Our Leadership and Looking Back to WWII

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

I'm the host, but you are here to listen to the star and the namesake, Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

We are recording on Saturday, May 4th, and this particular podcast episode will be up on Thursday.

May 9th, two days after Victor's book, The End of Everything, has come out.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

We'll talk more about that later in this episode.

I think a couple of things we want to get to today, Victor, are two artists

who have

and do have, one does anyway, the other's dead, important positions that have really helped screw up nations.

We've got an important poll out about the forthcoming elections and the gender gap.

If we have time, Victor, let's also talk about the importance of India and just what the hell is an insurrection anymore.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor Jared Bernstein, he is Joe Biden's top economic advisor.

And I'm sure you've seen it.

I'm sure many of our listeners have seen this video clip of him going around social media in which he cannot answer basic economic questions, including why does the government have to borrow money?

He's completely baffled as to monetary policy.

And you know, Victor, he's the head of the U.S.

Council of Economic Advisors.

He's not an economist.

That council role that was held in the Trump administration by our great friend and great economist, Kevin Hassett.

But here in the Biden administration, we have a jazz musician and a social worker overseeing economics.

Are you surprised by that, Victor?

And any other thoughts you might have?

No, not at all.

He's been on television from the, he was Joe Biden's,

as I recall, his

advisor, economic advisor when he was vice president under Obama.

And he's been on there telling us lies from the moment Biden was inaugurated.

He told us that he was one of the ones along with Janet Yellen who said that

inflation was only temporary, that the economy was in great shape.

And he's not an economist.

He's a, as I recall, he's a jazz player.

He's a musician.

He was,

I mean, he was just, that's who he was.

His degree is in music.

And then

he got into social activism and he joined some left-wing group and he started writing things about social justice and economy, but he's not an economist.

He's there because he's a left-wing person.

And Paul Krugman always praised him.

That should tell you something.

So he doesn't know anything.

And

the other question about it is, it's so ironic because they all said that Donald Trump is bringing in incompetence.

And when you look at all these appointments, you compare Kevin Hassert, Columbia tenured professor, brilliant economist, and you compare him

to

Bernstein, it's just a joke.

And when you compare, I wasn't a big fan of Kelly, but when you compare him at Homeland Security to Mallorkas, it's a joke.

And you compare, I mean, I disagreed with Bill Barr, but when you compare him with Merrick Garland as far as intelligence and competence, it's a joke.

And

go down the line, you know, Jim Mattis, if you compare him,

He was no friend of Trump's, but you compare Mattis to Lloyd Austin and you compare their records, say, in Iraq, it's a joke.

And so it's a joke.

And so what people need to understand is all of these appointments are political.

They're based on all sorts of non-meritratic criteria and they're incompetent.

When you look at Anthony Blinken and you compare him with Mike Pompeo, it's a damn joke.

Excuse me, darn joke.

When you compare

Jake Sullivan with H.R.

McMaster, it's a joke.

So, or Robert O'Brien, and every one one of these major appointments that Trump made were so far, and yet we're told by the media and the left that these are the professional, these are the experts in charge.

And if you want to know why we fled from Afghanistan or why there's a Chinese balloon traversing the United States or why there's 10 million people coming through, or why we have prices of key staple goods 30 to 40 percent higher than when and gas, you look at these people, and there's either one of two explanations.

They're either totally incompetent, and they're not mutually exclusive, Jack.

They're totally

incompetent, or they're radical Jacobin left-wingers that like chaos.

And either one, the result has been a disaster.

And he's a good example.

He gets on TV, you watch him, and when you look at that video,

he just keeps repeating, you know, yeah, you print money, you print money, yeah, the government can print money.

As if money, I guess he's trying to advocate critical monetary theory

that he doesn't understand basic principles that the more money that you print, the less value that it has, and that the more debt that the government has to assume to honor those

commitments.

And he doesn't understand that.

And I mean,

anybody where I work, I mean,

if you look at the people of Hoover economists, Josh Rau, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, John Taylor, John Cocker, any one of them would, ⁇ I mean,

you're around those guys and just listening to them, you can learn economic.

This guy doesn't know anything.

He's surrounded by mediocrities, and he's another one of Joe Biden's cronies.

We hate to talk about ⁇ well, we don't hate to, but it is a prestigious position and prestigious in its importance, the head of

the Council.

of economic advisors, Victor, because we maybe don't like the complexity of our financial systems in the world, but the fact is they are complex.

The fact is, America is at the driver's seat.

I don't know about how much longer we are, but we are and the dollar is.

And to have someone who's doesn't even have a driver's license driving this car is

shocking.

I would say I have a a bachelor's degree in classical languages and a PhD.

And I would argue that that's a better training to be the chief of the president's economic advisors.

And I would be totally inept and incompetent.

But it's better than having a degree in jazz music, right?

Correct.

And that's what he did.

And then he taught, you know, jazz music.

And then he became a political activist in New York.

And out of that, he's kind of like Robert Reich, right?

Only Robert Reich actually had credentials.

And he's done untold damage.

And he lies all the time about how great everything is.

And then he wonders why, when you take polls, 30% of the people approve of the Biden economy.

And the answer is that it's no good for most people.

And he doesn't understand that.

And so now the job, we're running out.

I guess what I'm saying is people are losing confidence with this $1 trillion printed every hundred days.

And the jobs report was dismal.

And it's up in some states, near 5% unemployment, California.

And you know where that is, New York, Illinois, California.

And the inflation is coming back.

And we're going to get stagflation.

And it's going to be bad.

My only worry is that it's all going to collapse after the election.

And the next president, if he's Trump, is going to be blamed for it.

Right.

Let's clean up the

naples.

Yeah, Biden inherited a border that was secure.

He inherited growth.

He inherited the recovery from COVID.

He inherited a deterrent foreign policy, he inherited a

massive recommitment to drill oil and gas, and he destroyed it.

He did it intensely.

Yeah,

because some people are born to be destructive and thrilled to it.

And

he has done that everywhere he's gone.

Early in his career, he was quite happy with

Vietnam's collapse.

He was a senator prior to the fall of Said.

You remember he wanted to trisect Iraq.

That was his idea to make perennial warring Kurds versus Shia versus Sunni.

Sunnis basically formalize the Iran control of Iraq.

Everything he touches turns to dross.

And everybody knows that.

And

it's so funny because

Everything that he accuses Trump of is projection.

He said that you always blame the president if there's social unrest.

That's what he said when the left deliberately started that rioting in 2020.

And as Molly Ball wrote, it was modulated as a, quote, cabal, end, quote, conspiracy to hurt Trump.

Okay, well, that's what he's overseeing now, that all of this unrest, according to his own logic, he's responsible for it.

And he's a lot more responsible for it because it's in his own party and it's his own ideology than the antithetical riots were to Trump, and yet Trump was blamed for it.

And then he says that Trump, you know, Trump is corrupt.

And so after collusion and disinformation and all of that, there was no sign that he was corrupt.

But the Biden family is corrupt.

And then he said, Trump made, you know, incompetent.

We're going to bring back the professionals.

I just mentioned all of the professionals that Trump appointed as compared to these hacks that Biden has appointed.

So

he just projects his own failures

onto other people, and he's been a disaster.

He's not a nice person.

I know people are going to say that's a little bit animated of me to say that, but we've talked about that before.

That he has a history of racist smears and slanders, that he's been mean to people, that he intrudes on women's private space, he blows in their hair,

he's got a fixation with teenage and pre-teenage girls.

He's got a very sick family, whether we talk about Ashley Biden's diary and the showers or him walking nude in front of

Secret Service female agents or the Hunter laptop self-exposure or the Frank Biden,

I don't know, turns up on a gay porn site naked.

All of this family is severely

on balance.

It really is.

Yeah.

He must have been happy yesterday, Victor, that he was given out the Presidential Medal of Freedom

and he got to go behind

women's backs and put the put their medal on and maybe get a get a little sniff or a neck bite.

Didn't he call it the freedom of metal?

I think he said, I'm going to give the freedom of metal out.

He did.

Yeah, he did.

And then he had all these left-wing people there.

I guess there was 19 of them, you know.

And

Al Gore.

Right.

And that was all based on.

Didn't Nancy Pelosi get one?

Nancy Pelosi did.

But Elizabeth Dole got one.

So I think they wanted to say that it wasn't

a completely stacked deck.

Hey, Victor, we have another artist

who played a great and evil role in history.

And I think it would be important to get your take on this.

And how about we get to that right after

these important messages?

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show recording on May 4th.

And this episode is up on May 9th.

If you've yet to order Victor's new book, The End of Everything,

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So, Victor, the news,

I saw an article

in the Daily Mail last week about Anthony Blunt.

And I'm sure many of our listeners know that name.

He is one of the infamous British spies from Cambridge

who were

spies for the Soviet Union.

He, of course, he was a premier art historian.

So this is the link with Jerry Bernstein, he's artist.

But I think he had much more horrible consequence to what Anthony Blunt did.

It was

he excuse me, he admitted privately, I think Margaret Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister, you know, confirmed that he was a spy.

But it's come out lately in a book that not only did he spy for the Soviet Union, well, actually, in spying for the Soviet Union, in being an aide for the Soviet Union,

it's believed he provided the Nazis in 1944

with the details about

Market Garden, which was

the,

I think you can explain what Market Garden was, Victor, but I think history has said this was a flop

of General Montgomery.

And

I don't think, Victor,

I don't think it's news that there was some spying or some revealing of

the strategies that somebody gave them to the Nazis.

Maybe the news is that it's decided that it was Blunt who was the person who did it.

But Victor, you've written about the Second World War.

You've written about Operation Market Garden.

What are your thoughts about this?

Well,

everybody, I guess some people might not know it.

If we go back to September 1944, remember what had happened.

The Americans had broken out

in

late July on the beachhead and the British, and there was a big argument about whether they had enough resources for a single thrust or a simultaneous thrust.

The problem was for the British that 75% now, they had a million men in Normandy, were American.

So Eisenhower was supreme commander and his two corps, his two lieutenants, Bradley and Montgomery, were fighting over this.

Montgomery said, we are on the north and we have a straight 500-mile shot into the Ruhr and we should be given all of the

resources.

The Americans said,

You're a very good general, Montgomery, but you believe in the set piece.

That is, you go up five miles and then you entrench like you did at El Alamein, and it works sometime, but not now.

And you can't even take Caen.

There was a big Anglo-American fight.

And then the Third Army was activated.

It was supposed to go into the Brittany Peninsula, that is, the wrong way, and

secure Brest, and it didn't.

It took off.

So after Operation Cobra, where they used bombers to blast through a Panzer division, Bradley let Hodges and Batten go, and they were going, going, going.

So by

three weeks later, they took Paris.

He had some brilliant French divisions, Leclerc, and Patton was on his way the entire month of July.

Third Army.

He had almost a million men and he was nearing the German border and he needed gas.

He said to Eisenhower, I know that I'm going into Bavaria and Czech.

And I'm not going straight line, but I haven't, there's nobody ahead of me.

We destroyed the Panzer Panzer Group, Army Group West, and they haven't recovered yet.

And if you let me go, I will go in, take Prague, but also go into Bavaria, and I will be in the east of Berlin, and this will be valuable.

And Eisenhower, being Ike, who's a very good diplomat, he said, well,

Manny and the British think, you know,

so they cut, they decided that it was Manny's turn to run a, Monty wanted to be as audacious and as daring as Patton, and he wasn't suited for it.

So Eisenhower

basically cut off all the supplies to Hodges and Patton, two big American armies under the control of Bradley.

All three of them got very furious at Ike, and they said to Monty, okay, we're going to give you

you're going to have the largest airdrop in history.

And Monty concocted a completely cockamini plan.

First of all, the biggest port in Europe was Antwerp.

And they had Antwerp, but they didn't have the estuary to get into it.

Both sides were covered by Germans with huge artillery, so no ships could come in.

So they said to Monty,

We won't have a supply problem because we can supply Patton with the Normandy ports and Marseille and everything, and you can have Antwerp.

They had the supplies.

It was just a matter of of getting it there.

But he didn't want to take, he didn't want to do the on glamorous drudgery of securing the estuary.

So here we are, giving all of these supplies directing from the Americans to Monty.

And he came up with this idea called market-garden.

And market was he was going to take 40,000 paratroopers and he was going to drop them in sequence along the bridges of the Rhine tributaries,

you you know, at Eindoven, Son,

Nijeman, and then Arnheim, the big one, the last one.

And then Garden was going to have a British armor group go along this highway.

And as they went to each bridge, the 101st under the brilliant Maxwell Taylor was going to capture this.

And then James Gavin, who might have been one of the best commanders in the entire war, was his

division was going to take Eindoven and then they were going to Leipzigfog and in three days they were going to be over the Rhine River at Arnheim, the final bridge and then they were going to be right in the ruhr and the idea was the Germans were going to be shocked and then they were going to pour people.

Now

sounded great except Let's just go through very quickly.

I think this is interesting.

I think people might want to hear it because

it gets back to this spy.

So the was you had to get every one of those bridges in succession because if you didn't get one, you would hold up the entire armored

guard and thrust.

The first problem was that the road, and I've been to Arnheim three times, I've given lectures there on the campaign.

In fact,

I got almost kicked out of a Dutch museum.

I think it was in Eindoven.

or it was in Nijman because the people thought I was too critical.

But the problem was that the roadjack, when you look at it, it's still, it's in an estuary.

So there's trees.

I mean, there's water there.

It's kind of like Florida, but the road is built up.

It's the only place you can go across these bridges if you take that route.

So basically,

you had light German artillery.

in all of these trees on both sides of the road.

And then the road is elevated and it's single lane.

So these, when they got the bridges and they were, it was hard to get them because you had to parachute into these kind of estuary conditions and you had to, you know, there was bad weather and you had to take them and there was delays.

And the Germans, of course, blew up some of them.

You had to build bridges.

But they were easy to pick off.

And all you had to do was blow up three British German tanks.

And you could bottleneck the whole thing.

The whole thing was supposed to have three days.

So you take all of these Americans and British, and by the way, the most experienced

airborne at this time were the 101st and 82nd.

And the first airborne had not been at D-Day, the British airborne, 1st Division, and they had the

prestige and the most dangerous task of taking Arnheim, the last one.

Okay.

And so what happened?

They put Ryan Horrocks was a great commander.

He'd been severely wounded, and he was in charge.

Everybody loved him.

He was in charge of the armored divisions that were going across the bridge.

He was very slow.

So he got to these bridges, and he stopped for a day to recover.

And they kept telling them, people have died to take these bridges.

You don't stop for one moment.

You've got to get across before the Germans are onto you.

So make a long story short, it took over a week to get to Arnheim.

And the poor first British airborne was still holding this bridge with no heavy artillery, no tanks.

And guess what?

They were dropped not near Arnheim, over a mile, two miles.

They were way distant, and they had to march all the way to Arnheim with no heavy reinforcement.

The Polish, 1st Polish Division was supposed to

reinforce them.

The weather delayed them, I think, three days.

And the point is, And this was

where we're getting to Anthony Blunt,

they dropped this, they dropped the British right near Walter Mogul's Panzer Corps, and there were the 9th and 10th Panzer Divisions, and these people had tiger and panther tanks.

And they were, apparently, we know now, we'd known earlier, there was a guy named King Kong, as I remember, and he was a Dutch agent for the Soviets.

He had said he was working,

they arrested him, and he killed himself in jail, but he had said he was working for the Soviets by supplying the plans of market garden from the Dutch resistance because when Moni was planning this thing until they caught on, they were working with the Dutch resistance.

And I think three months before they found out it was too late, that somebody was passing on this information.

Why?

Because what you said, they wanted the Soviets to get to Berlin and get as far west as possible so communism would absorb Europe and the Americans and the British would be stalled, and that was why they helped the Nazis stall them.

Okay,

so apparently, and it's not proven, but it's pretty likely,

Landesman, the Dutch person, gave information to the Germans and they positioned

roughly two divisions.

If they had been full force, they weren't.

But about 20,000 Germans with heavy armor, and they were crack.

I think think one of them was an SS division.

They were crack soldiers, and they were waiting for the paratroopers.

They were waiting for Horrocks to come along the highway.

And now we learn that Anthony Blunt, or to the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess,

Don McClain, and the worst of all, Kim Philby, and there was another one.

They were intellectuals in Cambridge University, and they were very anti-British, even though, and they they were the aristocrats.

Anthony Blunt was,

as I remember, I want to be very careful.

He was a cousin to Queen Elizabeth's mother.

He was a second or third cousin to Queen Elizabeth, and he was the official royal art historian.

He wrote about French architecture.

He'd got a book that it's pretty well known.

And he was a prig.

He was an arrogant.

And he was also part of this Cambridge homosexual group with Guy Burgess and others.

I think one of them was the Rothschild, Victor Rothschild.

Was there Rothschild?

There was some American in there also.

Yeah, there was.

I forgot the guy's name.

And there was a young

writer, and he got killed in the Spanish Civil War.

But all of them were very anti-British.

They hated their own system.

They were aristocrats.

They thought they were untouchable as...

arrogant intellectuals at Cambridge.

They had ties to royalty and they were feeding the Soviets Soviets British war plans, mostly from Ultra.

And they were actually trying to give the Ultra intercepts of Nazi communications straight to the Soviets.

And the idea was they hoped that the Soviets would crush Germany and then go into Western Europe and crush the Americans and British and take it over.

Okay.

So the result of all that was when they dropped these airborne and all these Americans died to get these bridges, the British were very brave.

Jack Frost, all these guys fought for seven days, but they were against panzer divisions.

And that was because of these Cambridge intellectuals.

There was another subtext to this.

When the Americans broke out of the beachhead in Normandy, under Bradley and Patton and Hodges,

around the end of July, Operation Cobra, they quickly encircled the entire army group west of about 400,000 Germans.

Hitler would not let them retreat, and they were making a huge loop at Falaise, town of Falaise.

And

Patton made a big sweep, and then they said to Montgomery and Bradley,

you've got to come from the north and close this loop.

And Manny was not a thruster, what the British called called a thruster.

He wouldn't do it.

He was too slow.

And Bradley said, I don't want to break our neck because if we stop this bottle, we put a plug in the bottle, they'll blow it apart, which is

just silly.

Fantasy.

And so the result of it was they trapped the...

By this time, the Germans were getting out and out, and Patton was, he had done what he was supposed to do.

He was waiting.

His troops had

sealed half of the escape route.

And then from the north, and of course, you don't want two allied armies colliding with each other.

And they waited, and they waited.

And then they unleashed air power.

And typically, Bradley and Montgomery said, well, we're killing thousands of Germans.

And we're blowing up all their equipment, thousands of vehicles.

They killed 10,000 Germans.

It was a slaughterhouse.

And Patton kept saying, it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter how many you kill.

It's how many get away.

We can end the war right now.

There's nobody out there.

We just cut.

And they let it go.

And one of the results was the 9th and 10th Panzer Divisions escaped.

And where did they go to recoup?

They went right up to occupied Holland and the German border, and they were refitted.

And unfortunately for the Allies, they were then put under the control of the most fanatic, crazy, but brilliant Walter Modall.

He was a genuine Nazi general.

And

he was accused, he killed himself.

He was the person who

really

had stymied the American, would stymie the Americans

in their advance into

Germany.

And he finally killed himself.

But the point I'm making is that

that didn't happen to happen.

There wouldn't have been any panzer divisions if they had allowed the Americans to close the gap.

That was Bradley's fault, and it was also Montgomery's for not helping to close it.

So then those people went up there, and then they got intelligence that there was something big cooking, and the Dutch resistance traitor had confirmed that.

And he said there was another spy that he was working with to transmit the information called Josephine.

Nobody knew who it was.

And now we learn that Josephine was probably Anthony Blunt.

And he was taking the information from this Dutch spy and transmitting it to the Germans, to the Germans, and

probably to the Germans, because

the Betsley Park Ultra people and M15, all those people had turned German spies, and they were feeding them false stuff.

But apparently

he and others that were handling spies, and they made him a major, were able to transmit to the Germans that this particular feed that was coming from

German spies was actually accurate.

In other words, they were able to convince the German intelligence that,

you know, this is not coming from a turned spy that's been flipped.

This is genuine.

And the Germans, I think, after trial and error, believed it, and therefore they positioned

according to this theory, which is not really a theory because it happened, but we didn't know the role of Blount.

So they positioned these armored divisions and then they dropped the first British airborne right on, basically right on top of them.

And

so what the result of all it was, they took every bridge but Arnheim.

But the problem was it didn't matter because all of these were tributaries, but the main Rhine

flow was never taken.

So all they did was make a, I guess you'd call it a salient or a bulge all the way to the German border, very thin along the highway.

And then

the Germans were still occupying most of Holland.

Of course, they took it out in the population.

They cut off all food.

They starved 17,000 people.

20,000 Americans and British were killed or wounded.

It was a complete disaster.

And then Moni said, it's 90% successful because we had seven bridges.

We took all but one.

Now we've got Americans looking right across the Rhine.

And people said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The Americans did.

To do this, you cut off all the supplies of a huge American army that was nearing the German border with no opposition in front of it.

And it could have crossed the Rhine.

And unlike you, it would have done something.

And he said, and

that's where they stayed until almost the end of the war.

They never really got across the Rhine until the very end of the war.

And the irony was, Jack, that they sent a Polish division to relieve the British paratroopers and they were just slaughtered.

They were waiting for them.

They knew where they were.

Apparently, they knew where they were coming.

There were bad weather.

It was a disaster.

And more importantly,

I think

it caused a lot of

repercussions against the Dutch by the Germans.

And

the irony, as I said, was they were able, when they got to Arnheim, Horox was only about six or seven miles, I remember, outside, and they stopped.

And they said, why are you stopping?

He said, because we're thinning out as we go.

We don't have enough.

And we find now there's panzer divisions waiting for us.

Well, they had air support.

So you don't.

And they stopped and they let the paratroopers be captured.

Some of them got across and were able to get back, but most of them were captured or killed.

And there were ferries.

The funny thing was they could have taken a ferry and gotten across.

There were ferry services, and they didn't even know it.

And so the whole thing was compromised, just to review.

The British and Bradley let the German, two

huge German divisions escape from the fillet's pocket.

Number two,

they should have never given

preeminence and favors to Monty.

That's not the type of general.

He was very good on the defensive in the set piece.

He was not an offensive commander, and he was angry because the Americans were getting all of the attention under Patton.

They should have had him take the harbor at Antwerp.

He had the city, he had the harbor facilities.

All he had to do was take the estuary, and they would have had supplies for everybody.

They didn't do that for weeks after that.

Number three, they should have never

relied on a thin little highway to transmit 40 or 50,000 armored troops.

It was never going to work.

And number five, four, you couldn't expect all these bridges in succession to be taken.

Number five,

they had an idea that somebody in British intelligence was

counterfeit.

And in fact,

the final asterisk is that story, in the 1960s, they outed

Blunt, and because he was a member of the royal family by extension and the official art historian, they kept it silent as to what you said until Margaret Thatcher ratted him out.

But he was always thought to have been basically a spy for the Soviet Union.

That is, that he and Kim Philby and Guy Burgess and McClellan, Donald McClellan, they were all giving key information to the Soviets on technology, British war plans, allied strategies.

But nobody had really thought that like this Dutch spy, they were actually giving also information to the Nazis.

And that was

there was something, when you read about the Cambridge Five,

it reminds me kind of like this campus protest that you see today.

Because these were spoiled rats that were aristocratic, moneyed people.

A lot of them were gay and felt that they were aesthetes and were, it was kind of almost like Greek pederasty.

They thought they were Socratic,

that this was the cult of the male intellectual, and they were not the grubby common people of Britain, the yeomen of Britain.

Very arrogant.

They were very unapologetic.

Philby fled to the Soviet Union.

And

Blunt was never, during his lifetime, he was never punished.

They stripped, finally, when Margaret Thatcher exposed it, they stripped him of some honors, but he never went to jail.

And it was just, he got a lot of people killed.

He got a lot of people killed.

It's okay if you're a member of of the elite and do that, or a member of Davos and do that.

But if you're a truck driver and you walk by the Capitol on January 6th, somehow you're involved in the city.

Think of all the Americans who died at Eindoven.

Yeah.

Eindoven and Nijmen trying to

take the bridges all for nothing.

And think of all the Americans in the Third Army that were sitting outside of Metz and they couldn't move because they had no gasoline.

They were just sitting there after going for an entire month and blasting through

40 miles a day toward the German border, and then they just sit there.

Then after the war, the worst thing about it was Chester Wilmot and all these British historians said, well, Monty was right.

It was 90%

effective.

That's like saying you've got a brain tumor and you took out 90% of it and the last 10% was malignant, but you didn't get it.

So it's, oh.

That brain operation was 90% successful.

Of course, it killed the patient because we didn't get the malignancy out.

Well, that was the problem.

It didn't matter how many bridges you took.

The only one that mattered was Arnheim, because that was the one that got you into Germany.

And they didn't get into Germany.

Then they were exposed on this highway in the Sally and they had to pull back.

And it was a disaster, and they didn't take the harbor for weeks on end.

And yet, the British historians kept, you know, praising Monty.

And Monty had not closed the gap at Falaise.

He had not taken the harbor at Antwerp, the entire harbor, and he had wasted untold supplies.

And he had some incompetent Browning under him, was a joke.

And he got 20,000 people killed or wounded.

And it prolonged the war.

It really did, because it cut off the American advance.

And the result of this was the Battle of the Bulge.

Victor, historians, as you know, because you are one,

there's so much ideology layered into things now.

So

to see British historians looking back at Montgomery today,

and

I don't follow this, but I would imagine there'd be a lot of ideology, leftist ideology

cooked into that.

But is there in modern British military history, does anyone take the Victor Davis-Hanson view of Montgomery?

Some of them do.

I mean, I think Andrew Roberts was very fair in the storm of war,

to take one example.

Chester Walmot wrote right after the war, and he hated Patton.

And the thing about what's happened is you're absolutely right about the ideology of historiography.

Part of the problem was

that

when you wanted to look at the American role in World War II in Europe after D-Day, there were two problems.

George Patton died in his early 60s right after after the war, and that tragic, the day before he was going to go back to America.

Okay, he got killed in a trap.

So he's gone.

Omar Bradley lived, he was, you know, he was on the stage in a wheelchair in the celebration of the First Gulf War in his late 80s.

He wrote, you know,

he wrote his memoirs right after the war.

And then he revised them in reaction,

a ghostwriter revised them in reaction to the publication of

Hatton's diary, War as I Knew It, that his family published after the war.

It was very critical of Bradley.

So then he just attacked Hatton.

And then Eisenhower became president, and he lived into his mid-70s.

So the point I'm making is if you were a U.S.

Army historian and you went to the archives and you were writing, you had all of the people under Bradley in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s still alive.

And you had all the people under Ike, and they were iconic figures.

So nobody could really, if you were going to write a book and say that Omar Bradley should have closed the Lay's Gap, Omar Bradley was not the figure in the Patton movie that helped Patton.

He hated Patton.

He hated him.

He tried to sabotage his career all the way.

Eisenhower was a brilliant

I don't want to say bureaucrat because he wasn't.

He was a really good man and he was able to balance British and American interests.

But in doing that, he failed to see that 75% of the effort by July in terms of money,

supplies, weapons, and soldiers were American.

And he had under his command via Bradley an authentic military genius in George Patton.

And George Patton was obnoxious.

He was crude.

He was volatile.

He may have been crazy.

He believed in reincarnation.

But he was a genius.

And if they had just said to themselves,

Courtney Hodges is a good general in First Army, but

this man that we don't like will win the war.

And even though we put him way to the south, and he has the longest course into Germany, he is a genius, and he's got air support, and he's crafted a way to fight that no one can see.

And Monty is just a set piece,

go five miles, think, oh, I don't want to have a Verdun or Somme again and destroy British manhood, and I'm going to entrench, and then I'm going to go another five miles and stop and entrench.

And I'm going to go another five miles and strength, or I think the Germans are going to counterattack, so I'm going to spend a week and dig in and wait for them and bounce them off.

And he did that very well.

But if you're in Europe at this period in summer 1944, and you've got this genius who says,

They say to Patton, How about your flanks?

You're just going so fast.

He says, I've got air support, P-37s, P-51s.

I don't need Pete Queseta's a brilliant air commander, and they're covering my flanks, and I'm just bypassing resistance, and I'm going to get across.

And

it just didn't work.

And he had slapped two soldiers in Sicily.

He was on probation.

And so what I'm getting at, once Bradley died and once Eisenhower died, Eisenhower died much earlier, then all of a sudden

things started to happen.

And Carlo d'Este wrote, you know, a biography of Patton that was very fair.

And he wrote a book about Normandy that was brilliant.

And we started to see publications that took a completely different look at Normandy and a completely different look at Bradley.

And,

you know,

it was.

And

I don't know.

It's very sad.

And I'm not going to compare Trump to Patton.

But there was something Trumpian about about Patton or something Patton-esque about Trump in the sense that they were both their worst enemies in the sense they talked too much, they were crude, they were wild, they were erratic, but they had elements of genius.

So when you look at Trump, what he did

with the economy and foreign policy and Sulaimani and Iran and bombing ISIS and getting rid of it.

and deregulation and his judicial appointments.

It was very inspired and the country was on the right track, and yet they hated him.

And that was partly because of who he was.

And if you just take Trump's

orange tan and his comb over hair and his heavyweight, and you transfer that to Patton with his

pearl weight.

Pearl handle,

yes.

And then you have the shiny helmet that he shined and his

pants tucked into his boots and out there with a swagger stick directing traffic or up in a little Cessna plane by himself.

That's the same idea that people caricatured that.

Right.

Which you've written about is also from the movie's perspective, right?

John Wayne and the searchers and

Shane and Shane.

Yeah, tragic character.

Patton was an authentic,

I think in the book Solo Battle, I have an American Ajax, and that was who he was.

And

he was very fortunate that he he had a wonderful wife, Beatrice Ayers.

She was an heir to one of the big pharmaceutical fortunes.

And every time he got in trouble, even though she was very conservative and right-wing, they had access to the Roosevelt administration.

And there's a big myth that that movie

Patton, which was a good movie, George C.

Scott was brilliant, but it promulgated a lot of lies.

And one of them was that Bradley saved Patton.

Bradley tried to send Patton home.

Eisenhower wavered.

Ike knew he was a genius.

Both of them had been subordinate in the peacetime army.

Patton outranked both of them.

But the person who really saved him was actually George Marshall and FDR.

And FDR would say to Marshall, where's Patton?

He loved Patton.

And Marshall finally said to Ike,

It's your decision, Ike, what to do, but I want to tell you that you've got a genius.

Basically, I'm not verbatim, you've got a genius on your command, and be fair to him, but it's your decision.

And that in itself allowed Eisenhower to tell Bradley, we're going to keep him.

And then Bradley, of course, acted as if he saved Patton, but

he was conniving.

Bradley was a very nice person.

He was a capable general.

There were a lot of good character traits.

He was much more sober and judicious than Patton, but

he didn't have the talent of George Patton.

George Patton could look at a battlefield and know exactly what was going on, exactly what had to be done, exactly how to do it.

His only problem was the way that he termed it, you know, when he wanted to close the fillets gap.

And he kept saying,

well,

the British have to close it.

The British have to close it.

And everybody said, well, Monty doesn't want to close it because you might bump into him.

He said, hell, we'll bump into him and send him back to Dunkirk.

Can you imagine how that hurt, That sounded to the British.

So

he was like Trump in that sense.

Anyway, well, it's all

really fascinating, Victor.

And thanks for the important history lesson.

I think we have time for one more topic, and that would be about

politics in November and the gender gap.

And let's get to that, your thoughts on that, Victor, right after this final important message.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So John McLaughlin, not the dead ex-Jesuit

host of the McLaughlin group, but John McLaughlin, the pollster, who, by the way, Victor, I don't think you know that he grew up around the corner from me.

He's not a relation, is he, to the famous John McLaughlin?

He's not, no.

But John, the pollster, and his brother Jim, they grew up on

233rd Street and I grew up on 235th.

And there was no 234th at the time in the Bronx.

But he's a great guy, and he's a great pollster.

And he just conducted a poll and he wrote about it in the New York Post, and it had to do with the uh what he calls Biden's shrinking gender gap let me just read this quickly um john writes now according to the recent april national poll of 1,000 likely voters from McLaughlin and associates among all voters Trump leads Biden 49 to 45 percent.

Some more recent polls give President Trump an even bigger lead.

What the liberal media spinners fail to mention is that among all men, Trump leads 54 to 41, up a net six points from 2020.

But among women, Trump has cut Biden's 15-point 2020 lead to a mere four points.

Biden barely wins this among women, 48 to 44.

Sure, there's a gap, but not one that will make a difference.

The gender gap is more a Biden deficit among men rather than a Trump deficit.

among women.

Final line here, Trump's message to keep America safe is attracting what John calls safety moms who vote on the issues of immigration and crime.

Victor, your thoughts on this?

Well, to address why Biden is losing among women, just put yourself, if you're a suburban woman with

children of any age or husband, and you're looking at three or four things that Biden is in charge of.

Say your son or daughter is looking about going into the military, military and then you look at what happened in Afghanistan 13 Marines killed when they were had rules of engagement that were too restrictive abandonment ridicule and then

you look at the military in general with DEI and woke etc

would you really want your your children, would you feel they're safe in that military?

And then you look at your neighborhood and you start to see that carjacking and smashing and grabbing and the knockout game and all of that stuff is infiltrating your suburbs and more importantly people are not being charged with felonies

arrested no bail

and they're let out

so that that's a second thing and then you so if you have children and you're driving them in your SUV to work

or to school, you may be carjacked or

that's how you're thinking.

I'm not saying the statistics suggest that you will be, but it's a possibility.

Or you have a child that you spent, you've taken out a lot of loans,

you've told your kid to study, study, study.

They've done that.

And you were able to get them into Harvard or Princeton or Columbia or Stanford.

And you've taken out huge loans.

And it's going to cost you $350,000.

And your kid calls up and you say, are you studying all the time?

And he said,

well, they canceled graduation and we're all on Zoom classes and we haven't met and everybody's and they're thinking about giving everybody a pass.

And what do you think about that?

When the university doesn't protect your interests and then you say, are you in danger?

And they said, yeah, they're hitting Jewish students and you can't go into this camp.

And so All of that messaging, whether it affects somebody directly or not, starts to absorb.

And then it wars with, I'm a suburban woman, and Donald Trump is going to kill women without

by banning all abortion, that lie, rather than just turning over the states.

And it's amazing, given the propaganda about what Trump's views are on abortion, because that's the central issue for a lot of young women and not so much married women, but

the concerns about safety, whether it's on the campus or whether it's in your neighborhood or whether it's abroad, have now whittled down that.

And so, why is that important?

Because Donald Trump has won the male vote.

If you look at those polls and you predicate them on particular minorities, Latino, the reason that Latinos are 50-50 or 48-52 is because it's about 70%

male Latinos.

And the reason that blacks in general are 22%

in the polls for Trump is that's about 40%

males.

And the main thing that people don't talk about is he has lost the white male vote.

The white male vote despises Joe Biden and maybe the Democrats in general for a lot of reasons.

But

they don't like to be accused of being white supremacists, white privilege, white rage.

They don't like the idea that race is going to be considered in contracts for

blue-collar workers, construction firms, admissions, retentions, et cetera, hiring.

They don't like the constant January 6 libels and smears.

And so they've lost them, and they don't like the boutique issues of transgenderism and all that.

So they've lost them at a huge rate.

It's almost 65% of white males will never vote Democratic and are not going to vote for Joe Biden.

So what I've been in at Jack is he had no margin of error.

And what he relied to counteract that because he had lost the white male vote in 2020, he thought that they could counteract that and he was right about that.

They could counteract that by getting a

70 or maybe 80, 5, 15 black vote and maybe a 60, 40 Latino vote and maybe a 65, 35 women vote.

And he can't now.

He can't.

It's not enough for him to win the black vote or the Latino vote or the women.

He has to win them by extraordinary margins to make up for the fact that he's lost the male vote in general and the white male in particular.

And he can't do that.

And that's why these pollsters are getting very glum.

And you're starting to see now a panic as the democratic and liberal movement shifts gears.

They don't believe anymore that Joe Biden can run on his agenda and that he'll be nominated, that he'll advance this Chicago in Chicago.

He'll outline the agenda, and he said, I like what we've done on the border.

I like what we are doing on crime.

I like our foreign policy.

Our energy EV mandates are great.

And I'm going to run on that.

They just think it's not going to happen and that Trump is going to win.

So they have two fallback positions.

A,

they believe that Alvin Bragg and Letita James and Jack Smith, in concert with what Letita James has done, will do three things.

They will bankrupt Donald Trump and keep him in terms of time off the campaign trail and therefore severely hamper his campaign.

Two, they will wear him out.

They see he's sleepy now.

That's the narrative.

They'll wear him out physically, psychologically, financially, and he will either crack or be worn out

and act

sort of like Biden.

They'll They'll destroy him, in other words, through this ordeal.

That's number two.

Or three,

they will start to win some indictments and they will put Donald Trump in jail.

And while he gets more empathetic and sympathetic, the more that they torment him, they believe there's a shelf life to that.

And once he's actually in jail, your suburban women, minorities,

rhinos will say, well, Biden's awful,

and they've done a really injustice to Trump, but I don't want to tell people I'm voting for a president that's in jail.

Whatever he did or didn't do or however unfair, the fact is he's in jail.

The whole world is going to see a president in jail, in jail, in jail.

That's their strategy because they cannot win on the merits is what I'm trying to say.

And I don't know if it's going to work or not, but that's what they're trying to do.

Destroy him psychologically and physically, put him in jail to drain off his support

and keep him off the campaign trail and bankrupt him.

Yeah.

We don't have crystal balls, Victor, but I think we could be in August of 2024 and look back at the quiet days of early May when you and I were talking and the potential,

I won't say the curse word, but the curse word show that could be happening across America

are these riots in the campuses, well, riots, yeah, they are riots, a sign of

greater things to come on the.

Oh, wait to Chicago.

These people think they're playing, replaying not just 220, 2020,

the glory days of the destruction of Antifa and BLM,

when they caused 2 billion in damages and killed 35, arson, all that.

They love that, but they they think that they're the inheritors of 1968.

Bill Ayers showed up at one of them and Bernadine Dorn.

So they think they're replaying 1968, and key to that paradigm is showing up where?

In Chicago, at the, where?

The Democratic Convention.

And they're saying, wow,

we're going to outdo the generation of 68.

So, yes.

And what is going to happen?

Whether you...

They like it or not.

Netanyahu is going to run for re-election, and he cannot win unless he, A, gets the hostages back, or B, destroys Hamas.

I don't think he's going to get the hostages back, to be honest, because to do so, he's going to have to give so many concessions and let thousands of killers and murderers out that have killed Israelis and Jews.

I'm not sure he can do it.

And number two, I don't know how many, I don't think anybody knows how many hostages are alive.

They won't give a list because they have executed and tortured and killed a lot of them.

But one thing he's going to do is destroy Hamas, and that means going into Gaza.

And when he does that,

there's going to be violence as we, I know universities are going to be out,

and it'll be very interesting because the universities will be, and you know, there won't be very many people in summer sessions.

So these riots are going to shift toward the street.

And there's going to be more Middle Eastern activists and hardcore Antifa BLM people and less students just because the students will be home with their parents.

And I think that, you know, June, July, August, especially in Chicago, it's going to be a nightmare of street thuggery.

Just like 2020, that's going to be the effort.

And it's really going to hurt Biden, who himself

told the nation that if you're president and there's riots in the street, it's your fault.

And he had a little cute tweet about that, you know, in 2020.

And we'll see.

I think we're getting to the point that I think everybody listening should see that the unimaginable

is becoming likely that something, if this 10-point CNN poll is correct, and it's pretty left-wing, and they get into August

and it's 10 to 12 points down,

and

there's rioting in the streets, I think they're going to have to open the convention up and release his delegates, super delegates, and then they're going to have to say, you know what, we're going to have an open convention, we're going to vote.

And we like Camilla, and

it's her turn, but she didn't get enough votes.

So we have to go with Ben Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer or Gavin Newsome or someone like that.

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

We've talked about before.

It's kind of like the

Eagleton vice president goes to Sergeant Shriver from McGovern late in the campaign season, 1972.

That wrecked what was left of the McGovern campaign anyway.

So I don't think that'll work, but I think they're going to have to do something like that.

And that's assuming that this geometric rate of decline on the part of Biden doesn't get even worse.

But when he's giving the Medal of Freedom and he says the freedom of metal,

and he just He can't even finish the sentence, it's getting worse.

So we're going to see things that we've never imagined before in the next few months as far as this election.

And the election itself, I predict, is going to be so fraught with contesting claims and allegations of voter fraud and trying, it's going to be a nightmare.

It really is.

Because this time the Republicans and the conservatives know what the left's going to do.

And they're going to try to stop it and they're going to try to watch it.

They're going to have ballot watchers.

And this time there's going to be a sizable number of minority voters, many of them who work in government in cities like Chicago, but more importantly, like Las Vegas, like Phoenix, like Atlanta,

like Detroit, Milwaukee, that are going to be in charge of voting.

And not all of them this time around are going to be left-wing Biden supporters.

And if they see irregularities, they may report it in a way that didn't happen in 2020.

And

that's going to lead to turmoil.

Yeah.

While our cities will likely be in flames at the same time.

Victor, we've we've uh come to the end of your you know boatload of wisdom sharing here.

It's been just been terrific.

I thanks for all you've done and

all you've shared today.

I thank our listeners.

No matter what platform you listen to this podcast on, we do appreciate it.

Those who listen on Apple

can at least rate the show zero to five stars.

And practically everyone does give victor five stars those who don't blame the uh

bumbling uh co-host but uh that's life uh here's one comment from

uh apple it's uh

titled absolutely positively outstanding as always thank you and god bless you sincerely ed c algonquin illinois and he writes go back

a 60s classic rock song by crabby appleton which we talked about on the show.

I remember that.

There was a group called Krabby Appleton.

Yeah.

He wrote, good catch, all the best of the entire VDH team.

And that's Ed C.

Algonquin.

And one comment from a reader and a subscriber to your website, The Blade of Perseus, George, and we had talked about a Bakersfield on a recent podcast, Victor, and he wrote, Bakersfield, lousy air, but the best people retired here seven years ago because a family who lived here for years love it.

A red bubble of sanity afloat on a sea of blue California absurdity.

City government, the courts, and the PD seem to do their jobs, have lived in both LA and San Francisco, and cannot believe what has happened to them.

Pray this city can hold the line against the madness.

That is, George, we thank you.

Thank you, George.

People should remember that there's 40, almost 41 million despite the bleeding exodus from California, California, and 15 million of them are conservative.

That's only about a third, not quite a third, but

when you go above San Francisco into thinly inhabited Northern California, and you go into the Sierra and the foothills thinly inhabited, and you go to the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley, and you go to the inland empire toward the moving toward Arizona and Nevada, you get the most conservative voters in the nation.

And there's 10 million of them.

So in one way, there's California, then there's little red state California that's more like Oklahoma or Wyoming or Arkansas as far as its voters are even more conservative than them.

Well, Victor, I just want to say one last thing.

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Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks all.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.