World War Two Turning Point and Current Russian Politics

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Nealey 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.

This is the Saturday edition, and we have a lot on the agenda.

We're going to look at some news coming out of Russia recently this week and John Solomon's investigation and then we're going to turn to look at World War II the first two years.

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

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Victor, we've got some news coming out of Russia recently, and I just have two

topics, and you can just go ahead and talk about either one as you choose.

Pergozin, the general that had fought against or

rose up against Putin, has recently been killed in a plane explosion.

So perhaps another

Putin

in.

he was a dead man walking he if you if you're going to kill the king you kill the king you can't go

run a motorcade or a brigade going into Moscow as if you're going to decapitate Putin's government and then stop and then think

well i'll i'll brag about putin and he'll forgive me or whatever and

putin's a dictator he's on the back of a tiger.

You can't get off the tiger.

So you can't allow a guy like that to do it according to your own value system.

So at the moment, he didn't matter whether it was a fake coup or Putin was trying to stage it.

Who cares about all the conspiracy theories?

It's the optics.

And the optics were that a warlord told the world that he was on his way to Moscow to remove the government.

And then he didn't complete the mission.

At that point, he was dead.

It was just a question of where they were going to kill him.

And if they didn't kill him, then Putin would be weak.

And if you're a dictator, you can't appear weak.

It's completely amoral universe.

So he was dead.

And

so no surprise about the plan.

But they killed it.

Yeah.

So the question is, why did they do it now?

And the reason they did it now was they were waiting for the spring offensive.

And it had been talked up in the West that it was going to be a Patton-like Gwadarian-like Rommel-like blitzkrieg.

And I wrote an article called The Russian Way of War.

And it was basically, as screwed up as the Russians are,

as poorly led as they are, as endemically poor morale these conscripts have,

don't go in.

fight don't fight russia on its borders because it has a lot of resources don't go into russia don't fight it on its borders.

And so

they're wearing Ukraine down.

There's been 500,000 dead and casualties.

And if you believe some people, it's twice that number.

There may have been 250,000 Ukrainians killed.

10 million have left the country.

They're outnumbered in every aspect.

I don't take any satisfaction in that, but the idea they were going to break through this 600-mile line along the border, and it was over a mile wide.

It had drone surveillance.

It had artillery

focus points.

It had

cement traps, tank traps, trenches.

It was just not going to work.

It was like a ram butting his head against a concrete wall.

The Russians decided that they had failed in their mission to take Kiev and eastern Ukraine.

They had failed.

And they had lost terribly.

So then they went back to what they always do, a war of attrition.

At that point, Ukraine should have said, okay, we won, and we'll negotiate.

You get out of the 2000, post-2021 territory, and we'll recognize Crimea, and we'll recognize the Donbass you stole in 2014.

That would have been 500,000 people alive today, because that's where we ended up.

But my point is.

that in the West, they were Gaga.

People where I work were pronouncing, you know, it's onto Moscow.

And when I wrote stuff and I said stuff, I got kind of the cold shoulder.

If you go back and look at some of the podcasts I did or some of the treatment in print.

And so

Burgozin

was the guy who was popular

with the Russian people because he was criticizing the poor offensive efforts.

of the Russians.

And he said, you know what?

They can't take this city.

They can't take, they didn't take Kiev.

I'm out there.

And so he had a lot of popular support.

So Putin didn't dare touch him.

But once he tried to decapitate the Russian government and remove Putin, then they talked him into, well, you're a good guy still.

You go down to Africa or you help us in other ways.

But they were just biding their time to kill him.

And what they were waiting for is a comeback by the Russians.

So now it's been March, April, May, June, July.

Have you heard anything in the the news about the spring offensive other than it stalled?

It's not spring anymore, is it?

They've tragically lost thousands of Ukrainians.

And they're doing to Russia, the Russians are doing to the Ukrainians what the Ukrainians did to Russia.

And this idea that all warfare now is different because of drones and it's fluid and mechanized and AI.

No, it's still like Stalingrad.

It can be.

And the Russians are going to beat them down.

And so right now, Putin is starting to regain credibility.

He's saying to the Russian people, if you look at what the press releases come out, we're not going to give up an inch.

We've killed so many Ukrainians.

The West is losing heart.

And now they thought, ah,

Bogozin's not that popular anymore.

I'm the guy.

So now I can afford to kill him without the Russian people thinking I killed a martyr who was the only hero

of the Ukrainian war.

And that's that's why they killed him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, also then in Russia, we had a recent attempt to land on the moon, the South Pole that's ever been landed on, and it exploded and crashed.

And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on their scientific endeavors.

Well, you know, during the

Clinton

and

Bush years and Obama, we kind of gave up on space.

And we had the space station and we had these collaborative efforts with the Russians, and they were getting a lot of technology from us.

And then we've now sort of turned, and our biggest problem was rocketry.

That Saturn V, I mean, we had the best rocket in the world.

And then the Russians were still making Soviet big rockets like they always do.

So they were sending stuff up to the space lab and space station and all that stuff.

But once we went into private enterprise with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Now

we've turned it over to the private sector and we're way ahead of everybody.

I think Musk is way, way ahead of the Europeans and the Japanese, not to mention the Russians.

So they're not getting government collaborative projects with the Americans and they're losing their technological edge and they don't have the wherewithal anymore to do what they did during the Soviet period.

So, yeah, they can just get a big rocket and shoot something up there, but it's not going to work.

not, they don't have a sophisticated infrastructure like they used to.

I don't mean that they're worse than they were.

I'm just saying they haven't kept up with the competition to the same degree they did during the Cold War.

And they're going to fall further and further behind.

This war has hurt them because of the sanctions.

And

they're not getting access to computers and the

AI and Silicon Valley stuff.

Yeah.

We often think about this war as draining our,

depleting our military or our economy, but it also depleted theirs.

Well, the thing about the United States economy is that

everybody, I was watching the debate tonight, and, you know, it's a choice.

We say that we're in decline.

We're just, we're doing it to ourselves.

But even it's really hard to screw up the United States.

We have 330 million people.

And I think we're at 22 or 23 trillion GDP.

China has 1.4 billion, and they're like at 16, 17 trillion.

So in other words,

one American produces more goods and services than four Chinese.

You know, that's just a fact, or maybe closer to five.

And that's at China's peak.

It's starting to be in decline.

And so

for all of the stuff that Obama and Biden did to hamper and

tie down and regulate and tax the entrepreneurial spirit, it's very hard to destroy it.

And so we've got all of these

people all over the world that are coming here, and we have all these bright people in all walks of life, and they want to do well, and there's still a chance to do that.

Not in California to the same degree.

That's why Silicon Valley is bleeding and people are leaving.

But in most of this,

most of the Midwest or

the South are, you know, there's still a lot of opportunity and people are finding it and it's going to continue unless we screw it up.

We're trying our best, but we haven't quite succeeded.

The United States is not San Francisco yet.

It's getting close, but it's not quite San Francisco.

Yeah, that's interesting what you say about the entrepreneurial spirit, that it's hard to kill it or to destroy it in some fashion, but it's also hard to create it.

If you go to third world countries, they spend lots of money trying to teach people how to be entrepreneurs.

And so we live in a really unique society with so much entrepreneurial spirit, just a part of our culture.

It is.

I think you're right.

It is.

I'm all for legal immigration.

I go to Palo Alto and I was eating by myself the other night in Menlo Park and

I was just listening to people.

And it was six or seven languages being spoken, Japanese, Chinese, French, German, Spanish.

And they were back and forth in English.

And I can tell you what were they talking about?

They were talking about money, money, money, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, education, education, education.

So what we do is we're a big

siphon.

We just siphon off all of the elite talent all over the world.

And if we can create social calm with all these different, this cacophony of all these different people, and they're all, we can get them on the same page, it works.

But if you don't assimilate and integrate, then it doesn't work.

And it's always nip and tuck.

But so far, you know, we've got 50 million people who weren't born in the United States.

And

so we'll see.

We'll see how it works.

You have to, when you're bringing in brilliant people all over, they have to have some allegiance to the United States.

They have to.

And they have to drop their own culture.

Just because there's brilliant people, you have to ask yourself,

why is India not...

I mean, there's brilliant people in India, but why is it a mess?

And why is China a mess, basically?

And why is Brazil a mess?

And why is Argentina a mess?

Why is Vietnam a mess?

And the answer is they don't have a transparent, constitutional, free society.

And so the brilliant people don't have

They don't have any latitude to work.

If they get too rich, they get slapped down by the government, or they they have to pay it bribes, or they're subject to a whole culture of envy, or they don't get the government runs everything.

So they come here and they blossom, but they can't bring that culture with them.

Because if they come in great numbers, legally or not, and they have enclaves, and then they just replicate the failure elsewhere.

It's analogous to Californians.

If you,

the California Exodus is very controversial because people on the left think that

there's a lot of people leaving California.

Yes, they're leaving for the taxes, the oppressive taxes, the regulations, but they're still left-wing people.

And their attitude is, I want to go to a place we haven't screwed it up yet.

And so I want to have more money for myself.

So I'll go to Nevada or Idaho or Tennessee or Texas.

But once I get there, I would like to

infuse my ideas about transgenderism and Soros prosecutors and

green solar power and open borders, even though it's going to destroy my habitat that I've gone to.

And then the right-wing said, no, no, Victor, the best guys in California are leaving.

It's all the right-wing people who are successful.

So we'll see, but whatever it is, California does not work.

And it is the most ethnically diverse state in the Union.

Again, 27% of the people were not born in the United States in California that reside here.

And it's very rich.

Yes, it's diverse.

But

it can get really weird when you have so many different.

I went into the bank today.

I went to a food market yesterday.

When I go into a place in California where I've been 70 years and I do not hear English spoken, you know what I mean?

When I look at the shoppers, it's kind of weird.

And I'm right in the heart of California.

And everybody says, well, that's a learning experience, Victor.

You're being exposed to different cultures.

No, it's not.

It's just a drag on the economy when people, they're not choosing to speak their native language as their

to show off.

They don't have another language, they're not fluent in English.

So, when you go to the checking stand and the person brings out an EBT card and they don't speak English, that slows down.

When you go to the bank and they have an overdrawn check and they're arguing in Spanish,

or when you go to some, it doesn't work.

I'm sorry, it does not work.

Yeah,

and

that's the problem.

Yeah, that is.

Well, something else doesn't work, and it seems to be Joe Biden's

family syndicate.

And we're after it more and more.

And we are produced on John Solomon's website, Just the News, or his platform, Just the News.

And we'd like to talk about his investigations because he does some absolutely excellent work.

And he's currently looking into internal State Department communications about monies that were supposed to go to the Ukraine.

And he's recently found out that Joe Biden changed the policy on the Ukrainian money to get the prosecutor that they always talk about.

I know you know his name, Victor Shokin.

I know his name, Victor Shokin.

Yeah, Shokin, to get him fired.

And he changed the official policy to do that.

And that's what the internal State Department documents are showing by John Solomon.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that.

It's just incredible.

It is absolutely incredible.

Because when Peter Schweitzer

took on the Biden family and he aired, I think it was 2018, remember that famous talk in front of the Council on Foreign Relations when Biden says, and son of a bitch, I got him fired, ha ha ha, corrupt.

Well, the whole media swallowed that idea that Viktor Shokin was a crook.

Well, he was no more or no less crooked than everybody in the Ukrainian government.

But the fact that John Solomon is pointing out that up until that time, the State Department had okayed the $1 billion aid package to him because they thought he had been making progress, progress.

And then people with connections to the government put Hunter and his associates in the lap of burisma.

And that money was going to Joe Biden via Hunter.

And Viktor Shokin,

I think it was Proshinko, was the president then.

He was investigating that.

And the State Department had given him a green light.

So Biden is the point man on Ukraine.

So Hunter tells him to go over there.

And they're shocked from these internal communications.

So Biden goes over there and he's...

He shocks the State Department because he says, I was going to hold up all the aid that you had approved.

And And I don't care what your audit was about Chokin.

I wanted him fired.

And son of a bitch, they fired him.

And therefore, I released the aid.

They did it in six hours.

Ha ha ha.

And then everybody took that as gospel.

But the reason he fired him was obvious.

Everybody's known that.

He fired him because he was, Victor Shokin was looking into barisma.

And Hunter was siphoning money to Joe.

I mean, what does he pay a rent for his Virginia mansion i think it's something like twenty thousand a month thirty thousand a month yes and then he has a three and a half uh

million

dollar beach home and he's got a mansion in wilmington where does he get all that money he was only out of office a year or two three when he started accumulating these properties so it was flowing into his coffers when he was vice president and everybody knows that and it's just shocking that that we demonize this guy when he was the only among he may have been crooked, but among the crooked people that he deals with, he wasn't as crooked.

And he didn't like what Barisma was doing.

And we have the president of the United States threatening to cut off aid.

And so, what basically John Solomon is saying is that we impeach Donald Trump on

two premises.

You can't have a president of the United States that withholds congressionally approved aid to a particular country unless they investigate someone.

And two,

he can't use that lever if that someone may be a potential rival candidate.

And they impeached him.

And now what are they going to do on impeach him?

Because he turned out to be what?

Absolutely correct.

He said, you better look into the Biden family.

They're corrupt and they're a sporism.

And that's exactly what they were.

And he never did cancel.

Unlike Biden, he didn't threaten to cancel.

He delayed the aid, and he did give the aid.

And so what are you going to do with Biden now?

If you impeach Trump for that allegation, well, Biden did that,

and Trump did.

Biden basically did exactly what the Democrats accused Trump of doing, which Trump really didn't do because they were corrupt.

Biden went in and interfered in the internal affairs of Ukraine and told them that they had to not investigate somebody, fire him, fire the investigator, or he would withhold a billion dollars.

And he gave them a deadline.

That was what we impeached Trump.

So we impeached a guy that didn't do something, and then we didn't impeach the guy that really did do something, and that something was the same thing.

And if you say no, Victor,

Trump went after a potential political right.

Well, what do you think Biden is doing right now with unleashing Merrick Garland and Jack Smith?

So

I think we're coming to a head.

We can talk about that with the Bidens, with this disclosure, because there was a twin disclosure that John Solomon and others also disclosed.

And that is now we learn that in the acrimonious discussion, i.e.

the whistleblowers were trying to expose what David Weiss was doing.

And what was he doing?

He was giving a sweetheart deal to Hunter Biden that was collapsing because the whistleblowers were drawing attention to it and the judge was throwing it out.

And in those discussions and in the discussions that led up to the sweetheart deal, what was Hunter Biden doing?

He was having his lawyer leverage his own dad.

So he either got the sweetheart deal proposal because his lawyers threatened the DOJ that they were going to call Joe Biden, or as the deal started to unravel, they brought it up again.

And apparently the people in the DOJ said, oh, my God, can you imagine?

Joe Biden will be called as a character witness, and they'll put him on the stand.

And we might have some rogue prosecutor in this suit, and he will ask Joe Biden, have you ever spoken to Hunter about your business and he will lie again under oath.

And when he does that, he's guilty of perjury.

So there's no way in the world we're ever going to put Joe Biden on the stand and therefore, Hunter, we're going to succumb to your blackmail and we've got a sweetheart deal for you.

And that's what they did.

And then it started to blow up and they tried it again, apparently, because it was just released.

Well, don't do this.

Remember, we have Joe Biden as a witness, which brings up something that Jack and I talked about, and I've written a lot about that.

In fact, I've had readers say, Victor, just leave it alone.

Hunter Biden blackmails his own family.

You saw it in the laptop when he said, I'm getting sick and tired of giving half my income to Joe.

I'm getting sick and tired of paying Joe and Jill's daily utility bills, monthly utility, yearly utilities bill.

He referred sarcastically, the big guy, Mr.

10%.

And then he said to his sister, wine, wine, wine, wine, wine.

They don't appreciate me.

Look at what I've done for my dad.

And so then you would think, okay, Hunter, you're a crackhead.

You lost a gun that you illegally registered.

It turned up in a dumpster near a school.

We get that.

Your sister had a diary about showering with this is about as sordid a family as you can get.

You're knee-deep in barisma.

You've had your father lie to the American public twice.

So just behave.

Just behave.

And what does he do?

He goes into the, he goes with this, I don't know what we call it, this

suit about child support, and he starts stonewalling it and claims he's broke.

And it blows up.

And then his dad has to say that he doesn't have this granddaughter.

And

it just makes it worse.

And don't you think Hunter knew knew that?

I think he said to his dad, I'm getting sick and tired of me being exposed legally.

So I'm going to get a plea deal.

And if I get a plea deal,

I'll settle my

child support suit.

And you know what?

I'll drop my little art scam, too.

Because why in the world would a son under 360 degree 24-7 scrutiny start painting by numbers trashy

paintings and then hawking them to quid pro quo grifters.

That's what he's doing.

So you think you put him on high.

So finally they said, you know what?

I'm sure they said.

The people got around Biden.

They said, I know you love Hunter.

I know you praise him all the time.

And you say he's the smartest man you ever met.

And that's good because we're afraid of him.

But he's too volatile.

He's a loose cannon.

He can destroy you with this parisma and the China stuff.

So we're going to bring him into the White House where we can watch him.

And that's where we are.

And he's been

sneaking his cocaine into that White House too.

Wherever it was, I think they've announced that it's somebody with a connection to the Biden family.

Yeah, that's what they said.

Yeah, they've said that.

And so

everybody knows what he's doing.

And

we'll see what happens.

But if he goes to jail, that's what they're scared of.

And if Weiss is forced or he stays on the case and he has some character, which I doubt, but if by chance they get him on the gun

illegal registration or they get him on the back taxes and he even has to serve six months in jail, he will go ballistic and he will rat out his dad.

And they know that.

And that's everybody's got to realize that.

That is why

he gets, why would Merrick Garland destroy his reputation to interfere in a case and tell a federal prosecutor, you're going to get a sweetheart deal.

You're not going to prosecute this guy.

And then when that blew up and the judge blew it up, then he would pick that dubious prosecutor to the outrage of everybody and make him special counsel because he's saying to himself and he's saying to the Bidens, there's two bad choices.

One is public ridicule that I'm putting a fox in the hen house with this prosecutor because he is just

not going to do, that's probably the wrong metaphor, but you get my drift.

You've got somebody who is a conflict of interest that's going to destroy the whole case and let him off.

That's going to be bad, but it's not as bad as getting a real special counsel, a real one, and leading that right to Jim Biden and Jill Biden and Joe Biden and Halle, the whole Biden consortium.

That shows you how bad it is.

They're willing to risk all of that disdain and even breaking the law.

I know it's an internal DOJ regulation, but a lot of people have argued it has the force of law that you have to have an outside of government special provider.

They didn't even care about that.

Weiss is right in there.

He's not really a special counsel.

So they want to put a lid on it at any cost, no matter what, because they know that if anybody starts to put this guy in prison, he's going to squawk, squawk, squawk.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow, you just put into perspective

why they even appointed Weiss.

And I can see now you're right.

He's all of the ridicule they may get for the appointment of Weiss is worth it, given all the

same thing about Victor Shokin.

It's the same thing about Victor Shokin.

We don't care about the appearances that the vice president went over there and fired,

had fired, a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into his son and Verisma, because if he had not have done that, and there was a good chance this guy was semi-honest, he would have exposed what Hunter Biden was doing.

They probably would have killed him in Ukraine because it was a billion dollars of foreign aid.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Well, Victor, I can't wait for the Hollywood movie to come out.

It certainly sounds like a great plot on top of it all.

That's so, that's just devastating.

But we have

some messages and then we'll be coming back to talk about World War II.

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

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Victor, so we're going to talk about World War II and the first two years

up to 1942,

in which Germany was doing quite well with its Blitzkrieg strategy.

The U.S.

stayed out of the war for most of these years.

And then 1942 changed things.

So, your reflections on the strategy or the U.S.

role in all of this at this time, and then why everything changed in 1942.

So, any and all of those questions, we'd love to hear.

Well, there was a race, wasn't there?

Because

as long as that was a European war from September 1st, 1939,

until

June 22nd, 1941.

And as long as the Japanese were basically from August 1937

fighting in China to 1941, when they bombed Pearl Harbor and then the next day attacked Singapore, it was an Axis victory.

Because if you look at

the German army went into the Rhineland and militarized in 1936, and it had a head start,

it survived the depression, as did the command economy of Italy, much better than the democracies did.

And

more importantly, the losers of World War I, Germany, wanted to fight again, and the winners wanted not to fight.

And Italy and Japan had been reluctant allies in World War I.

They felt that they were not appreciated.

They didn't get the spoils of Versailles and they were willing to join because of their fascistic tendencies, Hitler.

Okay.

And they ran wild because the French and the British were not prepared.

I don't mean not prepared materially.

They could have been, they could have done a lot better in the French war, the invasion of France from May 10th onward.

But psychologically, they were not prepared.

And the Germans wanted to kill people.

They wanted to invade.

And the French and

The British were talking about two things all during the 30s, Verdun and Somme.

Verdun, Somme, Verdun, Somme.

Never again, never again.

The Dutch were saying you can't call ships destroyers.

That's too provocative.

You can't mention Verdun in a book.

Okay.

So he sweeps through and he goes in April 9th to Denmark and then Norway and then on May 10th, Belgium and the Netherlands and France.

And then he goes into Yugoslavia.

And da-da-da-da-da.

He takes Yugoslavia.

And then he starts the Blitz in 40 in september and by december he's bombing london kills 45 000 people when it's over but he can't take london and then he does what

he does the stupidest thing in the world he invades the soviet union on june 22nd 1941 while he is still fighting in North Africa and he's still got a war with Britain in the air and at the Battle of the Atlantic, the submarine war.

And why is is that stupid?

Because immediately, the ratio of

assets versus Axis and allies, the Allies have more assets.

That is,

the British Empire and before France falls have more assets than Germany, but Germany is further prepared and had been rearming.

Once England is isolated and all of the EU today is is in German hands, then Britain is stuck.

And it's just a matter of whether,

how well they can coordinate and marshal that huge economy of Western Europe.

But they're in the driver's seat.

And then Japan has been fighting in China.

It's kind of bogged down, but it has a golden opportunity because

everything it needs is now at its back door.

That is,

all of the shell oil companies in Indonesia are now orphaned.

There is no Netherlands.

So the Dutch East Indies,

all that is open.

All they have to do is take it.

There is no more France, Vichy France.

There's no more independent France.

So the breadbasket of Asia, the Mekong Delta, and Thailand,

Cambodia, it's all up for grabs.

All you got to do is take it.

And there's no consequences.

Now, there's some consequences.

You don't want to do two things.

If you're Japan, just don't go into Singapore because that's British.

And don't go into Burma.

And there's rubber in Burma.

And don't go into the Philippines because there's a big American base there.

All you have to do is tiptoe around, steal all the oil, steal the food and the minerals of these European colonies whose mother countries no longer exist.

Germany has taken over the mother countries.

And if you're Italy, all you have to do is tag along.

Just, you don't go invade Albania or Greece and

not tell the Germans.

And they did that.

So

the war was over.

From basically June 20th,

the Western European war was over.

And by April of 1941, Greece, the Balkans, they were all settled.

As I said earlier, you look at the map of Europe, every single European capital, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, even the major cities like Rotterdam, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Athens, they were either under Axis control or they were neutrals that were pro-Axis

or they were Axis allies.

And the war was over.

And then he did this two stupidest thing, they, he, meaning the Axis.

He did two things that changed the war.

Number one, he invaded, Germany invaded 1941, June 22nd.

And the Soviet Union had an enormous economy.

The Soviet Union was producing about

30 times more oil than Germany.

And Germany was trying to siphon it from everything.

It was trying to get it from the Allstace-Lorraine.

It was trying its coal liquefaction.

It's trying to steal American oil through Switzerland.

It tried everything.

It was oil short.

And the Soviet Union was this huge economy.

And they thought, wow, we'll just go walk right in and steal it.

It was stupid, though, because Britain had been unconquered in the West, and they had an air war, and Britain was starting to learn how to bomb Hitler.

And now he starts a whole nother war.

And so then you think, well, the United States isn't in it yet.

But they're starting in June, July, and by the end of the year, they're doing British-American Lin-Lease.

That's going to be 25%

of the whole Soviet military economy.

But it's even worse than that for Hitler.

Our experts and the British experts went over and said, what do you do well?

You're going to move your heavy industry out of air bombardment, German air bombardment.

So you're going to make artillery.

You're going to make tanks.

You're going to make artillery.

That's what you guys do well.

But you don't do radios and you don't do rubber ponchos and you don't do aluminum for your airframes and you have no aviation gasoline.

And we supplied it all.

So we targeted the Russian economy to allow it to be very specific in armaments.

And then we supplied all of the support network.

And it was, and then it started to slow down.

So then World War II started essentially sometime between June 22nd, 1941 and December 7th.

That is,

when those two powers went to war, the United States and the Soviet Union, then it was a world war and they were doomed.

They were doomed to lose it.

There was no way they were going to win the Axis.

And it was just a question of,

in their way of thinking, can we take Moscow and knock the Soviet Union out of the war before their engine revs up and they get Lindleys and we get and we're bombed by Britain and the Americans eventually come into it.

And the same with Japan.

Can we take all of this stuff?

And we took Singapore.

Singapore was a loser for them.

It was the biggest, best port, but they didn't even use it.

Yeah, there was rubber in Malaysia, but it didn't really,

it wasn't worth getting Britain in the war against them.

So the way to look at World War II is first phase, September 1st, 1939 or 1937 in the Asian.

And the Axis power have rearmed all during the 30s and they're way ahead.

And they run ragged over China, the Pacific,

the European colonies, and they get into North Africa.

The Italians even do well in East Somalia.

And then they do well in Western Europe.

Phase one is over right in June 1940.

They've won, basically.

All they have to do is settle somehow

because the Soviets and the Americans are not in the war.

The Americans are not going to get into the war, and the Soviets are on the side of Hitler.

So he's in the driver's seat, and he screws both of that up by invading the Soviet Union and then bringing in American aid and then declaring war in the United States after Pearl Harbor,

before

we did.

So

Japan then blows it by thinking that they were going to have a preemptive raid.

At that point, if you look at the total GDP,

the total vehicles made per year, even before the American and Soviet rearmament, it's vastly in favor of the new allies, the new allies.

And so where was that key point where the Axis thought, well, we're going to knock these people out before their economies rev up and their manpower advantages kick in it was somewhere depending on the particular theater but in the summer of 1942 and what do i mean by that the second invasion of the soviet union in 1942 did not go to moscow or leningrad as expected it was a effort case blue to go down and get to Mayhop

and Grozny and Baku and get the Soviet oil fields.

And they got to Rostas on the dawn, and it looked like it was going to do it.

And they had gone, they broke it.

They unfortunately split their forces.

They sent one, half their, about a million men up, the Sixth Army, to Stalingrad.

They were supposed to cut the river and then to blow up the city, and they would not be able to get Lindlease or oil coming in by the river.

And they decided to take the city.

But they almost, they had 90 percent of it in august september so right in that of 1942

you could say that russia was in really bad shape the second year and if you looked and if you looked at where the germans were they they had taken mayhof and they were right outside grozny and there were

nazis hitler got angry they might they They put a Nazi flag on the Caucasus, Mount Aribas, the highest point of the Caucasus.

They were only 100 miles from Baku and all of the Soviet oil.

And when you look at the same time

in North African war,

this was

the Americans hadn't, the Americans were in the war since December 7th, December 10th, 1941, but they hadn't done anything yet.

They hadn't bring it.

The B-17s really over yet, and they hadn't invaded North Africa.

And guess what?

They actually took Tobruk.

They had not been able to take it.

And on June 20th of 1942, they took Tobruk.

And that meant that from Vichy, France,

Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya,

and right up to the border with Egypt, about 150 miles from Suez and the Suez Canal that would stop all British oil imports from the Middle East.

It was German.

And the Germans had brook.

All they had to do was take Malta, and then they would have won the whole Mediterranean.

They would have had both shores of the Mediterranean.

And by that, I mean, if you look at the Mediterranean, it's fascist Franco, Spain,

Salazar, fascist Portugal, it's Vichy, France,

and it's fascist Italy,

it's fascist Balkans, and it's occupied Greece.

And then you go further across the Aegean, and it's neutral but pro-German Turkey.

And it's the Middle East is up for grabs.

But it's basically the Germans are in southern Russia, and they're all the way at Tobruk.

And if they take Suez and they go through the Middle East, they'll meet somewhere around the Caspian Sea and they'll win the war.

And the same thing with the Japanese.

From December 7th until the Battle of Midway, they haven't lost a battle, not one.

And the Battle of Midway is not till June 6th,

5th, 4th to 6th of 1942.

And so

if you look at

losses, the Japanese have lost about

200, 300 sailors.

They've lost a few ships, not capital ships, but the British have lost a carrier and

it's not good.

And

what changed everything?

What changed after Midway?

Two things.

What changed after Stalingrad?

What changed after the fall of Tobruk?

And the answer is

they reached their maximum potential of not that they wouldn't produce more goods and service, but they reached their maximum potential vis-a-vis the enemy.

And by that, I mean relative manpower, relative production versus Britain, the Soviets, and the Americans.

And so the irony was they would really ramp up their economies, the Japanese and

the Germans in 43, 44, and 45, but they fall further and further behind because they could not match the geometric increase in the Allied economies.

And then they had no margin of error, and they made not just tactical and

strategic blunders, but they made a terrible misplacement of resources.

So you had the Tirpitz, or you had the Bismarck, these 45,000-ton battleship, and its sister ship, the Tirpitz.

They didn't do anything after sinking the Hood and damaging the Prince of Wales.

They sunk the Bismarck.

The Tirpitz was up in a Scandinavian fjord,

and all of that capital investment in cruisers and destroyers and big battleships was wasted when they had their great submarine.

They started the war with about 50 submarines.

They eventually built over 1,000, but they should have done that from the very beginning.

They never built a four-engine bomber.

Not one.

They had great Condor reconnaissance four-engine, and they had the ability to do it, but they had these crackpot ideas.

They were going to make it dive bombers, or they were going to put in the NAS cell, instead of having four separate uh propellers they were going to have two propellers but two engines but stacked one after another with the same drive it was crazy and their various failed bombers and the japanese what did they do they built the mushashi and the yamat yamoto the two biggest battleships in history 75 000 tons

And they were so huge, they called it the Hotel Yamato.

It just sat there at Revol.

They didn't have the oil, and it was a sitting duck, and they didn't understand anything about light carriers, jeep carriers.

It was all these huge capital ships.

Meanwhile, the Americans were making hundreds, little 140 of these very light escort carriers, and then 20, 30 of these light carriers, and then the Essex heavy carriers.

And we were producing just crazy.

And that was, they were doomed it was just a question then and we'll get to it the next episode what do you want to do at

the uh

right around that midpoint that crest of axis power

at tobruk

the very first days of stalingrad

and the ability to absorb all of europe that high point

and the answer is you have to you have two choices for for the Allies.

We're going to win, and we can force terms down their throat.

So Hitler will have to give up everything and go back to Germany.

Same with Mussolini, same with what is now the Tojo government.

Or

we're going to ask for unconditional surrender.

And there wasn't really much discussion of it with Churchill.

We just declared it.

Roosevelt brought it up and just said, we're going to do that.

If you're going to have unconditional surrender against these fascist countries, then 1943, 1944, 1945

are going to demand that you have to have about 40 million people.

The Soviet Union will produce 12, the United States will produce 12, the British will produce eight, you'll have to get the French

liberated, they'll put another 2 million in, and then you'll have all of these imperial troops from Britain.

But you're going to have to go into Germany.

You can't do what you did in World War I.

And you're going to have to go into Japan or destroy it.

And you're going to have to go into Italy.

And the problem is you're then on the offensive, like the Ukrainians trying to go against a fixed position.

And you're not going to

get off very easily.

And there's going to be a lot, the battlefields are going to be over civilian territory.

And

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

It's, yes, they're going to win after the fall of 1942.

They are going to win.

But they have a learning curve.

They have to ramp up their economies.

And there's a lot of kids in America that are in high school or college, like my namesake, that think the thing is going to be over.

They're never going to have to go.

So in 1939, the person I was named after

was

he was

15.

And when the war breaks out, he's 15,

you know, 16.

And he's going to be dead on May 19th of 1945 in Okinawa at Sugarloaf Hill.

But the point is that all those kids in America, they're 15, 16, 17, 18,

are going to be needed if you're going to get a 12 million person military and you're going to go way over across the other side of the world and you're either going to blockade or bomb Japan to smithereens or occupy it, and you're going to go all the way into central Germany and occupy it, and you're going to occupy Italy.

That's hard to do.

I think people forget that's why there's 65 million people dead in World War II.

Because

you're fighting some of the most capable people in the world today.

If you look at Germans and Japanese and Italian craftsmanship, that was a tragedy of World War II.

We were from 1870 to 1939, you could say that German-speaking peoples, whether you call them Prussia in 1871 or German in 1940, they're the most militaristic, warlike, capable in arms of any country in Europe.

Biggest population, centrally located, most aggressive government.

Same thing when you look at Japan.

And how you're going to defeat those people when you're a pacifist democracy is you're going to need a guy like FDR and you're going to need a guy like Churchill that have sort of, they're democratic geniuses, but they have authoritarian instincts.

And

they're going to have a war production board and they're going to make a democracy do stuff that nobody ever thought.

So what I mean by that, just to close, is if you think you need B-24 bombers.

or you need liberty ships,

then what are you going to do?

You're going to tell Henry Kaiser, go into Oakland, Hayward, just destroy whatever suburbs you need, take over the land, make a production line of ships all the way out to San Francisco Bay, and just do what you got to do, but do it.

And we want you to produce one every three days.

And then they tell Henry Ford,

where's the big open space?

Willow Run, I don't know, 30, 40 miles outside of...

downtown Detroit.

Just go there, take over whatever you do and build the biggest warehouse in the world.

And it's yours.

You just run it.

You can do whatever you have to do.

But we want a B24 produced

every hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And then the same thing in New Mexico.

If you're going to have the Manhattan Project, go to New Mexico, do whatever you have to do.

There's no such thing as lawsuits about imminent domain.

There's no such things as environmental regulation.

That's not like high-speed rail in California.

You're just going to do it because we're going to lose the war if you don't.

That's what they did.

But it also required a lot of people to die to carry that out.

You're fighting some of the toughest people

in the world.

And

I can.

Do you think America could fight a war like that today?

I don't know.

I know my father got letters and my mother got letters from Victor Hansen.

They landed on April 1st, and he was killed on May 19th in the 6th Marine Division.

He wrote a letter every other day, I got some of them.

And all they're about is once they got to the north of the island, how fierce the Japanese were.

And they were in holes and coral, and they would bomb them, and they would shell them, and they wouldn't get at them at all.

Or they would be at night, and people would creep up.

You read EB sledge with the old, it was just hell.

It was absolutely hell.

And

everybody says, Oh, the B-29 program at work.

Well, no, you had to take off from Tinyin or Guam or Saipon, Saipan, and you had to fly 1,600 miles.

It's like flying at night from San Francisco to Salt Lake City with no computers or anything, no navigate, no nothing, but just primitive navigation.

And then you would have to bomb.

And they would be waiting for you.

And they knew when you were coming.

And

you had an experimental plane.

And then you had to turn around and go all the way back over the ocean for another eight hours so you had 16 hours on amphetamine and then they let you sleep one day and then you did it again then

24 hours later that's what it took to win the war and if somebody you know blew up i remember my father said well there was a b-29 it came in and

It blew up.

It was wounded.

They had missed EWO, or Ewo wasn't open rather and they came in and they crashed on tiny

i said what did they do and he said well there was no parts it just burned up i said what do you mean it burned up it just burned up it blew up there was a bomb stuck or it was full of gas still had gas so i said what did they do so they do just like they did when they took off they just took bulldozers and pushed it over they went in to see if there was anybody they could save the bodies if they could they just took a bulldozer and pushed it over the cliff and then they they went in And if they had, he said, if they had

valuable parts, they had a boneyard.

They just dragged it over.

And there was, he said, it was just sickening.

You could just see these huge destroyed B-29s that had crashed on takeoff or landing.

And so

that was what it took.

And it was an existential war.

But we, but there was a reason

the Germans.

What we'll see the next discussion is that from

19

from the turning point in the war of mid-42 and 43, the Americans are going to lose the most people

in 1944 as the war is essentially being won.

And 1945, they're going to lose more than they did in 1943.

And so that's what's sad about it.

And when you look at

the 40,000 B-17 crewmen, it really is, they start to lose them.

They get wiped out in, say, June of 43 to June of 44.

So winning the war and being on the over-the-curve is when people start dying.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you for that

today.

We have.

I didn't get into the battle of, I wanted to talk about, you know, Guadalcanal and the Battle of Coral Sea, which was a prelude to Midway, but we'll talk about that a little later.

Yeah, we can do that.

Well,

let's go to some messages and we'll be right back.

We're back.

Thank you for joining the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

So,

for the last part of this episode, I wanted to look at an article that was published for MSNBC by Trimain Lee, and it's titled How the Right Broke Woke.

And the argument in the article is that woke represented liberal policies of bodily autonomy, affirmative action, and teaching truth about history in the classroom.

And the right has gone after it and is attacking their progress in multi-ethnic relations, in equality, and that the right has also

doesn't like them and is worried because they were dismantling the system that historically benefited those people who are on the right.

And so that's kind of the argument.

Yeah,

that system really benefits those people, doesn't it?

That's why OPA is so poor and LeBron is so poor.

And

when you look at College Admissions, if you ask any young African-American 18-year-old or any young white 18-year-old, and they were applying to Harvard or Yale or whatever it takes to be among the elite, would you check black or white?

I'm just asking.

Yeah.

Oh, you want an answer?

Of course, you check black or

some other person of color.

Yes, yes.

So when she says how everybody's suffering, and that's not true because we have, we practice, that's what Raswami, Rasa Swami, Vivek or Vivek.

That's what Vive.

Vivek.

Vivek, sorry, Vivek is talking about reverse racism as racism.

So she's angry because people said, no moss, we're not going to do this anymore.

I don't mean the universities or the corporate boardroom, but we're not going to hire thousands of diversity, equity, and inclusion czars that are going to monitor everybody.

on the theory that, well, while you can't see racism and either can we, it's like air.

So it requires systemic racism.

And you can't see aggressions because they're micro-aggressions.

And so you need special people with antenna that have been trained to find them, like little gagger commers or something.

And that's what they want.

They want this huge industry.

And

this author

doesn't understand she's a fossil, she's a dinosaur, she's a triceratop, she's a bronosaurus, she's just a relic of this bankrupt, woke idea.

And she's angry because it's sort of like,

I guess we would call it a meteor hits the world, and all of a sudden the dinosaurs are doomed, or whatever it is.

She knows that woke is doomed because it's based on racism and it's based on lies.

And the lie is: if this is such a horrible country, why is everybody in the world of all different colors coming?

And why are 90% of the immigrants non-white if it's such a horrible white supremacist place.

And she's,

I don't know of any country in the world, with the exception of Italian Republican Rome of antiquity, that creates a document.

And it's 96% so-called European, but the document,

the Declaration of Independence, is

a

manifesto that says that all men are created equal.

And although we are are white, the principles of this government will apply to everybody.

And because they're a minority in the world, it was inevitable that race, that the original founders would not be the only people.

And so when she sees that, I don't see how she can say this was designed by white people for white people, for white people.

Slavery was a horrible thing, but not everybody held slaves.

4% of the South had slaves.

Doesn't mean they didn't benefit some of them.

But this constant,

I guess, what Americans are saying is: can't we get leaders who say,

look,

every dominant culture throughout history protects its own, but the difference in the United States was that natural human impulse was checked by some brilliant aristocratic founders.

And they crafted documents that prevented this from becoming a blood and soil

country, like most in Europe.

And therefore, today

you have a Barack Obama, or you see Nikki Haley debating on the Republican stage, Vivac, with Tim Scott looking on.

That's not, that is the ultimate expression of the Declaration.

And she's angry because when she looks at all these different groups, she sees success.

22 ethnic groups have higher incomes than whites.

And she's angry because she feels

that

there are hindrances in the black community that they are not achieving the same rate of success, although they're very successful compared to as a group as other groups.

And she is at a fork in the road.

She can say,

we're just shackled by the past.

We can't do anything because of racism, because of Jim Crow.

So we're just going to completely demand reparations, whether that's defined as money or affirmative action or woke.

Or we're just going to forget about the past and we're going to have a martial plan in our communities.

We're going to do what the Indian immigrant, we're going to do what the Asian immigrant is going to do, we're going to do what a lot of people come from Mexico do.

We're going to really strengthen family ties.

We're going to insist on fathers are present.

We're going to

insist that our music is not like number two we talked about the f

you men song written by gangsta that talks about

you and jack talked about it i know yeah

it had a lot of in there anal intercourse beating women up racism

you name it oral intercourse but mostly violence and obscenity scatology and that's the number two rat number two song in america not just rap or hip-hop but we're not going to put our emphasis on that.

We're going to put it only on education.

And what would happen if that happened?

But because that hasn't happened, and it hasn't happened, not because the black community is not capable of it, they're very capable, but it's because of a series of democratic left-wing civil rights that were very well-intentioned in the beginning, 64, 65.

But my God.

It's been a half century, you know what I mean?

A half century, more than a half century.

And it's time now to just forget about race and look at people as people.

And a lot of beneficiaries don't want to do that.

So, anytime, is Al Sharpton ever give a lecture about the slaughter that's going on in Chicago?

Does he ever come out?

Jesse Jackson come out of retirement?

Does Professor Kendi ever go to San Francisco and look at the crime rate and see that young black males, whether it's smash and grab or carjacking, are overrepresented five, six, seven times of their demographic in the Bay Area?

Well, no, they don't.

And so

the problem with all of this stuff in this article, and I did read the article very carefully, she keeps talking about black people, black might be, you know what I mean?

It's collectively, no individual.

Yes.

She kept saying our people.

And I was like, well, that just sounds racist to me.

It doesn't sound racist.

It is racist.

And the problem she doesn't understand, and a lot of the radical left black leadership doesn't understand,

once you go down the collective road and you just stick with it and you intensify it, and you say that everybody that's black is sister and brother, and we're all in this community together, and our foremost allegiance are to people who look like it's, well, why wouldn't other people do the same thing?

Why wouldn't somebody just do that?

You know, I was at Cal State, and I had a student.

I shouldn't even say this on the air.

I'll finish with this.

But she was a radical out of the Chicano studies and I was teaching Homer.

And she said,

every time she

introduced something, she says, as a Chicana.

I said, okay.

And you would know you're making us read this stuff.

It was just right out of Chicano Studies.

I said, we're reading about the human experience from a very impoverished culture in the Balkans.

If you want to talk about race, the ancient Greeks probably look more like you than they did me.

I mean, they claim that they were blonde and blue-eyed.

Maybe they were a northern Greece, but there were a lot of people who looked closer to you than a Swede.

So it's not about race.

It's about ideas that are timeless.

And she'd say, well, it doesn't mean anything to me as a Chicano.

So I said, if you do that again, I'm going to self-identify.

And she said, I don't know what you mean.

I said, I don't know.

As a white man, I can't understand anything, what you're talking about.

And then

she asked a question about an hour later.

And she said, as a Chicana,

I just like to, I said, as a white male,

I can't understand what you're talking about.

It just doesn't, it's not relevant to me.

It's not in my world.

I don't care about it.

And then she started crying.

And she went to the dean.

The dean was a wonderful guy who was Hispanic.

And he called me up and said, Victor, what the blank are you doing?

Get over here.

And he said, did you say as a white person, I said, I did, that you said it in jest.

I said, I did.

And she said, you hurt her feelings.

I said, she hurt mine.

It's my class.

I can say what I want as long as it's not out of hand.

He said, you made your point.

Don't do it again.

And I tell you, she never said that again in class.

And I, no, she, she didn't.

She bought her boyfriend.

And he was a gangbanger, and he sat in the back and gave me the gang evil eye stare that I grew up with.

And I walked over to him and I said, If you want to learn about the Odyssey next week, and then we can go on to the Antigone, and guess what?

We'll end with this first

month with Thucydides' history.

You're welcome here.

But if you're going to sit there and give me the evil eye, you're not going to be in this classroom.

There's a phone.

I'm going to call right now and get security and get you out of here.

And if you try to follow me to my car,

I don't want to go and go there.

And he left.

And you know what was weird?

By the end of the class, she was one of the best students.

And she was.

Oh, really?

Yes, she was.

She was from a small little farming community.

And she would follow me to my office because I had an hour break.

And she wanted to know what more she could read.

And I don't know if that was, I don't know what happened, but she did talk to the dean, and he was

a wonderful man, a man named Luis Costa, and he died very early with a brain con, but he was just a wonderful guy.

And

he had a talk with her.

And I don't know what happened, but

when I, she took about three classes from me.

And she would walk to class with me.

I was like, I don't know, I was 35 at the time, 34.

And

I don't know what it was, but she finally got out of that mold.

And then she did very well.

And I think she became a teacher.

So people can be,

people need to understand that the most primitive pre-civilizational urge is birds of a feather flock together.

That term is in Plato.

It's talking about older people.

Socrates talks about that in the laws.

But when you start identifying by your superficial skin color, you go down a pathway where you know where it ends up.

And just because you're black doesn't exempt you from that.

So if all these articles like this one, who killed woke, is my people and my black people and this and this and this, first of all, people are sick of it.

I don't mean white people.

I'm talking about black people, brown people, Asian people.

Everybody's tired of it.

We just had it up to here.

And the Chinese are laughing their heads off because they are racist and they love this dissension.

And if that

article,

if she went over to China and tried to write something like that about racist China,

they would expel her in two seconds.

And so, what I'm getting at is they're sick of it.

And if we don't stop it, it's going to be, it's not going to be good.

I can't think of any historical example where it ended well.

And I can already feel it because when I go places, especially out here, and I see somebody who looks like me,

And they seem to have an affinity with me.

You know what I'm saying?

Hey, what are you doing?

You know, whether I see them in the food market or I see them in the workplace in the San Joaquin Valley, and because they are starting to self-identify, and that's not good.

That's not good.

No, it isn't.

And especially since the United States is one of the largest multi-ethnic democracies, trying to survive as a democracy seems only divisive.

And that's why

there is no, I mean, there is a Chicano caucus, but it's not going to, it's not very, the Latino,

that hard left, racially chauvinistic Atsalan, it doesn't work because

most people south of the border in two generations are very successful.

They're not worried about this chauvinistic or this.

They intermarry, and by the third or fourth generation,

they're about as Mexican as I am Swedish.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And it's kind of romantic that you say you're Swedish or you might be Mexican, but you're fully integrated and assimilated.

And

that should be the goal of every ethnic group, white included.

And it's funny because when I grew up,

there wasn't a term like white in the North.

It wasn't.

There were Okies and they were really discriminated against.

I can trust me.

And then there was squareheads from Kingsburg that were Swedes and there were stupid Danes and there were Armenians.

They were terrible to Armenian.

It was almost anti-Semitic.

They called them Fresno Jews.

Can you imagine that?

And I remember a teacher, and

can you imagine this?

I'll end with this.

I was in a class.

I won't say what thing.

And the teacher says, why do Armenians have big noses?

And I thought, wow.

And they said, because air is free.

And everybody looked around and started laughing.

So I came home and told my

crusading mother, and she goes, you have a duty to go right back in that class and you correct him.

And if you don't, I will.

And so I went in and said, Mr.

Blank,

are you suggesting that

genetically people are crooked?

Is that what you're saying?

And he goes, oh, get off your soapbox, Victor.

Shut

up.

But I guess he got angry.

But can you imagine that prejudice toward Armenians?

I had an Armenian-American girlfriend in high school, and her father was very successful.

And once he showed me the deed of his home, and it was,

it had,

they had a title search.

He said, look at this.

And it had a restriction that Armenians were not allowed to buy a piece of property in Northwest Selma.

And so, and now,

Is there, if you see a person who's Armenian, do you think, no,

most of the community is fully integrated in a similar way?

Most successful.

You wouldn't think, you wouldn't think any difference.

Yes,

people who were slaughtered, one million, one million in 1917, one million and a half, and probably half a million between 1912 and 1915.

And they come over here with nothing.

And they're very close-knit and they have their strength.

And now those communities are assimilated.

And

that's the story of America with every group.

If you start with the 60s, we're going to be separate.

Rap Brown started it, you know, and all that stuff.

It's

road to perdition.

And everybody should speak up against it and don't worry about being called name.

Absolutely.

No.

So I think what the Republicans do so much a better job.

So Tim Scott was there.

He was really good tonight in the debate.

And people were evaluating.

If you were for him or against him, it had nothing to do with race.

People were, in the commentary I watched, they were evaluating each candidate.

And when they got to Vivek

or,

you know, they got to Tim Scott, it was,

you wouldn't know whether they were white or non-white or Haley, the same thing.

Nobody cared.

It was just the evaluation of their performance.

And they were the most critical of so-called white people.

Yeah, sure.

You would know that Vivek was young and skinny, though, because they kept

the fact of him.

All I knew about him was that

he had those hipster sport coats where he has like eight inches above his wrist.

He looked pretty natty to me.

And the other thing is

Chris Christie was kind of making fun of when he said, I'm a skinny guy like Obama or something.

And he said,

Yeah, he said, You're, you're a skinny guy like Obama.

And there was the inference that he was very young, and who knows what he could do, end up doing.

Right.

Chris Christie, though, shouldn't call anybody skinny, is what I'm saying.

True enough.

Yes.

Somebody may turn around and make a comment about his way.

Yeah, fat, fat.

Anyway, so that was, so I saw that article.

I just, everybody

who's listening is tired of it.

And we're going to judge people as people.

And if you have nine black friends and you're white, that's wonderful.

If you don't have a black friend, that's wonderful.

It doesn't matter anymore.

Just do it.

Do what you have to do.

And just don't count people by the color of their skin.

That's what Martin Luther King said.

And why we don't do that.

I know why we don't do it.

It's a lucrative, it's a lucrative business to be in the the race industry compared to what that dog eat dog world in the commercial sector yes and after uh george floyd it made it a lot more lucrative and so they can't even it's like michael brown nobody looks at the the whole thing we had one renegade officer who

had

was arrest trying to arrest a man that was high on fentanyl apparently to the initial autopsy that was later rejected, I think, for ideological purposes, but high on fentanyl to the point where he was very sick and he was recovering from COVID and he had advanced

cardio problems.

And

he was in the process of committing another felony bypassing counterfeit currency.

And he

had a long rap sheet and he went including a home entry violent and where he stuck a pistol to a pregnant woman's stomach.

And the next thing we know, we see him with angel wings and a halo.

And that's not to justify when somebody's saying, I can't breathe, and you still put, you know, your neck in.

No, whether what causes death, that officer, Shalvin, should have let up.

But he did resist arrest.

He resisted arrest repeatedly.

And boy, if you're young or you're old or whatever age you are and you are pulled over and you've got a cop who's arresting you, it's a subscription for suicide to resist arrest.

It just is.

Do not do it.

I've been pulled over when I was in high school and I said one smart word and that cop basically told me, you want,

this is going to go bad for you if you said another one.

I had taken out my contact lenses and I, those were the old glass ones.

He saw my eyes red.

He says, oh, you look like a drunk.

I said, no, I took, I don't drink.

I took out my contact.

He said, oh, don't lie to me.

I said, I'm not lying.

Maybe you're the one lying.

And that was it.

Sip there.

Yeah, you can't deal with cops that way, Victor.

No, you don't.

You don't.

Nobody, nobody wants.

Nobody should ever talk back to a police officer, both for the principle of law enforcement, they go through hell.

And they don't need another headache.

And then the more practical reason that they have a huge gun on their hip and you don't.

And they, or they can charge you a huge fine.

I did that one time.

I took a right turn way at night

onto a road where it said no right turn, but there was nobody around.

This cop pulls me over and he comes up to my window and he hadn't even gotten the words out of his mouth.

Did you see that sign?

I go, I didn't see the sign at all.

And he's just like pulling his ticket book out and writing me a ticket before.

They don't hesitate.

They don't hesitate.

I've had that happen to me.

And they don't hesitate.

No, I would never, I would never do it.

And I've been pulled over by non-white policemen, I think, three or four times.

And whether they're white or black or brown, they're policemen.

And

do not do that unless you want to be in trouble.

Yeah.

So I read that.

I just thought this essay.

The right killed woke is something out of the ethnic studies program of 1970.

I mean, yes, woke is over with.

It's peaked.

And people are sick of it because it is an old-fashioned Soviet idea of using something other than merit to adjudicate people.

In this case, it's the worst thing you can do is race.

And it's all based on the premise that 160 years ago we had slavery, then we had Jim Crow in the South, and then every other people born the next six generations are guilty.

And all the people

who

great-great-great-grandparents were oppressed, they are permanently impressed and scarred.

And all the people who have, you know, it's one out of six,

Well, probably one out of 20 people has an ancestor that lived in the South.

Or I can't even get into it.

It's just

part of it, I see it every day where I work, the whole obsession with race.

And it's just, it's not going to end well.

No, it isn't.

Well, on that, Victor, we are out of time here.

So thanks to all of our listeners.

Thank you for listening again.

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