Adams Indictment, Troops to the Middle East, and Norway and Denmark in WWII

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Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

This is our weekend episode and we do something a little more cultural in our middle segment.

So Victor is going to be talking about the invasion of Denmark and Norway, was it?

Or Finland?

Norway.

Norway.

And And then, but first, we'll look at a few news stories.

We have Eric Adams indicted in New York, and then a lot of endorsements of Kamala Harris that we want to look at first.

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

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So, Victor, we just got in the news.

What is it?

It's Thursday, and this is coming out Saturday.

But Eric Adams' indictment has been.

Hey, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Plurals, plurals, five indictments.

Five indictments.

Wow, okay.

And a lot of it has to do with Turkey and payments from Turkey.

I was wondering your thoughts.

Wire fraud.

It goes back a decade.

So he has been allegedly, allegedly on the Turkish government role.

There's a lot of interesting things about that because

Turkey is not the Turkey that we remember.

Turkey is anti-American.

It's pro-Iranian.

It's pro-Russia.

It's pro-China.

It's President Mr.

Erdogan has threatened to attack, think of this, not just the Kurds, the Cypriots, the Greeks, and the Israelis.

And why it isn't NATO, I don't know.

But if you were to stereotype that an authoritarian Islamic country is incompatible with the democratic nature of

the other,

I don't know, 20-some NATO nations, then you would be correct.

So he's getting money from an illiberal regime regime that's anti-American.

Now, keep that in mind.

And the other thing is, he had a press conference to show solidarity, but

he had all the officials of his,

but every single person was African-American.

So it re-enforces that stereotype when he said, look at this government.

You remember when he said it's a chocolate government?

Yeah.

And then when he ran, he said, you should vote for me because I took on the crackers.

He's a very odious person.

And the reason he's mayor was after the riots of the George Floyd 2020 summer of hate and violence, he positioned himself as a non-Bill de Blasio lunatic.

And he passed himself off as a policeman that would bring law and order.

But he wasn't.

He was always a race hustler.

And he was a crook, I think.

But I want to suspend judgment on him and now we'll see what happens but

you know

we'll see what happens it's

the left will have to deal with this because when they go after Donald Trump for

overvaluing a real house

real estate asset in New York that the Deutsche Bank said was not overvalued and issued the loan and made a profit and said they would issue more loans

No one said a word of these people

that are now upset about the Adams indictment.

The only thing that's weird is AOC called on him to resign.

That's a break in the intersectionality

community.

Maybe it, maybe, and I hate to say this, and your listeners are going to get angry.

It shows that AOC, for all of her show, has some element of authenticity to her.

I don't know.

I think she's been fighting with him a lot.

Yeah, maybe.

All right.

Well,

in addition to that, we've got lots of military officials in addition to actors endorsing Kamala Harris.

And one of them is Stanley McChrystal, who was a general that was caught on tape disparaging Trump.

And then also Sam Elliott, one of the probably

more famous actors of our generation, is endorsing Kamala Harris, which is a bit of a surprise.

And I know that you were looking at Robert Malley, the special envoy to Iran, and he is now being appointed to a position at Princeton.

I was wondering your thoughts on any and all of those three things.

Well,

I like Sam Elliott, but he's not, I don't think he's a great actor of our time.

He's a character actor.

He has a cowboy voice, a cowboy look, and he's kind of a wise ass, if I could use that

expletive.

Character actor.

He's very good.

He's married to Catherine Ross.

He has been for decades.

And he just came out and said, you know, he's voting why we should all, if you're.

I think what he was trying to say, if you're white males and you're conservative and you've got a southern accent, you might want to consider her

as a populist.

And so what she's trying to do is where she's going to lose the election if she loses it is of all the candidates in recent memory, she's hemorrhaging the most in white males.

And that's still

35% of the electorate.

And so they've been doing white dudes for her, and now they're trying to wheel out people who have southern accents or cowboy affiliations or country Western singers that they'll show you that it's okay to vote for Camilla.

Sort of like the Republicans are doing with African Americans, right?

It's okay.

You won't face social.

opprobrium.

But I don't think it's going to do anything.

She's got all the Hollywood actors.

This is very ironic because the other day she said that Donald Trump was a candidate of the skyscrapers and the billionaires and was pampered.

The billionaire class is all for her.

The celebrity class is all for her.

The tech, with some major exceptions, is all for her.

So she is a creature of the Bay Area, of quid pro quo.

I mean, she had no qualifications.

Her boyfriend put her on all these boards, jump-started her career.

She schmoozed with all the billionaire class in the Bay Area.

That's who her nucleus was of support.

So the idea that she's a popist is a joke.

She grew up in a posh neighborhood, Montreal.

Daughter of two PhDs.

Said

she grew up in middle-class Oakland.

I think she was born in Oakland when she was living in Berkeley.

Her mom went over to the Oakland Hospital.

And then that it's like me saying I'm from Fowler, California, because my mom had my brother and I as twins in Fowler, California.

But

I never lived in Fowler.

So that's just a complete

fraud.

The generals is a little weird.

You remember in

2018 to 2020, they all decided, the retired generals, that they were not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I think it's Article 82 that says no

high-ranking officer shall disparage the Commander-in-Chief publicly.

And they have,

remember, they go after people on that statute who break security or they,

if you're a private or

even though in that particular article it refers to officers, but if you're a private or sergeant and you go publicly and say, my commanding officer is a creep and a liar, they'll prosecute you.

And then it's been decided that retired officers who are on pensions and subject to recall in national emergencies are subject still to the Uniform Code.

It was created in 1950 to 52, and I think it was in direct response to Douglas MacArthur, who not only attacked Harry Truman while he was an officer, but more importantly,

after he was canned and retired,

he continued to attack

Harry Truman and then by association Eisenhower as well, whom he never liked.

So people said, you just can't do that.

Well, they all did it.

General

Hayden,

remember he said that

Trump was creating Auschwitz-like cages.

We had General McCaffrey that said he was a Mussolini.

We had General Mattis.

I can't say anything.

He's a colleague at Hoover.

We had

Admiral McRaven who said that Trump should be gone the sooner the better.

I would remind the Admiral that we do have elections for that contingency.

We don't have to do it sooner the better.

We do it every four years.

And McCaffrey said, I mean, McChrystal then, in this general hysteria, weighed in at that moment and said that

he was dishonest and didn't tell the truth, a liar, and attacked the commander-in-chief.

And now he's saying

that

he's he's thought it over and how he was won over to Camilla Harrison SA.

Well, he was never won over.

It was a uniparty decision.

If you're a retired general or admiral and you are in the corporate consulting business or you're on a defense board or you're a defense lobbyist or you're into a procurement activist, whatever term you want to use, and that's where the money is, then you're committing suicide to endorse Trump, who's a disruptor and is against this whole revolving door.

You go into the top echelon of the military, then you revolve out to, you know, General Dynamics, Northrop, Lockheed, Raytheon.

The military-industrial complex.

Yes, and he is a corporate leader.

I don't know what the word was.

What's the word?

A leadership.

He has a company.

I mean, it's not that big, but it's very lucrative.

And he goes to corporations and says, these are the leadership techniques that helped me be a successful counterinsurgency general yeah and

he's been very successful so if you're in that business you don't want to offend your clients there might be some conservatives so you write these types of articles and you say how i came

how i evolved to vote for her you were going to do it anyway because it's a simple business decision but you act like if you were conflicted and he did this before

he wrote an article i think it was was in the Atlantic.

But essentially it was,

I had worshipped Robert E.

Lee my whole life, and I had his portrait on my office.

And then

I just,

this was during the woke moment.

I realized, I realized, just like I was won over by Kamala Harris, I realized that

he was, he had slaves and he fought for a bad cause.

I mean, I didn't know that before.

How can you graduate from U.S.

West Point

Military Academy and not know that Robert E.

Lee had slaves and he fought for succession?

He was the best of the Confederates with the exception of James Longstreet on that issue.

He didn't really believe it was a good or sustainable cause, but he fought for it nevertheless.

But then all of a sudden, at an opportune moment, oh my God, the country's woke.

I realize it.

So I took my picture and I think he said he threw it in the dumpster in a nice virtue signaling performance act.

But I'm not trying to be too cynical, but all of these officers are these actors that make these big public confessionals or proclamations as if they reach some type of moral clarity.

99.9%, it's a

it's just a deliberate, calculated business decision.

If you're in Hollywood and you do occasional,

you're not going to say you're for Donald Trump, believe me.

Just like if you're an author, especially if you're a Jewish author, you're not going to say you're for Israel.

Or they're going to go blacklist you and they're going to go on social media and they're going to try to destroy your readership.

And that's happened.

And it's the same thing with other people.

So.

Yeah, I noticed that.

There was a whole article on Jewish authors that are having trouble getting published because they're not sufficiently pro-Palestinian, I guess, is what I would say.

But

it's a shame.

It's not even that they have, I mean, that's true.

The woke,

if you talk privately, as I have, with a number of editors from different houses,

I've written 27 books, and I probably published Alfred Knopp,

Doubleday,

The Free Press, Simon and Schuster,

Basic Books, more recently, Bloomsbury, all of them.

And you talk to some of those people and they will tell you that the woke mandates that they were under were money losing big time.

They were not Professor Kendi's big hits.

That was a one-off.

And so they had to get rid of a lot of editors.

As somebody who is

on the oversight board of Encounter Books, vis-a-vis the Bradley Bradley Foundation.

I can tell you that Encounter Books is the beneficiary of that.

Some great authors have been blacklisted because of their political views, whether they're Jewish or whatever.

And Roger Kimball has snapped them up to great success.

Yeah, your listeners should know that's the publishing house to go to for all the new stuff.

Yeah, so

it's really, I mean,

it's really disturbing because

McChrystal wrote that, I think it was, the title was something like, How I Threw Away the Portrait of Robert E.

Lee, kind of how I came to like Camilla, you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And it was in Atlantic magazine.

And it's always about a journey where you go to a higher level of consciousness.

And the subtext in that case was always Donald Trump.

Yeah.

Charlottesville, da, da, da, da, da, da, da.

I think your cynicism is merited, Victor, so you don't have to apologize for it.

What about this Robert McSally, sorry, Robert Malley?

Well, he's a different case.

He emerged.

He was a journalist, and he was a very close friend.

He was very wealthy, preppy.

He went to the same private school as did Anthony Blinken.

So he should have been disgraced.

He was the special Obama point person.

He was a rabid anti-Israeli journalist.

dressed him up as if he was a sophisticated diplomat.

And they put, that was Ben Rhodes.

Remember him, the deputy national security advisor who was infamously quoted in a number of contexts where he said, these people are stupid.

They know, these generation of reporters know nothing.

We feed them stuff about the Iran deal and they just circulate it back to us.

They're so stupid.

We created an echo chamber.

That's how we sold it.

It was an echo chamber.

And then in that echo chamber, one of his appendages was Robert Maui.

And then you thought he would be disgraced because Trump came in, and all of a sudden, Iran wasn't causing foment in the Middle East.

I mean, they got rid of General Solemni.

He put

$100 billion of oil sanctions.

They had no money.

The Houthis were declared terrorists.

So were the Quds division.

The Iranian

paramilitaries were declared terrorist.

No more money for Hamas.

And Robert Maui faded, as it has been.

And then Biden came, and via his former roommate, Anthony Blinken, or former associate, they rehabilitated him.

And now we find out

that he got his security clearance yanked.

Apparently, he was downloading, this is the allegation, so I say allegedly, he was downloading what, top secret stuff into an email account that was his own.

And there were allegations that he and is it Taba Tabai, Taba Tabai, or Miss Taba Tabai

in the Pentagon was part of an Iranian influencing lobbyist group.

And remember now, Iran is deeply embedded in the United States government, especially when it's a matter of the left.

And you can see how their appendages, they're on campuses, they monitor former Iranians.

When they come to the United Nations, they apparently get better secret service from us than does Donald Trump.

And Robert Malley and people in the Pentagon act as influencers on behalf of Iran, which, as we speak, is systematically trying to kill Donald Trump.

And I don't understand it.

But of course, he's been rewarded by an Ivy League visiting professorship.

And that's what the Ivy League always does.

They don't look at academic credentials.

They don't look at publications.

They just say,

do people not like this person?

And is he a

controversial, hardcore anti-American leftist?

And we'll put him in so he can indoctrinate our students.

That's kind of their modus operandi, to be quite frank about it.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back to talk a little bit about World War II and the wars against Norway and Denmark by the Germans at the beginning of the war.

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

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I forgot to introduce you, Victor.

You are the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You've written

by count now, I think it's 27 books, and you have

two new ones out.

The Case for Trump is

a new edition of an explanation of how Trump won in 2016, and then The End of Everything,

the

destruction of civilizations in a battle.

And he looks at four different cases of that.

So I highly recommend those two books.

But the most important one in this case is he also published, I'm not sure, probably 2018 or 19, The Second World Wars.

And it's a thorough examination of the fighting of the Second World War.

And it has lots of new

arguments made about important things that occurred in the Second World War.

So I highly recommend

that you you go out and purchase that.

But Victor, let's listen to you now on the beginning of the war in Norway and Denmark.

Well, remember, we're trying to, just as a reminder, each week work our way through

World War II in part response to Darrell Cooper, the blogger that Tucker Carlson had on, that I felt gave a lot of historically inaccurate assessments.

And I'm not trying to do this ad hominem, and I reiterated that

I know and like Tucker Carlson, but I wanted to set the record straight.

And remember the record as he saw it was the Allies were culpable for World War II.

Any atrocities on the Eastern Front were accidental or due to the unforeseen developments of a quick victory.

Churchill was a terrorist, a drunk.

I don't need to go on.

So I'm addressing the war, but sometimes in the context of a critique of that.

And we've now done

Three.

We've done the Versailles Treaty and the causes of World War II.

And I've made the argument that the Versailles Treaty was not harsh as Jane Mont

Maynard Keynes, John Maynard Keynes had alleged compared to the September program of World War I or the Brest-Litovic

Treaty of 1918, especially the 1945

Ally demands on a defeated Nazi Germany.

That made Versailles look like a picnic, what we did to Nazi Germany, and it worked.

And then we talked about appeasement, and then we went into the invasion of Poland in September 1st, 1939, that prompted an Allied declaration of war, the fall of Poland just a month later, on October 7th, and the duplicity of the Soviet Union attacking Poland.

And by the way, if you looked at Poland at that point of 1939, this is what's so funny about the Ukraine thing.

It looks like it has a lot of Western Ukraine and Belarus in it.

So when we talk about borders today, we should realize that the Poland that emerged out of the Versailles Treaty is partly Poland today, but a lot of it is Belarus and Ukraine, which was stolen by Stalin in September 17th of 1939 and never given back.

And then we talked about the phony war, because remember when Poland falls, Hitler says, wow.

I've got Austria with the Anschluss.

I've destroyed Czechoslovakia.

I got the Sudetenland.

I got 81 million German speakers in one nation.

I've destroyed Poland.

I've got the Soviet Union at my back.

And I will make a little peace feeler to the French and British who declared war.

And they haven't done anything.

They've been dropping leaflets.

We talked about the French army went in five or six miles to the Saarlands.

There's nobody here.

We could go to Berlin.

But you know what?

We don't want to be too provocative, so we'll turn back.

So there was a phony war.

The Germans were attacking ships, etc.

But there wasn't really a full-fledged war.

And then Hitler claimed, and Darrell Cooper took this seriously, that he wanted real peace.

In other words, now that I have broken every treaty, every promise, and I have digested like a snake a big

prey and it's in my gut digesting, I would like a time, a little reprieve, so I can digest this and get my losses.

He lost, as I said earlier, with dead and missing and in Poland probably 20,000 soldiers.

So now the digestion is over and he's looking at Norway and Denmark.

And remember the Battle of Jutland in the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark that sticks out into the Baltic-Dash North Sea was the site of the biggest sea battle of World War I.

One of the actually the biggest battleship

1916 battle of all time.

And what was it over?

It was over the same thing.

The Allies wanted to blockade Germany, and you have to close that strait between Denmark and Scandinavia.

And if you can do that, you can separate the Baltic from the North Sea, and therefore you can't get into the only ports in Germany that are in the

Baltic Sea.

So

Hitler's thinking, I've got the Swedes paying for the transportation of free iron ore.

It's about 60-70%

of my ore for high-grade steel.

And number

two,

I would like to ensure that the Allies, like they did in World War I, cannot blockade me.

So, and three, I kind of would like to take Norway because of the three Scandinavian peninsulas, Norway, Sweden, Finland.

It has a long coast that that looks out on the North Sea and by extension a little bit to the west and south.

Britain, and I can put you boats there or bases.

So he decided on April 9th

of 1940 to take Denmark and use it as a base

of support to cut off the British blockade and take Norway.

And it didn't go well at first because remember the British fleet was outnumbered him about five to one.

And there was still an independent, strong France with a navy.

So he took Denmark very easily, but then they landed all along from the Arctic Circle all the way down,

four or five hundred miles.

And this addresses what Darrell Cooper said.

He said that the Allies were terrorist bombing.

No, they had destroyed almost Warsaw.

They started the terrorist bombing, they being the

Luftwaffe, and they did the same thing in Norway.

They started wiping out small towns on the coast that offered resistance.

And they had this man

Quiesling, who we have that term, you know, as a Quisling, as a traitor, but he had basically promised Hitler that there would be very little resistance.

There was a lot of resistance by the Norwegians.

50,000 of them made their way into Sweden as operatives, but it didn't go too well in the sense that the German invasion force was almost about the same size.

If you counted up the divisions that were available before the invasion in Denmark and Norway and the men that France and England landed in the northern coast, then it was equal.

And of course, everybody knows if you're going to invade, you need a three-to-one numerical superiority.

If you look at the fleet assets,

the British number of ships that were available, and they didn't use them all, unfortunately,

were much greater.

And Germany lost 10 destroyers that they could not afford.

They lost, I think, two or three heavy cruisers.

But, but, but they took, they

sunk a commiserate amount of British shipping, and more importantly, They blew up a

it was the only aircraft carrier that I remember, fleet carrier, there were light carriers in the Pacific.

Think about it, the Glorious, HMS Glorious, was the only fleet carrier, 20,000 tons and above, that was blown up by a battleship.

How do you do that?

In this case, it was the pocket battleship, Schnarnos,

Nasono.

And,

I mean, supposedly they have an air protective cover of 200 miles, a battleship maybe with, and these did not have 16-inch or 14-inch guns, as I remember, and

they had to get within 15 to 18 miles undetected, and they did, and they blew the Glorious up.

And when you look at the actual losses in the whole campaign, the British-Norwegian French lost more than the Germans.

It was close, but it was a close-run thing.

And when it was over,

The British were, and the French were still going to hang on.

Ostensibly, they had gone in there to help Finland defend itself from Russia, and they were in this very awkward position that Hitler secretly wanted Finland to beat Russia too, but they didn't want to be in the same side supplying Finland as Germany.

So it was very contorted.

But

they had to get back on May 10th because that was the invasion.

of France.

So Hitler was

in Luxembourg and Netherlands and Belgium.

Hitler was

he thought he would be done in 10 days.

But he just said, you know what, just bomb these Norwegian towns into oblivion and we'll isolate the British in the north and all we care is the bottom 200 miles of coast because that's going to protect the strait into the Baltic Sea and give our submarines free transit, stop their blockade while we absorb Western Europe.

So they lost Norway when they just said, the British and the French said, we've got to get back because he's invaded France.

And that was the end of it.

And then the weird thing, the aftermath was

that he was obsessed for the next

almost four and a half years that he would lose Swedish iron ore if the British ships got into the Baltic Sea and disrupted that transit corridor in the Baltic Sea between Norwegian and Swedish ports and German ports.

And so he kept

30,000, 40,000 German soldiers in Norway.

And it was sort of like if you were in the Eastern Front and you were decorated, they sent you either before Paris fell to Paris, because they occupied all of France with less than 100,000 men.

And they did that from

June 23rd all the way until June, July, excuse me, July of 1944.

But Norway, the Allies never took it.

They never took it.

They said to themselves, you know what?

It didn't work very well for them during the Blitz.

It was too far north, and the weather was bad, so they couldn't really use it to bomb very well.

It was too long a distance as well compared to the channel airfields.

And the submarines were not placed in a good strategic position in the fjords and stuff.

So it was better to have the French coastal

reinforced submarine pens.

So there was no value in this campaign, except it did stop the blockade that had worked in World War I.

Cargo ships were able to go out, not a lot, a little bit, and more importantly,

it guaranteed Swedish transit of

very valuable iron ore.

And

the Allies just said, let it die on the vine.

And it was very funny because you see,

when we get into the later part of the war,

when we invaded,

Rommel wanted to push us back on like von Rundstedt, right on the beaches.

And he didn't really have enough people.

But there were sitting right in Norway, not far away, about 40,000 troops that he could have used.

But Hitler just forbid it.

He just said, we've taken Norway.

We don't give it up.

And I need my iron ore.

The irony, final irony was

as the war went badly for him, the Swedes said, first,

you pay for the transport and cash only, bullion, and now we're not even going to give you any, because now we've seen the error of our ways, and we always like Britain and America.

These are my ancestors, so I have to be very careful about it, because I grew up with old used Volvos, Electrolocks,

vacuum cleaners, Swedish rye crackers, etc.

And I said once to my decorated grandfather, who was gassed

in World War I, I said, Grandpa Frank, didn't the Swedes join Hitler in World War II?

Yes, they did.

And

it was a long story.

It's a long story.

He didn't like that, and I would tease my dad about it.

And he would say, well, you know, touch that volvo, or that was an old 544 ladybug, touch that volvo, look at the steel, Victor, look at the steel, it's Swedish steel, no wonder he wanted it.

So they had no choice.

I said, No, they were neutral.

And my mom, the judge, would always say,

Bill, I think Victor is correct on this issue.

So, I like Swedes, though, but they were neutral in World War II.

And one of my favorite authors,

Norwegian, was Newt Hampson.

Growth of the Soil, a great novel.

And unfortunately,

Hitler had him feeded in Berlin.

He was a pro-Nazi.

Wow.

So were a lot of people at that point.

What about that movie Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

They go up there to all those Swedes, and one of them's a complete Nazi.

The author, though, was very left-wing.

But

all of those novels have the subtext.

I've read one of them, but

by extension, you can say all of them have the subtext that a right-wing capitalist pro-Nazi hierarchy was running Sweden, and they've never really, they're the ones that have all the money in Sweden, and they're still right-wing.

But they all had Nazi contacts.

That was not a subtext.

That was the central theme of the Girl with a Dragon tattoo.

That family were Nazis.

Some of them were, and they fought like hell against each other.

That was a very good movie with,

what's his name,

Scars

Guard.

Scars Guardian, yeah.

Yeah, he was really, he's a great actor.

Martine.

Martine, the evil Martine.

That's the psychopath.

Yeah, but they have those really gross scenes where the social worker, he got what he deserved, but still it's pretty gross.

Daniel Craig was really good in that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Always.

That was a good movie, it really was.

Well, you were going to go on to Denmark.

Well, the Danish were a little different.

They only lasted about 48 hours, but

they, of all the Scandinavian, I should go even further.

Of all the countries that were occupied in Western Europe, they were the most successful in getting Jews out.

And Norway tried to do it too.

And Sweden, to its credit later in the war, allowed a lot of Norwegian and Danish Jews had gone

to

places like Finland, Sweden, across the Channel into Norway.

And then when Norway was taken completely, they went into Sweden.

But Denmark had the fewest percentages of, I think I'm pretty correct,

the fewest percentages of Jews were killed or sent to the camps of Denmark, given their pre-war population, than any other occupied country.

So they were noble in that way.

And then, of course, Quiesling had fighting, he fought with the Nazis, but not in a way that you would like.

His beef with Hitler was that Nordics were not Aryans, like

trashy German tribes that we read about in Tacitus, but they were more pure and noble and even more Aryan, Vikings.

And so he didn't like the idea to be lumped in with German peoples as the master race.

Because Hitler kept saying that the Dutch, he had these gradations and the Scandinavians were almost, but not quite, where Germans were.

And Quisland said, no, no, no, as a fellow racist, my racism is better than yours, my race.

And he was killed after, he was hung after the, no, I think he was shot after the war.

Yeah.

Quisland

The Norwegians were pretty tough after the war.

You know, we always talk about the French resistance, and after the war, they shaved women's heads, and they shot people.

The Norwegians did the same thing, and they executed a lot of collaborators.

Wow.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break, and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Poles, the Prime Minister Strait down,

and

U.S.

sending troops, more, actually, I should say, more military resources to the Middle East.

Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So we still have a lot of things going on in terms of pro

I want to say pro-Hillary, it's pro-Harris.

And the first thing is just looking at the polls.

I want to just state two of them that we've seen this week: that the national average on Real Clear Politics shows 49 to 47 about, but approximately two points in favor of Harris.

But the Rasmussen report shows 49 to 47

plus 2 in favor of Trump.

So what should we think about these polls?

It's very hard because if you're a conservative,

you look at this data that says 2016,

which was off and the polls favored Hillary, but not off like 2020.

The more recent recent was even more egregious.

So you say

in 2016, in a state that Trump was supposed to lose by two or three points, and he either lost it by 0.5 or he won, in that particular state, Trump is now ahead by one or two, and therefore equal, and therefore he's really given that paradigm ahead by two or three.

However, however, however, that does not factor in the reality

that the voting laws were changed.

And so

we don't really know how to function.

We've only had one election where only 30% in many states voted on Election Day.

And then conservatives will counter, hey, wait a minute, Victor, but that's factored in.

So they were using mail-in stealthy ballots.

when they were telling us that he was going to lose Wisconsin by 17 points, or he was going to lose

North Carolina by three, and he won North Carolina, and he only lost Wisconsin by less than a point.

And so we've already factored that in, the flawed polls, the fact that the mail-in and early balloting helped him.

So

that's already baked into those crooked polls.

So the point is that even though

Trump was behind by two or three points in these polls, and even though they had mail-in balloting which should have made the actual count even worse

he did pretty well in 2020 and he confounded most of those polls so if he is dead even in 2024 or running neck and neck then despite the cheating and despite

the prejudice of the polls

even

any poll that he is even or ahead or behind you have to give him two more points.

Yeah.

Factored for everything.

And if that were to be true, then he would win

the election.

And so I think that's important to keep everybody in mind because that explains why after the disastrous Philadelphia interview, the disastrous Association of Black Journalists interview, the

disastrous

OPA, she went and did this

latest one with MSNBC, Miss Rule.

And that was a disaster.

I think I saw that,

I looked at the tapes, that was a disaster.

We can talk about that particular interview, but

we have in the past.

We did, yeah,

we have.

And when she says, you know, holistic, holistic, holistic, or she doesn't answer the question, or when they ask about, did you really

flip hamburgers at McDonald's?

No, I did fries, but you know, she can't tell

She said that she worked down in LA or San Diego or somewhere down in the LA area, and there's only the town that she mentioned, I don't know which one it was, but there's only two, and they asked, and they had no record of her working there.

So she never worked at McDonald's.

And so anyway,

the point I'm making is she wouldn't be doing these interviews that keep turning out to be disastrous.

She wouldn't keep trying to string out

a debate offer, even though she won't go on Fox.

So she knows she can't go on Fox because they will ask her a follow-up question.

They'll say, you didn't answer the question.

Here, yes or no, yes or no.

So why is she doing all that?

And the answer is that those polls that looked ambiguous for her

must reflect an internal poll that's even more damning because the internal polls, as we've said ad nauseum on this podcast, they are not rigged.

You never pay, you know,

they're not court gestures.

You don't pay thousands of dollars for a court gesture pollster.

Say, you're winning by 20.

No, you want the exact numbers, and then you react accordingly.

And the exact numbers,

I think, show that Trump is slightly ahead.

Yeah.

Well, the

Federal Reserve seems to be coming out on her behalf, and they've lowered the prime interest rate by half a point, which is you know for the federal federal reserve that's a lot i was wondering your your thoughts on

is this are they interfering or is it foreseeing every session

the country's not going to go down the tubes in 43 days come on 50 days i think is when they end so they were all going to do that and then the chairman said i don't know much about politics no that he was told to do that and he did it and the same thing uh that we talked at length about the ukrainian visit And Mr.

Zelensky, now, since I've talked about it on our last podcast, we learned that it was even worse than I thought.

They didn't allow, I said they didn't allow, but there was not one Republican that was invited to the visit at all for Zelensky.

And, you know, he was coordinated by the embassy.

in Washington, the Ukrainian embassy.

And you remember that in 2016, they were chastised because they were coming out and

getting dirt on the Trump campaign and turning it over to Hillary.

So that dossier, you remember they went after Manafort?

A lot of the lies about Manafort came from the Ukrainian embassy.

And I think even the ambassador was writing basically public endorsements of Hillary Clinton.

And, you know,

if you factor all of these in, Venman, who was an American citizen, but he was an expatriate Ukrainian, and he was really the person.

It wasn't Karamella, the whistleblower.

He was never even in the room.

It was Venman listened to the call to Ukraine.

He called

his buddy and said, this is what happened.

Will you be a whistleblower?

And then they both met with Adam Schiff.

That's true.

And the point I'm making is there are so many Ukrainians.

And then we get into Joe Biden, son of a bitch.

I went over there and I looked at my watch and I said, I'm leaving.

I'm going to suspend aid until until you fire Viktor Shokin.

And they did.

Again, think about it.

They were impeaching Donald Trump allegedly.

And they did because they said for domestic political advantage, i.e.

that Biden someday, he wasn't a candidate then,

but in someday he will be a candidate.

And then Joe...

Donald Trump, to protect his chances of defeating Biden, went after the Biden family by suspending congressionally approved aid.

That was what the Writs said.

A lot of people, Zelensky himself said he didn't feel pressured to look at.

But the point that I'm making is, A,

Viktor Chokin was really looking at, no matter what the European left or the art left, he was looking at the skullduggery of the Biden family vis-a-vis Hunter Biden.

It wasn't worth $80,000 a month and a million a year.

And he was getting that.

And he was trying to find out why.

And Biden knew that and went over there and used congressionally approved aid and used it as a lever to fire him.

Well, that's what they

impeached Trump for.

They said he suspended congressionally approved aid so that Rudy Giuliani could look at the Biden actual corruption.

So,

and they said it was election interference.

This is what they're doing right now.

They are bringing Ukraine over and they're trying to get aid by getting

Zelensky to go into a swing state right during early Malin Ballet that is now starting and sign shells and basically send the message, I help your economy, your jobs in this factory that we're in right now are going to me.

And by the way, I'm going to give some interviews that J.D.

Vance is dangerous and he's a radical and Trump doesn't know what he's talking about.

And he was ferried around by the United States government with Secret Service protection.

And that is about as

election interference as possible.

If anybody did that with Netanyahu, as we said, you'd be in big trouble.

Yeah.

Well, last topic here, Victor, is the Middle East.

And at the beginning of this week, the U.S.

began a

trip by the USS Harry S.

Truman over to the Middle East to add to the troops that were already there, which apparently

amounts to about 40,000 troops.

But new troops are going into the Middle East and an undisclosed number of them.

And I was wondering your thoughts on the Middle East this week and the new

we have 40,000 troops.

But

this military has been so eroded by manpower issues, both in the Merchant Marine supplies, but also in the actual Navy, Army, Air Force.

We've talked about that at length.

And now we learn that we don't have enough supply ships.

So for gasoline, for a carrier task force, I think it's very tenuous, the supply line.

We're only going to have one carrier.

I don't think we can have two because we don't have the ability, the wherewithal to supply it with aviation fuel, you know, regular fuel oil for

the conventional engines on them.

And there's 40,000 people there already.

And so I don't quite understand what the Biden administration is doing.

They're preparing for a wider war.

So

they think if there's a war between Iran

and

Hezbollah versus Israel, they're going to do what?

If they attack us,

We're going to do what?

I mean, we've already shown that when they've attacked us 120 times on installations in Syria and Iraq, which, by the way, Kamala Harris said there's not one U.S.

soldier in harm's way.

Remember that?

In combat, she said that in the debate.

They're everywhere in harm's way from the Red Sea to Syria.

But what are we going to do?

What's the purpose of that?

To deter Iran?

Is it to say, don't send missiles into Israel as last time?

Or is it to deter Israel?

I don't know.

It doesn't make any sense.

What would they be doing if there is a wide open war between Hezbollah and Israel or Iran, I have no idea.

And who is running the country right now?

Who's on the phone every day talking to Lloyd Austin?

I don't know who is, is it?

Kamala Harris?

Because she's vice president.

If the president and he was on, we talked about that interview with the view, and they asked him about Nancy Pelosi, and he couldn't finish a sentence.

He didn't know what, you know, he's just,

it's like this.

So if they call him and say, Mr.

President, we have the Truman

carrier group, and what are the particular protocols that we are to follow should there be a war with Hezbollah in Israel?

Or do you think he's going to answer that question?

No.

No, but apparently our vice president is disowning herself from the administration, so she's not there either.

What's going on?

According to Joe Biden on the view, that's a lie.

He said that she's been involved in every decision, and she should have been, and because he has absolute confidence in her.

That's right.

So she was a partner, and she owns it.

So, 40 days left.

Let's see if Donald Trump can control his emotions.

Don't talk about attendance.

Don't talk about her at McDonald's.

Just stay to

Camilla.

Tell us what you're for.

Tell us why you've changed.

Tell us what your relationship is with what has happened the last three and a half years.

Were you the owner or the co-owner?

And tell us about whether you you are distancing yourself from joe biden are you approved i know you gave a talk that said bidenomics and you laughed and cackled was great do you still feel that way but you got to get that out yeah

well victor i i have a question or a statement by a listener on apple podcasts his name is ira Rock and I'm only going to read part of it.

I thought it was an interesting thing because we are often talking about is there any chance of World War III?

And he says this about the Ukrainians getting missiles that can fire into Russia, deep into Russia.

He says, if the Ukraine fires missiles deep into Russia, then Poland, Hungary, and Western Europe can expect a similar response.

There's World War III starting, he's suggesting.

Then there's the nuclear factor.

As Trump

had a previous and, from all accounts, good relationship with both parties as a private citizen, he

ought to make some overtures before it gets to that intractable stage, because it's quite apparent that Biden et al.

want to ratchet things up.

It would be a win-win for Russia, Ukraine, and Europe, and an electoral win for Trump, and a slapdown to Biden, Harris, and the warmongers of the Pentagon and State Department.

There's nothing to lose.

What do you think of that idea?

Getting to the point now,

this,

and I know this sounds conspiratorial, I'm usually not that way.

If you are a retired admiral in general, okay?

And if you are in the one to four star class,

And if you are working for the Boston Consortium of Arms Contractors, or you're working for Northrop, or General Dynamics, our Raytheon, or

Lockheed, then you really should not

assume your general mantle and start weighing in on Ukraine.

Because there is a fabulous amount of money that is being made by gearing up and either taking U.S.

stockpiles and sending them to Ukraine and then they have to be restored.

or repairing things.

And Mr.

Vinman should not be talking about Ukraine.

He's a middleman that's trying to profit off the war.

There's too many people that are involved in the military-industrial contracts revolving door, so they should not be listened to on Ukraine.

And there's a few

ex-diplomats and investors, too.

They should not be listened to.

And the point is,

I was asked to do the paperback version of The End of Everything in the epilogue.

And I'm going to wait until December 1st because I think there's going to be a lot of unfortunate developments.

But in that existing epilogue, I quoted all the the places in the world where people have threatened to use nuclear weapons.

Putin said again today:

those countries who provide weapons to Ukraine to hit targets inside Russia,

we will consider them enemies, and we will consider using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine.

Now, everybody says,

they would say, you idiot, Victor.

He just says that all the time.

Don't take take him seriously.

He says it 100 times.

If he's right one time,

then you've got a new threshold.

You've got a nuclear weapon used.

And what happens if he were to use that?

Then what happens?

Tell me what happens.

I don't know what happens.

Does Joe Biden say, you broke the protocols and we're going to have a nuclear weapon going off in Russia?

I don't know.

And for all of you out there who says, well, what are they supposed to do to win?

They have to hit things in Russia because that's that's where the supplies come.

Yes, I know that.

But it's a little different.

It's violating the Cold War rules, as I said, about proxy wars, that the two main

nations in the conflict do not use the proxies to attack one another.

Homelands.

So we're on new ground.

The reader has right to be concerned.

We keep dismissing it.

I'm writing an article right now for Monday in American Great.

It's called Ukrainiana.

And I'm going to go over all these strange disconnects about Ukraine that I can't figure out.

The difference that we treat Israel versus Ukraine, the obsession with hating the Russian people,

the recklessness by which we advocate any necessary means to win the war, the lack of a strategy.

the complete indifference to one million casualties that have been incurred on both sides,

the basically wearing out of Europe has basically had it with this conflict.

And it's now...

And then the left's,

the so-called pacifist left's just obsession with this war.

And I'm speaking as someone that wants to give the enough material to protect itself, but I do not want them to use weapons to go inside Russia.

And I know that that's asymmetrical, that Russia is going inside Ukraine.

But it's a little different because Russia has almost 7,000 nuclear weapons and we have about the same amount.

And my God, you can see where this is going unless somebody tries to tell us what the strategy is and what the costs are.

And when you see these people that are so worried about territorial integrity and they have let in 10 to 15 million illegal aliens in the United States to their complete delight and yet we're going to risk a nuclear showdown with Russia over the integrity of the Ukrainian border.

It's very bizarre.

Yeah.

Very bizarre.

Yes, it is.

Well, thank you, Victor, for that.

I'm sure your listeners thank you.

And we'd like to thank our listeners because without you, we are not here.

So

a huge thanks to the listeners as well.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

Much appreciated.

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

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