Weaponizers, the Walking Blunderers, and the Battle for Britain

53m

In this weekend episode, Victor Davis Hanson considers more campaign news from the week — Trump isn’t weaponizing assassination attempts, Walz on the electoral college, and Biden’s stealth in a time of failing health — and assesses the Battle of Britain in 1940.

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Do you ever just want to turn off the news and ignore politics?

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hampson Show.

This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little different in the middle segment, something cultural or military.

And we are currently on a discussion of the beginning of World War II.

And we just finished France last week.

So we're going to look at the Battle of Britain.

So we'll do that in the middle segment after we look at some of the current news.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson 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.

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So, Victor, we have lots of things going on in the campaign, the campaign seams, and the hurricane, but we talked about the hurricane on Friday, but

I wanted to look at, there's a lot of accusations from the left that Donald Trump has weaponized the assassination attempts.

And I'm quoting that from a Salon article, which is a very left-wing post.

And they're saying that he is blaming left rhetoric for the shootings and linked it to other efforts to take him out of politics.

And he's linking it to other efforts to take him out of politics.

For example, the impeachments and all the court cases, and he said the assassinations.

I was wondering your reflections on those accusations against the weaponization of assassination attempts.

Well, it's very rich.

Let me just start answering that by saying, if you remember in 2011, the tragic shooting of

the Arizona Congressional Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Gabby, Gabby?

Gabby Giffords, yeah.

And she said that Sarah Palin, who had had a map of key districts to win, and they had little symbols of bullseye,

that she was

responsible for creating a climate of violence.

Now, think of that for a second, because Joe Biden, not too long ago, told a group of donors that it's time to put a bullseye on Donald Trump, and the left didn't say work.

And so

have they lowered the bar of what's permissible?

Right before he was assassinated, the New Republic ran their cover story with Donald Trump's picture,

but photoshopped to look like Adolf Hitler.

And

I think we've mentioned it before, but remember that Mr.

Flouf, who is advising Kamala Harris, said that Donald Trump a few years ago should be destroyed and people like him destroyed.

Then we had Dan Goldman who said that he should be eliminated.

And then we just had,

is it Gina Raimundo?

She's the Secretary of Commerce.

She said that he should be extinguished.

And

what is that but eliminationist rhetoric?

And that happened after the first assassination attempt.

And then we had this, I don't know what you'd call it, a competition among celebrities and politicians to see who could dream up the best way of killing Donald Trump.

Been going on for a decade.

Since 2015, Snoop Dogg wanted to shoot him.

Chef Berdine wanted to poison him.

The Shakespeare in the Park and Central Park wanted to stab him.

Kathy Griffiths wanted to decapitate him.

They talked to, I think the late Peter Fonda said that Melania and

the Trump children should be put in cages.

Johnny Depps said.

Johnny Depp said, where something should be.

Yeah,

we want an actor like John Wilkes Booth to kill him.

So they did lower the bar.

And people do think who are on hinge that if you shoot, kill Donald Trump, that there will be

a large group of people who accept that.

Now, there was a poll, Rasmussen, I think, that said a quarter of all Democrats, people who identified themselves as Democrat thought that Donald Trump could be killed, should be killed.

The other half, the other quarter, were not sure.

So half of them were indifferent or wanted him killed.

Case closed.

So that's public knowledge.

And believe me, as I said before, if you said anything remotely near that about Barack Obama, and I reference everybody to the Missouri State Fair clown who put on an Obama mask just as a joke and, you know, as a way of entertaining the crowd as he tried to deflect bulls that had knocked off bull riders.

And he was banned for life from the Missouri.

There was no tolerance, is what I'm saying, for the Missouri State Fair.

So, yes, they did lower the bar.

They know they lower the bar.

They wanted to lower the bar.

They're still lowering the bar.

And this is not weaponizing the assassination attempts.

It's just truth about the assassination attempts.

It is just truth.

And it's backfiring because, as you and I are speaking right now,

Donald Trump in the

Quinnipiac poll is four points ahead in Michigan.

That's preposterous.

Two points ahead in Wisconsin, only two behind in Pennsylvania.

And by the way, Pennsylvania is a more conservative state than Michigan or Wisconsin, so that poll is probably wrong in Pennsylvania.

And you look at other polls, and they're starting to show

gradual, incremental, but steady, 72-hour increases in Trump support.

Now, why is that?

It's because people

have slowly gauged, didn't know Waltz, didn't know Vance, didn't know Harris.

And they decided that Vance was not the demon that they'd been told after that debate.

They found out that Waltz is an inveterate liar, a buffoon.

He just said the other day that the yesterday that the Electoral College, we'll get to that, should be eliminated.

And they've seen these CBS interviews with Kamala Harris, they've seen the Dana Bainbash, the OPA, and they've come to a conclusion that she doesn't know what she's talking about, and she knows she doesn't know what she's talking about.

And the interviewer knows that she's not talking about.

And they all know that she must go out as a presidential candidate and talk.

And

they all know that she can't.

Again, what we said the other broadcast: doomed if you don't, doomed if you do.

And the result of that is slowly, incrementally, they're bleeding.

And the internal polls show that, and we can see as disinterested observers the symptomatology of that erosion of support.

Evidence one,

they put Tim Waltz, a walking catastrophe on Fox News Sunday.

They put Kamala Harris on CBS.

They are putting people out there that they know can't do well.

Evidence too,

they are begging for another debate because they know that the moderators are something.

But the point is they wouldn't want another debate if they were ahead or they were even.

Number three,

they are

getting the Obamas back on the trail.

So Barack and Michelle are going to be the fire people who come out of the woodwork, and I don't know where they're going to come from.

They're going to come from Martha's Vineyard, Colorama Mansion, the Chicago Mansion, or the Hawaii Beachfront Mansion.

And they will come out and they will rescue her, they think.

And that will have the opposite effect.

I thought Obama was supposed to already be doing that.

If I recall, that was a week ago.

Final.

Yeah.

I haven't seen him out there yet, but they said he's doing it.

He's going to.

He's going to have hope and change, and, you know, we're going to fundamentally

transform the country.

That's what we're going to do.

We've heard it, we've heard it, we've heard it.

Obama won't put his energy into getting somebody's.

He said, Don't suggest that he's lazy, because that could be a stereotype that was racially motivated, but it's not.

He said he was lazy.

What's your greatest fault?

I'm fundamentally lazy.

And what would you like to do?

Oh, I'd like to be in my basement and just call in the presidency with no work involved, and that's what he's doing right now.

Got his dream come true, but it's not going to help.

It's the more that they do this, and the problem is this: they had a 90 to 100-day campaign, and they thought they could run out the clock with her.

And they can't completely, even with their obsequious, toadish media.

And then they don't read or know or care about history.

Had they seen history, there was a pattern there.

When she was elected to the Senate, everybody thought, oh, an attractive, biracial

person of color, senator, dynamic, Bay Area money.

And she went into the Senate and she was just a joke.

And then it was, she's going to run for president.

Oh, I'm going to say that I'm from Oakland.

20,000 people showed up to announce it.

First debate.

I was that little girl that you called, you know, that you stopped based.

I was a little girl that you were racist again.

No, you weren't a little girl.

You were an upper-middle-class Berkeley resident, and

you wanted to go to a preferably better school and you were soon to go to the wealthiest neighborhood in Montreal and your parents were both PhDs.

So that campaign, after what, three or four debates, they just plummeted her.

Kelsey Gabbard had her for lunch and then she dropped out.

Before Iowa, didn't she?

Yeah, she dropped out in mid-December.

So

those two examples should have shown you that there was a pattern.

She's young.

She's charismatic.

She's nice.

Not necessarily true.

And we're all going to get behind her.

And then,

oh, she can't speak.

She doesn't tell the truth.

She's a hard leftist.

Well, we can run out the we can.

No, you can't.

And that's what's happening.

Exactly like her primary failed attempt.

The only question will be, how quick will be this implosion.

It's starting, and will it implode enough,

and will it be enough to counteract some irregularities in the balloting?

But she's not an enthusiastic.

See, in 2020,

they were all angry about Donald Trump, and they thought they had the COVID thing, and they thought they had the balloting rules, and we're going to change.

They were flooded.

But I don't see the left very excited about her.

No.

She almost looks like she's ready to cry in those interviews when they ask her a question that she actually

thinks or actually have time to ask.

She just says, oh my God, I don't want to be here.

Why are you asking me that?

Yeah, you're making me want to cry.

Can I cackle?

Can I bat my eyes?

I just can't do it.

Not when she's in the midst of crying.

No, she's not going to, she's not going to do well.

And again,

Donald Trump should take note of this.

He keeps saying that he won the debate with Biden.

I don't think that's accurate.

I think Biden blew up the debate.

Trump was a bystander at a fire.

He really was.

And he got some great lines.

He said, Mr.

Trump, President Trump, would you like to reply to that?

I can't.

What did he say?

That was funny.

Yeah, and that was good.

But he thought that he winged it with Biden, and then he didn't realize they had the Google lawyers and they had everybody making her memorize little things to incite him.

And long term, i.e., after two weeks, I don't think he lost that debate, but short term, it was a train wreck.

But he recovered.

So all he has to do is, in the next 23 days, keep to the issues,

keep the X-tweets within normal, truth social, within normal limits.

You know, don't say what he has been saying.

Just curb it a little bit

and do

what she does.

Go into interviews with a favorable host, and your days with the black journalist are over with.

Just say, I've been there, done it, not going to be called a racist anymore.

No way.

I've done with Dana Bash before.

I went in with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.

She lied and said that laptop is authentic.

Don't have to do it anymore.

I know who you people are.

You've shown me your other side of this one-eyed jackface.

We're done.

Yeah.

And he will win.

Speaking of a train wreck, Walls was out in California giving a talk, and he said,

I think all of us know that the Electoral College needs to go.

And the Harris administration quickly disowned that.

What a bad,

oh my God.

Well, they disowned it because they know they're for it.

I mean, there's a four-point plan that they're going to enact if they get elected.

Electoral College, two new states,

get rid of the Senate filibuster and pack the court.

But

here's the thing about the left.

When they have a system

like six to three or five to four justices, they don't want to touch the court.

Now, everybody should remember there was something in 2016 that we still called the blue Wall.

And the Blue Wall was

before a person

voted, there were 104,

that is, I don't know, about 35, 40% of the electoral votes that you need in California and

New York and Chicago, where the three largest cities of the United States are in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.

That was an automatic blue.

So they were bragging about it.

Oh, how are they ever going to win?

Because we've got got 100 and more.

And then they had the Wisconsin.

And

they had Wisconsin, and they had Michigan, and they had

Pennsylvania.

And they had another

45 votes.

So before they, you know what I mean, they had almost 150 votes, 151.

And they thought the blue wall was great.

And then it was shattered, shattered in 2016.

Those three swing mid-eastern Rust Belt states all went to Trump.

And then they said it wasn't fair because they won the popular vote.

And they hate it now.

And so they want to get rid of it.

Now, if they were principled people, they would do what you have to do to get rid of the Constitution.

It's in the Constitution, after all.

So what do you do?

You go to Congress

and you initiate a bill, a bipartisan bill, and you say, we would like to amend the Constitution to get rid of the Electoral College.

That requires two-thirds, 66 senators, right?

And two-thirds of 400 and was it 431 or something representatives?

They don't have that.

And then even if they did get those, then you have to go to the states and you have to get 75% of the states.

They don't have that.

They do not have that.

So most people would say we can't get rid of the elect, but not the left, because any means necessary are okay, because they're superior moral trajectory.

So what are they doing?

They cooked up something that we know colloquially as a national popular vote compact.

And it says that we're going to get states

to vote in their legislature, i.e.

blue states, and we're going to get the governor.

We're just going to have an ongoing process, so we're just going to wait till the state turns Democrat.

But once they do, they're going to vote, and they're going to pass a law that says our state shall nullify the Constitution and pledge our Electoral College

votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

Okay, we're not going to get rid of the Electoral College technically, just elements of it.

So, therefore, we don't need to go to Congress and the states.

They're only 61, I think they're 61 votes short.

You just need a couple of big states, two or three states, and they'll have it.

And then there will be no Electoral College.

Now that's unconstitutional.

Any Supreme Court that's sincere and knowledgeable and fair would throw that out.

But that's what they're trying to do.

They're trying to get rid of the Electoral College by a back end round because they don't have the votes.

And they keep saying that the National Voters Compact, they keep saying, well, the American people vote overwhelmingly 61%.

Well, then, if that's true, they have 10 million bucks they just raised from left-wing sources.

If it's true, then just go make the argument.

Go to every state and say, you know, we have 61%

of the national will, and we want you to vote to

follow the national vote.

And I mean by follow the national vote, get rid of the Electoral College by voting to amend the company won't do that.

And by the way, the Electoral College was not,

it wasn't some plot.

It's in the Federalist papers.

They debated again and again.

And the founders talk about it.

And Jefferson, people like Jefferson were really for it, and there were certain arguments for it.

I could give you three off the top of my head.

One, they were afraid of national fraud, that if the federal government controlled the balloting, that

it would be very easy to rig something at the federal level, and then everything would be corrupted in one full sweep.

If you dispersed power to the states

to not only conduct their own voting, and it's in the Constitution, the primary responsibility of voting shall be with the states, with exceptions from time to time to the federal government, you know, women's suffrage, 18-year-old vote, but then it would be dispersed.

And when you put the imprint, the Electoral College on it, it meant that each state's vote controlled by the state, immune from federal uniform tampering, would come up with an Electoral College vote.

And therefore, you wouldn't have a blanket corruption.

Second,

it was really clear that we are not the United People of America.

When we started the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation failed.

But the idea was there were were separate independent entities, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania.

There weren't just a bunch of people that were anonymous.

So the idea is that we're going to incorporate these independent little kingdoms into a federation, a federalist system, the United States, United States of America.

And we're going to do that by giving them some sovereign rights in some ways.

In the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, it says all other powers that are not hereby delineated shall revert to the states.

And one of them is the states shall set the balloting.

And one of them is

the states shall conduct an

electoral college vote.

And that was the idea that gave them enough sovereignty that they were willing to give up their independence and give it to a larger union.

And then finally, and most importantly, there were red-blue maps at the founding.

People understood that the population centers were all along the coast at that time in Philadelphia, New York, etc.

And they felt that that urban population represented a minority of the actual territory where there were natural resources, where the food came from, where the expansion would ensue, and they wanted to give a geographical representation as well as a population

representation.

Jefferson said that when we all get piled up in the cities, we won't be America anymore.

And the idea was that a candidate would just go,

to put the founders' visions in modern terms, if we had no electoral college, we would see the candidates just going to Chicago.

There wouldn't be any rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

There would be a rally in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, maybe.

But mostly it would be in Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, New York.

Just where the people are, the votes.

And you would just say, you know what, the rest are deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, drag.

We don't even want to see those people.

We don't want to see where our oil is produced.

We do not want to see where our coal is produced.

We do not want to see where our food is produced.

We don't want to see any of those people.

And they didn't want that.

And so that's worked worked 233 years, pretty good.

Until the left comes in and says they want to do,

remember, to change it, and this is just an element of their revolutionary program.

They're going to resurrect the 1937 failed Pact the Court scheme.

And by the way, they never said anything when they had Earl Warren and Souter flipped and Brennan flipped.

And the idea was, even if the Republicans pick conservative justices in the malu, the environment, the landscape of Georgetown, we can flip these people through popular pressures.

So they thought the nine court, and then all of a sudden, you know, Ginsburg wanted to be immortal and didn't step down when she could hardly walk.

And they lost the court.

Hillary lost the court.

And now they want to change the system.

Same thing is true with a filibuster.

Filibuster has been there about 180 years.

Every time they're in the minority, it is the hallmark of democratic protection.

Every time they're in the majority, it is a racist, ossified relic.

And they start to get rid of it, which they did on judicial appointments.

They were warned, if you get rid of the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations, there's going to come a time when you don't have the majority of the Senate, and we're going to push through conservatives, and you can't filibuster them.

And we're going to get them nominated on 51, 52 point, 52 senator margins.

It's not going to be 60.

And they said, ah, nah, it's not going to happen.

We have a new Democratic majority.

Demography is destiny.

Exactly what happened.

And they said, this is unfair.

So, and

the same thing is true about the nine-person court.

It's been there since.

1869.

It's not in the Constitution.

But the idea was every time we have an administration, they try to change the court and pack it to get their judges.

So let's just set it at nine.

And that's been there since 1869.

Even FDR couldn't do it.

He tried.

He tried to pack it to 15.

And he tried to have term limits, but he couldn't do it.

And he was disgraced.

And now they're doing that again.

These people are insidious.

They just keep...

trying to change things depending on the current political climate and their zest for power.

There's no consistency, no idea, there's not even an ideological principle that guides us other than power.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the battle for Britain and what happened with Germany after it had been doing so well in Western Europe with Norway, Denmark, and France defeated.

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

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We're back.

So this is our middle segment, and Victor is going to explain today the Battle of Britain and

whatever happened.

Why did the Nazis in their march to the West all of a sudden stop with the Battle of Britain?

Well you have to remember that we're talking about this period from the fall of France and that's basically when the armistice of June 22nd 1940 and then the final capitulation about a week later.

So then what happened?

All of Europe was in Hitler's possession and in response to this blogger Daryl Cooper who said that Churchill's a terrorist and that Hitler was

sincere and he offered real terms of peace, nobody believed him.

He hadn't kept one agreement, and Britain was not going to give up.

All Britain thought it had to do was hang in there and survive, and then if it did, eventually the United States would come in, and eventually

the two thieves, the two criminal states, Stalin and Hitler, would turn on each other.

It's exactly what happened.

But for a year, we're talking about this period of July, August, September, October, November, December 1940, January, and then the next six months until the invasion of Russia.

It was a very busy time.

So

he waited and waited, and he replenished his losses.

He lost 25,000 dead.

and probably 15,000 missing in France.

And if you do the Polish campaign in the Low Countries and Norway, he's short 50,000, 60,000 soldiers.

About 1,000 tanks, about 1,000 airplanes.

So he's rebuilding.

In this time,

Britain is fighting.

They're controlling the seas.

They're trying to stop shipments into Germany.

They're fighting U-boats.

They're protecting convoys from Canada.

And they have sent troops to repel the Italians in East Africa successfully.

And they are fighting the Italians in Libya and hopefully going into Tunisia.

And Germany is watching all this, and it decides that Britain has the deadline is over, they haven't quit.

So, starting in August, September, October, November, December, actually until October, they start bombing them.

And they start slowly bombing, as they should,

in a strategic sense, the airfields, the radar.

So, the point is that if they can destroy the roughly 600 to 700 hurricane and Spitfire planes,

then they would have open season and they could just bomb and do whatever they want, all as a preliminary to an invasion of Britain by sea.

So they're assembling barges in the Channel ports and the Dutch ports, and they think they're going to just go across once there's no opposition.

And, you know, they don't.

Remember, as I said last time, the famous quit by the first sea lord in 1803, I think it was before, and he said, I don't know whether they're going to invade us, but I can guarantee you they won't come by sea.

So what happens is they don't have a four-engine bomber.

And they are flying across the channel and they are fighting over British territory.

And they have learned that they thought the British were primarily fighting with hurricane fighters, which were slower, heavier, but slower than the BF-109.

And what do they find out?

They had some experience over the air of France, but they're finding out that the British planes have more airtime because they don't have to fly 100 miles in some cases from inland fields in France or the long distance from Norway.

That the Spitfire is in many ways superior to the BF-109 and the pilots are just as good, even though they haven't fought as much.

They're getting pilots from all over the world, American pilots, Canadian, Polish, and they, and doubting the air marshal is brilliant.

And they have the hurricanes, which are heavy, but not very agile or fast.

They go very high, and then they go swoop down in a pack at the bombers, while the

Supermarine Spitfires dogfight the 109s.

And it's very effective.

It gets to the point in September that they've almost cratered all the field, taken out the radar, and hit some air factories.

They were producing over 400 Spitfires a month.

And then the British come up with the idea of sending one raid into Germany to trigger Hitler.

And then he goes ballistic, Goering goes ballistic, and they change tactics stupidly.

They stop, when they've almost eliminated the RAF and the radar, they turn to civilian targets and incendiaries, and they bomb Coventry.

That's the first real civilian, I mean, they did it in Poland, but that's the first of this war.

And then they start trying to torch London.

They'll kill 50,000 Londoners and British.

But while they do that,

the British quickly rebuild and enlarge their radar and they increase fighter production.

And all of a sudden, the loss rate of two-engine German bombers is unsustainable.

They just start knocking them down.

And by September and October, they're done.

And then Hitler stops the blitz.

On occasion, they'll come back once in a while, and they'll come back with rockets in 44.

But the point is, it failed

because

they don't have air parity, much less superiority or supremacy.

So, what do they do?

They call off the invasion, and now it's September.

Knucklehead Mussolini in October 28th, he says, I'm going to go take, he's taken Albania, and he tells the Greeks, think of this.

The Greeks were some of the best fighters in the world, up in the mountains of the Pendus Range and near the Albanian border.

And it's October, it's almost November, and everybody's been in those mountains, and I have several times.

They're very cold, rugged, snowy.

And Knucklehead Mussolini invades.

And guess what?

He says to dictator Mectaxis, I'm going to come into your country.

And he says, Ohi.

Nope.

That becomes Ochi day, very famous.

The Greeks rally and they stop him.

They not only stop him, they repel him and push him back into Albania.

Hitler's going crazy because he said to his marshals, we can't take England.

They're fighting.

We've been humiliated.

What are we going to do?

How do we get them out of the war?

And they said, we can't get them out of the war, but we don't need to.

Let's just call it a peace.

Beh said that.

He said, no, no, no, no.

We'll go into Russia and betray our allies.

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

Guderian said, they've got the best tanks in the world.

They can marshal 12 million people.

Nobody can get Hitler said, no, no, no, no.

We took European Russia in World War I.

We can do it in about two weeks.

And then England will be surrounded.

And they said, please don't.

And before that happens, though, the generals come to him and say Mussolini is losing in Greece, and the British now are bringing troops from North Africa because they've almost squashed the Italians.

And if we don't do something, we'll be in Russia and the Balkans will be on our back, and there'll be British soldiers, and maybe the Americans will come in, and we'll have a whole.

And now Yugoslavia has declared their independence, and they've got a new pro-ally government.

So then Hitler decides, I've had enough.

So in April, he goes into Yugoslavia, bombs the crap out of Belgrade, starts murdering thousands of Yugoslavians and takes over Yugoslavia, makes a puppet government in Croatia, and now he's right on the border of Greece.

And in 8 April he goes into Greece, pushes back the 40,000 British soldiers that have been emptied from North African campaign.

And meanwhile, Rommel is now going to go in there and go go all the way to El Alamein because the British have divided their forces

and Mussolini

and the British and the Greeks lose.

And by the way,

of the 80,000 Jews, one of the oldest Jewish communities in Europe, there will only be about 10,000 that survive.

They divide up Greece between the Bulgarians who take Thrace, the northern part,

And then the Italians take most or in charge of most of it except Athens and some of the islands and some of the coastal parts.

And the Germans take that, and the Germans start rounding up Jews.

The Italians don't let them do it, but

they end up killing seven out of eight Jews.

They send them to Auschwitz and Treblinka.

They kill all the Jews in Crete, all the Jews in Thessaloniki,

and the occupation is pretty rugged, terrible.

And they starve 300,000 to 400,000, the Greeks think a million, by

supplying army army groups south from Greece when they invade Russia.

But the point is, Hitler, as he's watching his whole kingdom fall apart in 1945, at dinner would look back, and we have some of the transcripts.

And he says, we started on June 22nd,

and we got to Moscow on December 6th, 7th.

Coldest winter in history.

We saw the spires of the Kremlin.

We were at the first subway station.

It was too cold.

We were

out of gas.

We just couldn't do it anymore.

However, had we started six weeks earlier, seven weeks, on May 1st,

then we would have had seven weeks more weather.

And the Siberian troops hadn't really got there yet.

And we would have taken Moscow in late October, even though we diverted to take Kiev.

And why didn't we do that?

Because Knucklehead Mussolini sidelined me and made me bail him out in Greece, and we had to invade Yugoslavia.

Had we not done that and then we'd not gone into Crete, we wouldn't have lost some of our transport planes, our fighter aircraft, but more importantly, we would have had a head start.

Most people don't believe that.

They believe that he would have lost anyway because it was rainy and muddy in May.

Who knows?

But Mussolini caused him a great headache.

What?

Can I take us back?

So that's where we are for the next time.

We're right.

Where are we now?

We're ready.

We're in June 1941.

Hitler's ready to go into Russia, but he has been delayed for a year trying to bomb Britain, failed.

He's been delayed

bailing Mussolini out of Greece.

He's been delayed by having to pacify and invade all of Yugoslavia.

And he's had a disastrous aired

first parachute major offensive of the war.

He's taken Crete, but he's got enormous casualties in the taking of Crete by air.

He'll never use paratroopers again in a major operation.

And now what he's doing is

in late and early May, he's trying to now make up all of these losses in men, material, planes,

so he can go in on a later date.

And he's delayed about six to eight weeks going into Russia.

Yeah.

So you've been a great historian and really very descriptive for us.

But I was wondering if you had to answer the question why it is the Germans failed in their battle for Britain.

Would you say it was British strength, German weakness?

What would be the analysis there?

It was a combination of both.

And the problem was that

why did the

Allied bombing of Germany eventually work?

Eventually.

And they were bombing from Britain, and they were bombing occupied France, and then Germany, and why did the opposite fail?

It's an easy question to answer.

And if you look at what the Allies

used were B-17 bombers, B-24, many from Italy, and Lancaster bombers.

So they carried anywhere from eight tons all the way up to 15 tons of bombs.

And these Heinkel and Junkers bombers,

Dorner's bombers, were carrying three or four tons.

They only had two engine, they only had three.

They weren't ever designed for a strategic bombing campaign, ever.

More importantly, the Allies were not successful in 42 and 43 because they did not have air supremacy.

So Goering never really understood that.

But if you're going to send two-engined light bombers with light bomb loads and you're going to bomb Britain into smithereens, then you have to eliminate the Royal Air Force.

And that requires a two- or three-one majority advantage.

And you have to have ways of making sure that these planes that take off from Germany and France and Norway, lesser of Norway, but on occasion, they have airtime to dogfight.

Do they have drop tanks?

No.

They don't have, they don't have by the time, and the ME-109s have very short range.

So they don't have a fighter that has air superiority to knock down the Spitfires and hurricanes to a level that the bombers can come in and do their work, and the bombers can't do their work because they don't carry enough bombs per load.

So you take a chance with you, take a Lancaster, but a Lancaster can carry two to three times the load of a German bomber, so you only have to do it once, not go back three times and increase their vulnerability.

And then in addition to that,

Herming Goering was an ignoramus.

He was a cocaine addict.

He was a brave guy in World War I, but he was a buffoon.

He was not well.

And if you read

Galand's, his air marshal, the first and the last, it's just a damning portrait of what they did.

And had they not had Goering and they had just listened to Galand and they had said,

Mein Fuhrer, we're not, just because they got a lucky raid into Berlin, we're not going to direct, we're almost done with the task of destroying all their radar.

If we destroy their radar, they have no idea at night when we're coming.

We can go anywhere in Britain.

We can go to Manchester, we can go to London,

we can go Lancaster, we can go anywhere, and they won't, we can go to Liverpool,

we can go to Edinburgh, we can go

into Northern Ireland, And they won't know where we were going.

But if they have radar, they know the minute we take off.

And they're readying all of their offenses.

And we've almost destroyed them.

We've done a good job on the air factories and we've shooting them down.

Let us continue.

And they didn't want to do it.

They were so the German people were promised by Goering there would never be one British plane in the sky over Germany.

And when there was,

they went crazy.

So

they didn't have the industrial wherewithal to increase fighter production at a level.

And then number two,

why they were doing this,

they were

planning to go into Russia.

So they were hoarding all of their supplies, their planes, everything to go into Russia.

And they were not fighting a one-front war in total.

And they were sending Rommel to...

Africa to bail out the Italians while

they were going to bail him out soon in Greece.

So they were overwhelmed in their responsive.

Their strategic goals way outweighed their capacity to achieve them.

And technologically, the German genius was no match for British and American practicality in the way that they made choices about fighter craft and bombers.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Victor.

Let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and finish up on the news.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

You can find Victor at X.

His handle is V D Hansen.

And you can find him on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join us there and you can hook up with Victor's ideas.

He does almost an article worth of tweets and Facebook postings each week.

So there's a lot there as well.

Victor, I wanted to just continue on the campaign stuff because we had so much out recently.

What do you think

about Biden and his because this week what he did that was new was to call up Ron DeSantis and say to the news press, yes, DeSantis is doing a great job and Harris had failed attempts at getting a hold of DeSantis.

And so it's starting to look like Biden in all of his dementia or whatever it is, may have an underlying desire to undermine the Harris campaign.

And we've seen so much.

Well, it's a tough call because no sane person wants the opposite party to succeed him or her because they'll undo your whole agenda.

So Obama gets George W.

Bush does not, he wants, he doesn't like John McCain, but he doesn't want John McCain to lose.

John McCain's been very critical of Bush in 2008,

but he doesn't want Obama to come in because he'll undo everything.

Obama has been,

you know,

he doesn't really like Hillary Clinton, but he doesn't want Hillary Clinton to lose because then Donald Trump will overturn his agenda, right?

Yes.

And so

that's where we are.

And Donald Trump likes Donald Trump in 2020 and he wants to succeed.

So now Donald Trump is going to try to undo the undoing that Biden did.

And so Biden should, by all rational calculations, be a stalwart for Harris because she represents a continuum of his four years.

He never completed two terms.

But he's Biden.

And Biden is a mean person.

He always was before he was demented.

He said terrible things of people.

He was a racist.

Remember, he said, you know, Barack Obama was the first articulate, clean, white person, and put you all in chains again as if these people are going to go back into slavery, these assembled professionals in a holiday.

Then he said, junkie, and you ain't black.

John Stennis was a great man, so was James O.

Easton, all these people, Thurman.

He has a terrible record.

I'm worried that they're going to create a racial jungle for my grandmother and grandkids.

He said that his entire life.

So he's a mean person, and

he's angry, and he's got no filters now because he's demented.

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

I mean in a clinical sense.

And so what he's thinking is,

okay, I was exhausted.

I was stumbling.

I had a disastrous debate.

I get that.

But I was only back about one or two points in the polls.

I could have recovered.

I'm just thinking what he said.

Yeah, what he did.

And Jill tells me this, and Jill knows everything, and Hunter does too, and Hunter's the smartest man I ever met.

I've said that now, and I mean it.

And I had all sorts of plans of

pardoning Hunter and everything.

And then they just had a coup.

I had one bad night, and they had a coup.

And then they didn't even have an open convention.

They just appointed her.

And that tells me that they never intended to have an open convention.

It wasn't to get rid of me and then let another Democrat, Amy Kobuchar or Gavin Newsom, or Josh Shipper.

No, it was to get her in there, my vice president, the person who was nothing until I appointed her, the person that was supposedly supposed to be loyal.

I get

railroad 86th, and the next thing I know, she's there in 48 hours.

That's not fair.

And now,

since I haven't really been president, I've been at the beach, I feel reinvigorated.

And I'm kind of sharper than I was during the campaign.

I don't have have to go campaign.

And not that I did much of it, but I'm at the beach.

And I'm kind of looking around and thinking, I feel better.

I should be president next four years, not just the next.

So I'm mad at her.

So if she were to lose,

let me think now.

If she were to lose, is it any worse than she were to win?

If she were to lose,

people would be so angry that Donald Trump, Satan incarnate, is back.

They'd go crazy.

And they would blame people.

They couldn't blame me.

I didn't lose.

They'd say, good old Joe Biden from Scranton, unlike Hillary, unlike Camilla, he beat Trump.

He beat Trump.

He saved us from

this god-awful Lucifer.

He did.

In 2020, 2016 and 2024, these incompetent

lost.

And they're thinking, so, you know, he thinks, yeah,

I might just have to say a few things now and then because she's kind of undercutting me.

She says she's going to support me, but all of her advisors and everybody are telling that she can't win unless she undercuts me.

And Jill tells me that my negatives wouldn't be that high if she didn't, with a wink and a nod, fuel that narrative that I was blowing it and she's the savior.

So I'm just going to do this.

Every once in a while, she gets in a little tiff with somebody who's on the right.

I'm going to praise them.

So I don't know what I'm going to do.

I'm going to wear a MAGA hat once in a while, make a joke out of it.

I'm going to say, when Ron DeSantis says that she's demagoguing the issue and calling him up in a way that she's never done ever before as vice president, he's good.

He's

in this doing a great job.

We talked.

We're good.

Everything is good.

No problem.

And then they're saying she's trying to distance.

Jill says, Joe, she's trying to distance him.

That's going to really hurt you.

Your legacy, appraisals of your presidency.

All you have to do is just insert a little word now and then.

Okay, Jill, okay, I'll do that.

And

look, she's talented.

I can't think of any major decision that she wasn't there as a partner.

She owns it, you know, that kind of stuff.

And that's what he's doing.

Yeah, absolutely.

And she's trying to say that

How would you differ from Joe Biden?

Well, obviously, I'm not Joe Biden.

And they let her go.

And then every once in a while, some guy thinks, I want to get a little integrity, at least a little iota of it, so that I could be a credible journalist.

Well, you didn't answer the question.

What do you mean?

Well, let me think.

I guess I can't think of anything that really comes to mind.

I disagreed with him.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden

her handlers say, you idiot, are you crazy?

He's pulling 41%.

The border is one of the worst issues.

The economy is the worst issue.

Crime is the worst issue.

Foreign policy was the worst issue.

The only thing that you're supposed to say is that Joe Biden and I were stalwarts hand in hand on abortion.

And

we were going to get backwell versus Wade.

We're partners.

And sometimes she could say just what George W.

Bush did, George H.W.

Bush.

He was Reagan's vice president, and Reagan was kind of popular, but they kept telling H.W., senior, you're running against Dukakis.

He's talking about change, change, change.

And you've got to say something.

And so he kind of came up with thousand points of light, kinder, gentler nation.

And Nancy got angry.

And then so he changed.

And he said, look,

Mr.

Bush, surely there were things that you didn't approve of in the Ronald Reagan administration.

And he's thinking,

I'm not going to say that because Ronald Reagan has about a 55% approval rating.

But I don't want to take credit for it, but I'm surely not stupid enough to criticize a popular agenda and a popular president.

I want to write his coattails, but yet seem independent at the same time.

I can square that circle.

So he said something to the effect, as I remember,

he said, every vice president has disagreements, but that's not his job.

His job isn't to think about how he's different.

He was appointed by the president and nominated by his party to be the president's partner.

My job as vice president is to fulfill the agenda of the president, and that's what I did.

And I was happy to do it.

And everything that Ronald Reagan succeeded at, I was proud that I had some small part.

And that's what you do.

So, all he, she should say was something like this.

I was selected by

Joe Biden to be his running mate.

That was ratified by the convention.

My job was to help perpetuate, enhance, win over the Biden, the Joe Biden, the Joe Biden from Scranton, the Joe Biden president agenda.

Now, of course I have disagreement.

Everybody does with everybody.

But that's not my role to tell you.

I never articulated them because my job was to fill the Biden agenda, the Biden agenda.

And that's what I tried to do.

And I'm not going to get back here in retrospect and tell me which Harris agenda I should have disloyally tried to promote against my commander-in-chief.

One thing that I am not is disloyal.

But of course people have differences.

And that's all she could have said.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's not hard to think.

It worked for George H.W.

Bush.

She still has time, Victor.

You might be giving her her battle strategy.

All right.

Nobody listens to this on the right.

I mean, the left, I mean, excuse me.

Yeah, unfortunately, today we're up against a hard end here, so we need to end the show.

We'd like to thank our listeners most of all for listening to us.

And thank you, Victor, for your time today.

Thank you, everybody, for coming and listening in.

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