Hezbollah, Oprah and the Phoney War

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

Well, with a name-your-price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at progressive.com.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law, not available in all states.

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. This is our weekend edition where we do a little cultural discussion in the middle segment, but we have lots of news yet to go over.
Hezbollah is

declaring war against Israel and Oprah had an interview with our candidate for president, Kamal Harris. And the border is as open as it's ever been.

So stay with us and we've got those stories when we get back.

What if your drive was fueled with more?

More protection, more performance?

Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline removes up to 100% of performance robbing deposits to rejuvenate your engine's performance. Fueling every drive with a fuel like no other.

Shell V Power Nitro Plus Premium Gasoline. More performance with every drive.
Compared to lower octane fuels in gasoline direct injection engine fuel injectors.

Actual effects and benefits may vary according to vehicle type, driving conditions, and driving style. What's going on? I'm Arsh Manning, Viore athlete and college quarterback.

Whether I'm running, training, traveling, or just unwinding at home, I love doing it in my core shorts from Viori.

With a breathable boxer briefliner, they're quick to dry, super versatile, and stand up to even my most intense training sessions. Plus, they come in three inseams and a ton of colors.

Ready to try a pair? Go to Veori.com slash Arch and get 20% off at checkout. I think you're going to love them as much as I do.
That's vuri.com slash A-R-C-H and get 20% off your first order.

Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.
Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on any U.S. orders over $75 and free returns.

Have a great day.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com. It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can come join us there and read VDH Ultra material that comes out three times a week.

So three separate articles, and all for the great price of $5

a month or $50 a year. So, Victor, we've got

Hezbollah

saying that Israel has declared war on it with these pagers blowing up and walkie-talkies blowing up. And Israel this morning or on Friday, and we're recording in the afternoon on Friday has

killed 10 of the top Hezbollah this day so I was wondering your thoughts on this escalating warfare

well it's weird Hezbollah said they crossed a red line

this is the same terrorist organization that prior to 9-11 had killed more Americans than any other in the world. They blew up 241 Marines.

1983, they killed some CIA personnel. Remember that sailor? I think his name is Stepham? Very tragically, he wouldn't.

They were interrogating when they hijacked that plane in 1985, and then they just threw his body out on the tarmac.

And they're a horrific group of people. And

as we said the other day, the weird thing about it is everybody's collateral damage, collateral damage, collateral damage. But

they set up this phony company, the Israelis did, and they made these same identical pagers that they knew Hezbollah was buying from this Japanese company

or was it a Taiwanese company but in any case they they added an explosive and they had they just sold them to them and they were buying them in 2022 23 24 and it was like

a dormant

egg that hatched. So they were just waiting for the opportune moment.
The same was true with the Walkie-Talkies Walkie-Talkies, where they could insert more

gunpowder. And

what did Hezbollah, I mean, what were these people doing?

They had helped the October 7th people, but they were planning the same type of October 7th operation in Galilee. Sneak across the border en masse, kill a bunch of people, rape them, and go back.

And Israel's not going to do that anymore. And they have since over with Hamas and Hezbollah, there's about 14 or 15,000 rockets.

And they have about anywhere from 60 to 90,000 people that can't live in their homes. And they just, now that they've almost taken care of Hamas,

they're turning their full attention, not partial attention. And Hezbollah is so cowardly why Israel has been dealing with the tunnel people.

They have been shooting at their backs. And now they've done with the tunnel people.
And they're turning around and suddenly there's red lines.

This is aggression. Blinken, help us.

No, no, there's no, and then they went into Beirut, and they know exactly. I mean, this is scary if you're a Hezbollah.

They knew exactly where the terrorist leaders were, one of which was responsible for the Marine Corps

slaughter and had a $7 million

bounty on his head provided by us. I guess we're going to pay Israel for doing it.
But how can Blinken say this is an escalation when our government has a bounty on the the guy that Israel took out?

And that shows you that they know every single person. And that's only possible if there are people in Lebanon who despise Hezbollah and are giving information and working for the Mossad.

And they know that.

And then...

All you have to do is read, as we said before, the funeral notices. Now you know every single person.

With the Walkie-Talkies and the Pagers, there's probably 2,500 people that were blinded or injured, and somewhere, I don't know, anywhere from 20 to 30 that were killed. And they're all exposed.

Their covers are blown. They are terrorists.
And you might be living across the hallway from somebody in a chic apartment with an ocean view.

And suddenly you notice, you hear a bang across the hallway, and you think, that guy was a terrorist. His whole family, I want him out.

And it's going to be earth-shattering for Lebanese society to disassociate. They know who these people are,

and they're exposed, and they've disrupted their entire terrorist hierarchy of planning operations against Israel. They also took out

100 launching sites, just blew them up. And so now that they've turned their attention, what is Hezbollah going to do?

They keep threatening and threatening and threatening and threatening, and they're thinking, Iran, Iran, Iran, help us, help us, help us. Come on now, now, because we have 150,000 rockets.

We've told everybody we have 150,000 rockets, 150,000 rockets. Oh, wait a minute.
The launchers are being destroyed at the rate of 100 a day anytime they want. They've wiped out our whole command.

They've exposed the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon as a Hezbollah terrorist who's now taken out.

And Iran has already had their day with Israel in exchange and didn't come out very well.

And so Israel is in a situation where they're saying, you know what, we are tired of your cowardly terrorist attacks. Now we're here we are, you're there, we want to destroy you.

You want to destroy us? You go ahead. And

they're backing down.

And Israel will take care of them. Israel is going to have to.

The Netanyahu government can only survive the wartime coalition government unless

it can only survive

if they restore the homes to this huge number of Israeli citizens. They have to be able to live there.

And they're going to have to go in and they're going to have to go into the air attack on Shia Beirut and take out these cells and then take out these launchers.

And then they're going to have to invade on the ground for about 10 or 15 miles and then fortify a line and make a demilitarized zone.

And that's the only solution.

And then then if

the only, I think the only unknown, the known unknown, is what the world, China, Russia, Iran, the Middle East in general, is going to do in this,

I don't know, what we have. We have 10 days in September, October, November, December, January.
We have

four months.

And we have no president.

Have you heard him? Where is he? No, I've been meaning to ask you if you're bothered by that. That's just weird.
It is.

They said that in a cabinet meeting today, Jill Biden had to take over and ran it. He did the Wilson style.
So what I'm saying is that the entire complexion of this war has changed

because Israel has already retaliated to the Houthis and taken out

millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of port facilities.

They have gone into the West Bank and replied. They have pretty much destroyed Hamas.
Hamas,

and now they're turning their attention to Hezbollah.

And as I mentioned, this is, and then they had already an exchange.

That's the precedent's gone now. You don't dare touch Iran and vice versa.
But in that exchange, Israel came out and talked.

So, my point, I mean, they sent three missiles and they all hit their target, and Iran hit, sent what, 320?

And there was almost no damage. So

we're in a different world right now. And Israel is, and if Netanyahu's government is going to survive, as I said,

they've got to deal with Hezbollah. And Hezbollah

has been very loud and very loud and very loud and talked about their missiles. And now it's

gut check time. Do you really want to go to war with Israel? Because you have no air force.
And they have complete air supremacy. They have much better intelligence than you do.

And last time they did this in 2006, Mr. Nasrallah, the terrorist leader of Hezbollah, was hiding in the embassy.
And is he there now?

Because he knows at any moment that he goes out of an embassy basement, he's fair game, and they know where he is. So I don't think they're going to do much.
And if they do, they're going to lose.

But the key thing, again, is what I said, is we've got this four-month period where we've got Joe Biden in office.

Now, oddly enough and ironically, if she is elected, Kamala Harris, then they have four more years and there's not this urgency to do something.

But if she loses, and I think she will, and Donald Trump is president-designate,

then

basically all of November and December and most of January, we have three months.

And I think they're going to move.

Somebody's going to have to do something because Iran or all of them. Because if they don't, you know what's going to happen on January 20th.

The Houthis are going to be declared a terrorist organization again. They're going to be shut out from international banking, from commerce.

There's going to be no money for reconstruction to Hamas in Gaza. Hezbollah is going to be ostracized.
Iran is going to be slapped with an oil embargo, maybe a blockade.

There's going to be

a travel ban again, as there was. And they know that.

And so it's going to get worse for them. And they don't know what Trump will do.
Because if they, and you know what he will do, I know what he'll do. You know what he'll do.

If they start to send missiles into Israel, he'll say, take the gloves off, do whatever you want.

And he will supply them with a wherewithal. That's why he was so frustrated today.
He said some things that were untoward maybe to the Jewish community, but he said, you know,

I'm really angry. I don't know why I'm only polling 40%.

This man, Biden, Harris, they want to destroy Israel. What he meant was their laxity will destroy Israel.

She was bragging in the interview that she had put to the Association of Black Journalists, that she had put a, she supported the suspension of weapons.

the 2,000-pound bombs. I think there were 3,500 of them.
So we know where she is. And how can you talk?

She keeps talking as if Hezbollah is a nation state or that Hamas is an entity. It's not.
They're terrorists.

And

they know that. And they know that if she loses the election,

they only have about, as I said, three and a half months. And then it's got check time with Donald Trump.
And so

they'll have to do something. Yeah.

Do you think there are a lot of people inside of Lebanon who are against Hezbollah in the way there really wasn't in Gaza against Hamas? Do you think there are very many people

a large part of the population? The Christian community

is halved of what it used to be, that ancient community, the Phalangaite Mariana. But there is a large Sunni Arab community.

And I would imagine Hezbollah is less than half of the population.

And

people resent their

they use Beirut as a shield, just like Hamas does with hospitals. The city of Beirut, this great French colonial city that I've been there in 1974, it's beautiful.
It was,

and they've ruined it. Yeah, and everybody's sick of them.

And I hope so.

Yeah, I think what Israel is trying to say to the world is we don't

after October 7th and after you people in the United States, we looked looked to the United States and we saw this feckless administration that attacked us and all your crazy people in Congress, all the anti-Semitism on campus.

We're alone now.

And we can't count on any of you people.

And we're going to take care of business. And if you don't like it, there's not going to be a second Holocaust.
I guarantee you. That's their message now.

that they're not going to go down and they're going to fight to the very end and they're going to going to destroy Hezbollah. And Hezbollah knows that.

It's going to be very interesting to see how they get out of this, get their head out of the news.

Because

if you saw 2,500 people blow up, basically, and get injured or killed, and you knew every one of them

is a Hezbollah terrorist, and then the next day, another,

what, 500 walkie-talkies blew up and killed even more people?

And then you would think,

what else do they know? What are they going to do next? And how do we replace these people?

And do you think the population is going to say, oh, poor Hezbollah,

the Israelis blew up their rockets and they actually hit Beirut. That was the Israelis' fault, not Hezbollah's.
I don't think so. Good.
I hope that's true.

And the way you describe it, this is just an observation. It sounds like Israel has very surgical operations, as they always say.

They hit the communications, they took out the leadership, and they took out out places from which they can fire weapons. I mean, boom, with the least collateral damage possible.

So they should be commended for that, I think.

AOC said it was contrary to international law.

You want to say, hey, AOC,

what is sending 7,000 rockets at civilian centers for the last year? What is that? Is that lawful?

And what would you do if they did that?

And

so these people,

they have certain agendas and they're anti-Semites and they despise Israel and they feel that the whole DEI woke movement is in the majority or it's

an escalating movement and

they're riding that wave. And I don't think that the polls show that they're correct.

I think there's a huge backlash against this whole

DEI and there's a backlash against the universities.

And we'll see. We'll see if there's a big war if all of these people are going to start demonstrating on behalf of Hezbollah.
Yeah,

all these Middle Eastern students, the vast majority of them are Sunni Muslims with interest in Palestine.

And we'll see if they want to attack the United States and shut down bridges and deface government cemeteries and property and beat up Jews for the sake of Iranian-backed

Shia terrorists.

If they do, then we know really who they are. There's no pretense anymore.
Yeah, absolutely. They're just nihilist.

Victor, I would like to.

Yeah, that's true. I would like to take a moment for our sponsor, Field of Greens.

Field of Greens feeds your body with fruits and vegetables, medically chosen to support your heart, vital organs, and immune system.

With Field of Greens, you can feel the difference in your energy levels. No more afternoon crashes.
Thanks to Field of Greens, you can even get a better night's sleep.

Make Field of Greens your go-to for getting nutrients you need, even on those bad eating days. I'm sure you'll love Field of Greens, but if you don't, you can return it for a full refund.

I got you 15% off your first order and free rush shipment. Visit fieldofgreens.com and use the promo code Victor.
That's promo code V-I-C-T-O-R

at fieldofgreens.com. That's fieldofgreens.com, and we we would like to thank them for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen show.
So, Victor

Kamala is on her road to having a few interviews, and she recently showed up in Oprah's show and, once again, did not answer the economy question and seemed to say that she was going to want you to feel better about your life and aspirations and dreams and for your family, and absolutely no discussion of policy on that issue.

I can't even imagine people electing her. But what are your thoughts on that Oprah interview?

Well,

she has given now four interviews

in her campaign. And they all have something in common.
She will not sit down with a CBS, ABC, NBC, much less Fox, PBS anchor. for a major or 60 Minutes type interview.

Trump has had something like 75 interviews. And we know that on one occasion with Dana Bash, she had to have Waltz next to her.
And she provided, she asked a question, and then she said, and

is it A, B, C, or D? She offered an array of multiple choice answers for her.

And then we had the second one with the local anchor man in Philadelphia. who was known to be sort of a guy you go to when you want a Democratic presidential candidate to look good.

And he just asked basic questions.

What would you do?

Why haven't you done it now? And they were very easy and she went into the same bio. I'm a middle class, just

the wash, as I said,

Wash Rent spin cycle with the 250 to 300 word vocabulary, but always with the hand motions and that nasal voice, and she's very therapeutic and caring. But it was just nonsense.

So then she went into the Association of Black Journalists, and the three journalists basically asked these t-ball questions.

And she went into the third time about, I'm a middle-class person, and na-na-na-na-na, and the empathetic, and it was just repetition, repetition, repetition.

And when she left, she was angry because it was almost to say, you were supposed to give me

multiple choice answers like Dana Bash did, or you didn't really help me enough. She was angry.
She kind of looked at it, scowled, and walked off. And they looked up, like, what the hell?

You know, they looked bewildered. And then she went to another minority,

Oprah, who, by the way, doesn't have the clout that she used to.

Remember how she became a multi-billionaire and a household word was that she created a particular niche, and that was women between the ages usually married, 30 to 70, who were home watching children or working in the home and could watch TV during the working hours.

And she was a therapeutic person and she didn't really mention race very much. It was all about issues, Dr.
Phil and psychobabble stuff.

And then she, and she didn't endorse, she didn't get involved with the Clintons. But when Obama came, she decided to

be a partisan. And I can see, first black president, but now she's really doubled down.
So, two things are going on at once.

Her audience has eroded, and there's a whole generation that doesn't know who she is, and she's getting more and more partisan and angry.

So, I don't think the people who stream that, they're just a fraction of the number of the people that Trump has in any one of his daily interviews.

But the key point is that, unlike the other three interviews, there will be people,

and you saw all the movie stars she had. You know, there's Merle Streep, all these Zooms, Julia Roberts, Julie Roberts,

all of them.

And

so they're going to be,

what, replays or looping of that, and there will be people who see that. And I don't know what the attitude of Harris will be in her campaign.
Do they really want that to be replayed?

Is the idea to get her exposure, or was it really just just to say you did it, matter-of-factly, pro forma, so that you get another 10 days so you don't have to do any interviews?

And what do you do if you're a congressman or woman in a purple district and you're a down ballot, maybe

even a senator in a tough race? What if you're a tester? Do you want her to do these, more and more of them, and then you endorse that? I don't think they want her out there at all.

I think they just want to hide her and then just talk about Trump as a dictator. And they really did double down after the assassination attempt.
David Axelrod

today said Trump was trying to play the victim. And I thought,

what would your attitude have been if Barack Obama was almost killed twice?

What would you say to somebody when

Obama said, people shouldn't talk about assassination when I've been shot at twice or shot once and almost the second? And somebody on the right said, Oh, he's just a victim.

He's kind of, what would Axelrod have said? How dare you?

And he created the whole victimization, the Obamas and Axelrod did.

Who was the person who first came on the scene and said, This is a downright mean country? I've never been prat

until they nominated Barack. Every time I tried to do something, they raised the bar.
That was Michelle. She introduced the

victimizer on a national scene in 2008

until Axelrod put her on ice. Right around August, she just disappeared.
And you never saw her again.

And they put a muzzle on her because she was talking about, well, everybody's stereotyping angry black women and that's so sexist and racist. And she was proving their stereotypes correct.

So he shouldn't talk about that at all. And by the way, it wasn't just that people are saying dictator, dictator.
You saw that exchange probably with Peter Ducey and Karine Jean-Pierre when

she said, this is,

it's dangerous what you're doing when you say he's a threat. And she said, oh, that's dangerous by asking the question.

But they haven't just said that. We talked about that last time when

Dan Goldman, the congressman, said that he should be eliminated. And we had that FOOF guy who said that he should be destroyed.
And that Rick Wilson nut said that he should have a bullet.

And Joe Biden said he should be in our bullseye. So they've been using eliminationist rhetoric.

And again, when you combine a lax Secret Service, we can talk about the Secret Service because they seem to be high-fiving the latest aborted assassination attempt as if it all went to plan.

So we were, everything went to protocol, this wool guy said.

I'm thinking, okay, so the protocol is that a man can, I don't know, approach a golf course without being detected, and there's nobody on the street walking back and forth along the fence.

He can set up a sniper's nest. He's there for 12 hours.
And you depend on a secret service who has no idea where he is, but it just happens that he will see somebody there.

Because if one person had not seen them and they'd moved to the next hole, you had about a 200-yard straight shot and they would have shot him.

And for that guy to say that everything went according to protocol, he should be fired. He really should.

And he comes across with this tough guy, Macho Braggadace, you know,

I'm not going to release the names.

And you hear that the person who was in charge

of the first assassination protection,

she, She,

they're not talking about her, but apparently she was completely unqualified. Everybody knew it, and the leakers are now talking to Congressman Josh Hawley, Fox News.
Her name is coming out.

I'm not going to repeat it because I don't know if it's been verified. But

it's very disturbing. It really is.
It is. That Axel, all these people think they can get away.
And I don't know, maybe I'm being, maybe the listeners will think I'm being naive because I'm not a good

prognosticator, but I sense something that she's played almost every card in her deck. She got the I'm not Joe Biden and senile boost.

I've been anointed without a primary and everybody is exuberant. Bounce.

I am raking in money like you wouldn't believe. It's setting records.
I'm going to outspend Trump three to one.

I went into that debate and I had those moderators who pre-planned to just focus on Trump, and I won that debate.

And I think

that's it.

I think people on the left really believed that when she gave those canned answers in that debate, and the moderator kept fact-checking Trump and demanding that he answer the question, I really think they equated that with her being able to speak well.

But when you look back at that debate, all of her answers did not fit the question asked. They were just pre-planned and memorized.

You know? Yeah.

What would you do? What's your plan? Why have you not done this earlier? I'm a middle-class person. I believe in an empathy economy and aspiration.
And it was just, it had nothing to do with it.

And so I think now we've got this 40 days left. What's she going to do? Hide.

Hide, and then people are going to say, you're for democracy and this is anti-democratic. You're suppressing, you're treating the voters like idiots.
I wish they would say that, but the mass media is.

Okay, let me ask you a question.

If you were her handlers, would you put her out again for another OPA interview?

No, because you have the mainstream media behind you and they will talk all about her said agenda themselves and I would keep her in because the more you hear her, the more she has no answers for anything.

Yeah, it's funny. It's rapid.

And it depends on Donald Trump. Because you saw him on Gutfield, we talked about that.
Anytime he goes on and he's relaxed and funny, he comes across as wonderful. And anytime he either in two

arenas, whether he was in the debate and he gets angry and he gets baited and he starts to say,

or he gets into a rally and he gets worked up.

And he can reach in a gutfield

I don't know, 40 actual minutes, 5 million people. He can't reach that many in the rallies.

So I think he has to do the rallies to be out there in person, but if he can do three or four of those a day with mainstream interviewers, he's really good at it.

What he's not good about, he's really good about talking about facts. He's got a good memory issues, but he's not good about talking in retaliation to people calling him names.
He calls names back.

And then they just say, see? He's a name caller.

And we're for unity. We just called him a racist.
We just said that he he was a spoiled brad who inherited $400 million.

We said he was a crook. We said he was a pervert.
We said he was a dictator. But we're for unity.
We don't go down. We don't go low like he does.
We go high.

And that's

lie, lie, lie. That's unique.
Exactly. And he has to get out of that loop, that doom.
And he can, because he's good at what he does. That gut feel picked up one point at least in the polls.

Anybody watch that? That this,

see what I'm saying?

If the election is going to be decided by 40 or 50,000 voters in Georgia, North Carolina, or Pennsylvania, every little vote counts and he can reach much more in a venue that favors him.

And so that's what he needs to do.

And

stay on script at your rallies and then impromptu with funny things and self-deprecation and you will win. I keep going back to 1980 and I keep looking at that Gallup poll in mid-October.

It had Reagan down seven or eight points.

And remember, Carter in the debate said,'I asked Amy about that. She's scared.'

And we're all scared because Reagan's going to blow up the world, basically. And then everybody just listened to that.
And then in that debate, Reagan, there you go again.

And he just, he was calm.

And then

people thought,

I'm so tired of this incompetent.

The hostage rescue was a debacle.

Remember that horrible moolah taking a stick and poking American charred bodies? It was horrible. And then the stagflation, and then the blame, and everybody was sick of it.

But they didn't know that yet because they didn't know about Reagan.

They thought maybe he'd blow up the world. And then suddenly they just shrugged almost collectively, almost spontaneously, almost without communication.
It was almost conspiratorial.

They just, America just said, I'm done.

I'm done with Jimmy. I'm sick and tired of him, and I'm going to try this guy.
And I liked the guy, and he's, and they voted for him, and he won by seven to eight points.

But he was that many points down.

And that's the thing about Trump. He's dead even.
He could break this thing wide open. in the next 40 days because people are sick of Biden.
She can't explain.

She was was asked again today, and her husband had that really embarrassing interview where he said that she was just vice president, so she's not responsible, which means one of two things.

She agreed with Joe Biden, but she can't take credit for it, i.e., you know, it was a disaster. Or she really disagrees with Joe Biden because she was not in control.

If that's true, then everything she says is a lie because she keeps saying Bidenomics was good and everything's going great. We don't want to to go backwards, right?

We want to move forward.

Yes.

But there's a third thing that she really is just incompetent, so she's not involved in this, in what's going on in the government. So, you know, that's what

that's my idea, yeah. Well, she is.

They didn't let her do anything. They deliberately either gave her

a softball space czar or something that was over her head, the border czar.

And she blew both of them. She didn't do anything.

She was a complete non-entity. So that shows you that they don't even think she can do the job.
She can't do a vice president job to do. The Democrats know the Democrats.

Mark my words, if

Donald Trump wins,

they're going to look at polls right now. And right...

Before Joe Biden dropped out, he was one point ahead or even in polls with Donald Trump. Donald Trump Trump had caught him.
And after the debate, of course, he collapsed.

But people are going to say to themselves, because Joe's not doing anything now, and he'll probably rest. And they'll think, you know what?

We should have done one or two things. We should have just kept covering up that he was non-composmentes and let him do it.

Or we should have had an open convention and got Gavin or Josh Shapiro or Amy Kobuchar or somebody like that.

But we knew, we knew that she was the insurance policy that protected Biden, that no one wanted her.

And yet we put her in there and then we created this mythology that she was articulate, right, dynamic, and we knew it was false and we knew we couldn't pull it off all the way to the election.

My column today was written,

can Camilla Harris

run out the clock? Yeah. Cynically.
So.

Yeah, we'll see. Well, Victor, we need to get to our middle segment, so let's go ahead and take a break very quickly and then come back and talk about the phony war at the beginning of World War II.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

At Arizona State University, we're bringing world-class education from our globally acclaimed faculty to you. Earn your degree from the nation's most innovative university online.

That's a degree better. Learn more at asuonline.asu.edu.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. You can find Victor at X.
His handle is V D Hansen. And then at Facebook, Hansen's Morning Cup.
So please come join him there.

Victor, so we were on an odyssey of talking about

the significant moments in military history, but we're going backward.

And we're starting with World War II, and you are on the phony war. So take it away.

Well, we had talked about this long series on World War II and it's going to parallel what's appearing now in the Ultra section of our website.

I think I have 10 sections on World War II.

We talked in the first segment about what caused World War II and then the actual breakout of the hostilities by the September 1st, 1939 invasion of Poland and what happened.

Just to remind everybody, Poland was invaded by Germany from the north, south, and from the west.

And then 17 days later, the Soviets cleaned up with their war against the Japanese along the Mongolian border, felt they were now not facing a two-front war, and then came in late and gobbled up the eastern part of Poland.

And remember, we're talking about a large Poland now. This is not the Poland of border.

The famous city of the First World War's treaty, Brest-Litovitsk, that was in Poland at this point. Now it's in Belarus, and Robno and those other cities that are in Ukraine now, they were in Poland.

And that represents what the Soviet Union did. It carved up half of Poland, and then it lied to FDR and Churchill and never gave it back.

And so today's Poland has been cobbled together from parts of the old Poland that Germany occupied, but they had to take portions from Prussia, from Germany, and ethnically ethnically cleanse 13 million Germans and then give that to Poland in lieu of what Poland lost to Belarus and Ukraine.

So when the war was over,

it wasn't an easy war because if you look at the dead and missing, they lost over 20,000, over 250 tanks, the Germans. You're talking about the battle in Poland.
Yes,

the Poles... were outnumbered by two million to a million, two to one, and then the Russians came in.
The

lost almost nobody. They just cleaned up opportunistically.

But after it was over,

because the Allies had declared war on September 2nd, suddenly what do you do? Well, what you should have done was

there was only about, they had put 200 divisions, they had put the entire 2 million plus

million German army to invade Poland from three directions, but there was only 20 20-something divisions on the Western Front.

And

the French had an army of could be mobilized to three million very easily. And the British were able to bring over eventually 300,000 people to land it.
But they had already sent over two divisions.

So they had a force that was capable of invading and outnumbering the German army 10 to 1 in the west. And so that was the promise for Poland.

And when they said that, when they had their treaty of mutual assistance, they said they won't invade you. Because to invade you, they didn't think Russia would be so treacherous.

But to invade you, they would have to expose, because Poland's a huge country, almost as big as Germany, and it had a big population, and they were good fighters.

And

so when they were depleted on the Western Front, the Germans, France actually invaded. I think it was September

7th or something, and

they went in about seven or or 8 miles. And guess what? Along a 20-mile front, there was no Germans.
They occupied 15 or 20 villages. And there was no resistance.
They could have walked into Berlin.

After the war, all of the

before they hung Alfred Jodl, he said that. Jodel, he said that they could have gone all the way to Berlin.

It was a big bluff. We had nobody there.
They had better tanks. They had just as good planes.
And then they backed out. They thought, you know what?

Maybe Hitler will be satisfied with Poland and we can go back to the Munich mentality. So they went back and Hitler said, let's have a peace.
This is what Daryl Cooper said was a genuine offer.

All he was doing was recuperating, reformulating the Wehrmacht, making up his losses in planes and tanks.

explaining to the German people they'd lost 20,000 people, but they had ended Poland and got all this territory. And then then he was preparing for the West.
So there was a phony war from October 7th.

Well, there was really a phony war as far as the British and English were, the British and the French were from the beginning of the war, because they didn't do anything.

FDR kept saying, let's not have any civilian bombing, Britain, do not bomb cities. Of course, he didn't say anything about them killing 100,000 Poles in indiscriminate area bombing.

The Germans were doing that. But for this period during the Polish War, and then in October and November and December, there was almost no land war at all.

And the British tried one or two raids over Wilhelmsvenhaven and they lost almost half their bomber force. And so as a result

As a result, Chamberlain called off daylight bombing and they dropped some leaflets.

And there was a the Germans blew up a battleship, they blew up an aircraft carrier and they went raiding in the Atlantic against merchant ships and the British tried to have a blockade, but there was no serious fighting.

And the Americans looked at it, they were the ones that coined the war phony war. They said, look,

it's a war. What have you guys done in October and November and December and January and February and March and April, beginning of April?

And the French said, well, we're rearming. And the British said, we're rearming.
We have a strategy. It's going to be a long war of exhaustion.
So we're going to marshal our forces, play defense,

build up the army, the air force, and the navy, put a blockade around Germany. and we will kind of starve them out.
And the Americans said, well, at least the pro-British Americans said, well,

they've got the Soviet Union supplying everything they need. They don't care about a blockade.

So then the British said, well, maybe we'll cut off their iron ore.

And so finally,

they went into Norway. Churchill was first

Lord of the Admiralty. But before they could really get there, the Germans on April 9th invaded Denmark, took it in two days, and invaded Norway.

And then there were some some severe German losses of, I think, 10 destroyers and cruisers. The British then pulled out because they just stayed there.
They didn't really advance.

They just sort of occupied the northern coastal section. Germany got all the major cities and basically won the war.

And then on May 10th, the real war started when he invaded Luxembourg, Belgium, and France. And then all of a sudden, they pulled out everybody out of Norway.
And then a real war started.

But up until what I'm getting at, for seven or eight months, British planes would drop leaflets and Germans on the ground would wave at them.

And Hitler said that any German who bombed a British city would be executed because he really, he was trying to tell the British and vice versa, that let's just, now that I've gobbled up all of Europe and I'm ready to I'm not quite ready to go into

Denmark and Norway and not quite ready to take France. Let's just act as if we're friends.
They're just a pause.

And that's why they use the word phony rather than, I think Churchill and people call it a sitzkrieg instead of a blitzkrieg. It's a sit-down war.

And people on the Western Front, actually, they exchanged food and clothing on opposite lines. There was no problem.
They thought that

the war was over. Maybe it would end there.
And the French could have... It's too bad because they had all this warning from 1938

and most of 1939. And what the British and the French should have been doing is saying he's going to go into Poland.

If he goes into Poland, we have to have a one million person attack on the West and go right to the Ruhr and occupy it, and we'll shut them down.

And they had no confidence. No.
It was so strange because the people who lost World War I really wanted to have a replay, and the people won didn't. And I mentioned that, and the causes of the war.

And Chamberlain was still the Prime Minister. Yes, he was.
He was prime minister until, ironically, May 10th, the day that

the day that the Germans invaded France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. And then Churchill came in.

He had a vote of no confidence, but he had survived it because they didn't know who else to do, because the rest of the people on the left were worse. He was a conservative, Chamberlain,

but

he had support of the Conservative Party. So then there was a war cabinet, and he brought Churchill back to the Admiralty, and he was First Lord, and he was in charge of all naval policy.
But then

everybody who hated, even Stanley Baldwin was in retirement. He was the prior prime minister.
He hated Churchill, but he always said,

If we get in a war, we're going to have to bring Winston. Nobody wanted to do it because he had traded parties.

You know, he went from Conservative to Labor, Liberal, and then back again, and they blamed him for Gallipoli.

And he was considered in his mid-60s and basically over with. But they all knew that he was courageous and indomitable, and if they got into a war with Germany, they would need him.

So even his enemies said, you better bring Winston in. So then Chamberlain, who didn't have to, stepped down.
And they didn't, and he...

The Conservative Party didn't have to stage an election yet. And so the way that parliamentary system, you vote for the party, and then they pick the leaders.

So they got they removed Chamberlain and then in an act of magnanimity, Churchill brought Chamberlain into the war cabinet. And he really thought he was good on domestic

problems. And he brought Halifax in and there was a coalition government of Labor and Conservatives.
And then everything got bad.

And Chamberlain, of course, died, I think he died in November of 1940 from stomach colon cancer. He was very sick.

He was very sick. It was a tragic figure.

In the Darrell Cooper article that I replied to, he was suggesting that Chamberlain was demonized by Churchill and he was blamed on, and he was the peacenick.

He was really trying to understand a sympathetic Hitler. And Churchill was a terrorist, and a drunk, and a warmonger, and

hated that. And that's not true at all.

Churchill reached out and he said, you know what, he was maybe naive,

and he believed that Hitler might finally change his mind or attack the Soviet Union instead of us, or maybe he thought the longer he could appease Hitler, the more we'd have time to increase Spitfire production, build up the naval resources, something to that.

And then he brought him into the war cabinet. He didn't bring Stanley Baldwin or any people like that in.
He was so

here we are

after Norway and Denmark, then we're riding into May and everybody thinks Hitler won't do anything because

basically in World War I, the German army never got, you know, never took Paris and it didn't get to the coast.

And really it was confined to about 80 miles of French and Belgian territory after four years and a million deaths, a million and a half casualties.

So they thought, and the generals generals told this to Hitler,

Meinfuhr, you don't want to go into France.

Why don't we just digest what we have? And Rader and Dernitz, the two admirals, said, we'll have 1,500 U-boats in two years.

We will build a fleet comparable to maybe a third or fourth of the British fleet. The generals said, we've got to digest everything.

The Soviet Union is really cooperating. They're giving us stuff that we can't believe.

And let's not go into France and replague four years again. And nobody thought the French army would collapse in eight weeks.

And so that's what we'll talk about next time. And I'll try to reference Marc Bloch's famous book on the collapse of France.
Strange World. Strange Defeat.
Strange Defeat. Yeah.

He was executed right before the liberation, Mark Bloch. He was a great medieval historian.

And

it was really the great shock of

the 20th century that the great, it was kind of like our Afghanistan, but on steroids, you know what I mean?

You just didn't think that that French army that had withstood the Kaiser's best Prussians would just collapse. And then when you looked at in retrospect,

you saw that the combined British and French force was larger than the invasion force. It was fighting on its home territory.

A number of British and French fighters were superior, or at least comparable, to the Bf-109 and better than the Heinkel fighter two-engine.

And the Char Tank B was better than the Mark I, Mark II, and maybe even the Mark III, which they had very little of. So it's just inexplicable on paper.
But when we'll talk about it, you'll see that

when you are flying six sorties a day and the French are flying per plane one or two

and the French don't have tankers with their tanks to fill up their gas and people are taking long breaks for long and they don't really want to fight. They just don't want to fight.

And the Germans really do want to fight.

And that's the tragedy. So we're going to talk about the fall of France and the fall of Belgium and the fall of the Netherlands and along with it next and the end of Western Europe.

Next Saturday. That sounds really good.
Well, let's take a break and come back and talk a little bit more about the current events. Stay with us.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. So I know that you wanted to talk a little bit about Rich Laurie,

and he was talking about immigrants and ended up getting canceled for a,

you know how it is when you talk, you have sometimes you slip or you pronounce words incorrectly. It's just the way it goes.
It was a very strange thing. I played the case.

He was on Megan Kelly's, and he was talking.

I think he got confused because

it's almost that all conservatives now have conceded that we're not going to use the word illegal alien. We're not even going to use the word illegal immigrant.

We're going to use the word migrant, right?

Yes. But the problem

in English is when you put a prefix onto migrant m,

following the use of long and short vowels, then it's not immigrant, it's immigrant, right?

So you have a short I when you compound migrant with the

prefix or the preposition i in. It's from Latin.

So

migrants going in.

Okay, so he got confused. I think he was confused about whether he should use migrants or immigrants.
So he said migrants,

but he didn't lengthen the I.

So he said mig.

Migrant. Migrants.
Migrants.

And I played the tape in slow motion and watched him and

it's like migrants, migrants, migrants. And people said he used the N-word,

which was preposterous. So they canceled him.

And

Indiana State University, who's not known to be a radical campus, would not let Rich speak. And they canceled him.
And then the Badger Institute, this Wisconsin

conservative think tank, he was supposed to address them. I'm a member of the Bradley Foundation board and we fund the Badger Institute.

And I am shocked, and I'm going to bring it up at the board meeting, that the director, who will go on name,

told told Rich, according to news accounts, that you cannot speak to this group because of your statement. He didn't do anything wrong.
It's complete,

it's just complete hysteria. And to see conservative people just abandon him.
I've known Rich. You know how I got to know Rich Lowry?

On September 11th,

2001,

I was headed to give a lecture on George Patton at Hillsdale College. We flew up and we were approaching the first 10 minutes of flight to go into the Sierra airspace.

And the pilot said, I have a very bizarre announcement. A Piper Cub or some light plane has hit the World Trade.

And for some reason, I don't know why they're making us not only go back to Fresno Airport, but we're going to close down the airport. So you will not be able to leave the airport.

So I went back and I sat there for, I think, five hours, maybe and watched television, right? And then you saw the burning towers.

And I got this call from somebody who introduced himself as Rich Lowry. I think I'd written two book reviews maybe.
And he said, would you like to write a column? And I thought, okay.

I've written to the Wall Street Journal maybe once a year. I've written guest columns, right?

I used to actually write book reviews for the New York Times, believe it or not. And I wrote maybe 20 reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, but I was still surprised.

And then he said, we have a columnist, Anne Coulter.

And she wrote a column that we would not, I think it was something to the effect, and I want to be fair to her, I don't want to mischaracterize it, it was kind of in jest that we should bomb Mecca and Medina and then colonize or convert, convert the survival.

It was kind of, and

they said no, and then she resigned and they got in a big fight. So he called me and said, would you, I'll tell you what, if you wrote two articles this week and maybe next, we'll see how it goes.

And so I did, and it went well.

And then we became kind of good friends. And then

we were embedded together with H.R. McMaster's group.
He had a group that was during the surge, pretty hairy. Rich and I went for, I don't know how many days, over to Iraq.

And as we were leaving, a rocket came over.

A rocketeer shot a rocket right toward us and it was kind of a dud and hit. National Guardsmen jumped on Rich and me and the shrapnel went over our head.
So we've been through a lot

and

I disagreed with, of course, I left National Review after 20 years because I felt that people that I had known very well, Jay Norlinger, Kevin Williamson, Jonah Goldberg, I didn't know David French too well, and the rest of them were,

they were taking positions, I just didn't see the the logic that you can't,

when you had a choice between Hillary Clinton and this Trump, and he was espousing or embracing a conservative agenda, main issues they had fought for all of their lives, why would you abandon your lifetime issues over what you thought his personality was so crude or beyond the pale when you say, given what you saw with Bill Clinton.

So I finally had to leave four years later, but the point is I never had an argument with Rich. I disagreed with him.

I thought I really tried to suggest that the National Review should endorse the Republican nominee, and that Donald Trump was qualitatively different than Hillary Clinton, and he would make a big difference.

And I think that that is borne out by his four-year tenure.

So I've always liked Rich, and that's what I mean. It doesn't matter whether I like him or not.
He's always been a very good writer. He's witty.
He's very good on his feet. He was a commentator.

And so

I just couldn't believe it when I saw that.

I could believe the left went after him for

slurring a word. And it sounded like

it reminded me of that incident. There was a person maybe seven or years ago, he used that old English word, N-I-G-G-A-R-D-L-Y,

for being stingy.

And that's an Anglo-Saxon word that predates the N word for blacks,

that disparaging word.

But when you use it for stingy, it sounds the same, right?

Because it has two G's.

And

if you look at the root, it's related to words in Anglo-Saxon and early Germanic that mean stingy.

And

this person used it. I'll recall, I know our listeners are already saying, Victor, I know what that was about, and they canceled him for using something that had nothing to do with it.

It was just phonetically similar.

And so this was sort of like that. But what gets me about it is I thought of all people, conservative people wouldn't cancel it.

That's what I don't understand.

Rich has been canceled by conservatives. The Badger Institute.
He was giving a keynote address.

And so you know what happens if he's scheduled to give two lectures, one at Indiana State University and one at the Badger keynote, keynote, and you cancel, then everybody cancels you.

So I hope everybody who's listening

supports him to what in the station you could.

And

he should be defended. It reminds me of Scott Atlas, you know, when people said, don't write anymore about Scott Atlas

because he's persona non grata and he's getting people killed. I said, no, he's going to be, he's prescient.
And I think I wrote three columns. Every time I was told to stop, I wrote another one.

And it's very important we do that and stop this council culture, especially in conservatives. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say about it.
Yeah.

And especially when it's obviously been misplaced, council culture. Not that it ever has a place, but to the extent that it does, this obviously is not a case in which you would counsel somebody.

But well, Victor, we're at the end of our show, and I would like to thank you and your listeners, especially your listeners, for

being with us today. And please come back on Tuesday and Thursday of next week when Jack Fowler and Victor have their show together.
They're usually very upbeat and lots of news.

So, and the campaign is providing us with endless news, so we're happy about that. So come back on Tuesday and Thursday, and Victor and I will be back on Friday and Saturday.
Thank you for watching.

I'm very excited. Maybe I don't sound excited, but

I had to go to Utah and I got a bad cold. But

I think this World War II will be very interesting as we walk through it. And I'm not trying to pick on Daryl Cooper, although what he said on Tucker's show I thought was beyond the pale.

And we're trying to correct the record not with invective, but just with a narrative that's based on fact and evidence.

And

everything I said today I think can be corroborated by either German documents or testimonies by German generals in the aftermath or correspondents who were on the ground during the Polish invasion or British and American, even American diplomatic cables and things.

William Scheier wrote about it. He was very disturbed about it.

He wrote three books. He was stationed in Germany

before

we got into the war. And he knew Goering and Goebbels.

And he said everybody in Germany was shocked. And he was shocked at correspondence and everybody.
They couldn't believe it. They thought, wow, Germany really put its head in its noose.

It went whole hog into Poland, and now it's naked. And the French army, it could never defeat, is right at its back, and something's going to happen.

Wait, wait, come on, come on, come on, come on. Nothing.
Nothing.

I think John Keegan once called it chateau generalship, that the French command, Wiglund and Petan and others, were in their 70s, and they stayed in the chateau. That was true of World War I.

He used the term, but he used it as well in World War II. Yeah.

All right, Victor, that's the end of the Victor Davis-Hanson show for this weekend. Thank you very much for listening.
This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis-Hanson, and we are signing off.