that it's the pet rock syndrome.

You know what I mean?

Once you say that DEI is the new fad, it's like a pet rock, people will go crazy for a couple of years, like the Me Too.

And then people wake up and say, wow, Me Too is McCarthyism.

Wow, DEI loyalty oath.

It's no different than McCarthy wanted.

What happened to me?

When did I go insane after George Floyd's death?

And so it's starting to evaporate.

Yeah.

Well, let's finish this show with a comment from

somebody at the website.

It says, Victor and Jack, your podcast is an island of sanity in a world gone mad.

You have single-handedly kept me sane all these years of lowered standards, debased values, and political corruption.

Your conversations set a high standard for intellectual integrity.

I commend Jack for reading on air the request by a listener that he, quote, stop swearing.

His ability to hear this comment and issue an on-air apology reflects Jack's values, self-awareness, maturity.

That forthright honesty is something the other side has lost completely, has lost complete touch with.

Victor, Jack, and Sammy, you have inaugurated a new American institution.

We need you, Mike Ferris.

So thank you, Mike, for that comment.

I reminded my mother when I came home from UC Santa Cruz, I had never used the F word in front of her.

And I came home and I said, what the?

And she said, what did you say?

Do you think that makes you look smart?

Does that make you look cool, Victor?

All it does is cheapen your dialogue and your discourse.

So please, don't ever say that word in my presence again.

I never did.

Not that I haven't said the word, but I'm very careful that it can be very offensive to people.

It's meaningless anyway when you use it a lot.

Yeah.

Not that Jack used it on the air.

Two chairs for your mother.

Too chairs.

Yeah, she was

very puritanical in some good ways.

All good ways.

I shouldn't say some.

Everything was good about it.

But I owe a lot to her.

And

anyway.

and we owe a lot to our audience, so we would like to thank her.

I want to our audience.

I know, you know what, audience, I hear that all the time because I hear it in my own brain that we are not crazy, but we think we are.

We brave Vander Brothers, we few.

No, we're going to change that.

We majority of the country, we many,

there are two

sexes and genders.

We feel bad for people who suffer from gender dysphoria, but it's not a normal third third sex.

And you cannot undress as a male with male genitalia in front of a pre-teenage girl.

Not in our country, you can't.

No, no, no, no, no.

And we don't look at people's skin color.

We look at their content of the color of their character as Martin Luther King.

And we want standards and meritocracies.

We do not want a Coma Sar system behind the wheel of a Boeing 737.

Thank you, yesterday.

That's for sure.

We don't want it.

And we, meaning everybody of every gender and every race.

Exactly.

We don't want it.

And we know one final thing.

We owe $37 billion, excuse me, $37 trillion.

And that's the debt servicing is the second most expensive thing, soon to be the first.

And what can't go on, won't go on.

So we're going to have to see some blood on the floor cutting when Trump comes in.

That's my only worry about Trump.

That he's promised so many good things that I hope his theory is correct.

It could be when he says no taxes on tips, no tax on Social Security, deregulation, maybe that'll get everybody off their sofa and work crazy and we'll be more productive and we'll get Elon Musk and people like him to encourage and they'll have labor-saving devices.

Productivity will increase and we will grow the economy to such that we can pay down the debt without radical cuts in defense or something.

Well, with that wonderful image, and I like it, thank you very much, Victor Davis-Hanson, for your time today.

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