Political Deception and Its History

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the namesake, and the star.

Victor Davis-Hanson is the Martin N.

Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor, I know you talked a lot with Sammy on

another podcast that you just recorded about the big, one of the big topics of the end of 2022, and that's George Santos.

And there may be one or other, two other things to discuss about that and a broader theme of deception, not only in

you are a classical historian, Victor.

I think you know that, don't you?

Can we look at the Greeks or any

insight into public lying?

And then also, Victor, you are also a military historian.

And I personally am kind of interested in continuing this deception theme into things military, some of the great deceptive moves of World War II.

So I'd like to hear your thoughts on that.

So let's get to some final wrap-up of your thoughts on the Santos affair, if we can call it an affair.

And then we'll get on to these other topics.

And we'll do that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

So, Victor, I must admit, I didn't get a chance yet to listen to what you and Sammy discussed about Santos.

But I can't wait to listen.

I know before this podcast,

we discussed things a little bit.

You have some more you want to add.

But let me just throw out there.

Maybe our listeners saw earlier this current week, I was watching Fox News, and I saw Tulsi Gabbard, you know, she interviewed Santos, and she really,

as we say in the Bronx, drilled him a new one.

And it was, to me, the kind of interview you would have hoped to have seen someone on MSNBC or CNN

do grilling Adam Schiff or some other liar on the left, which never happened.

So maybe a little bit of a hat tip to Tulsi Gerbert for that.

But, Victor, if you have any thoughts on that, and then any fuller, you know, other thoughts that you want to wrap up, your more collective thoughts on Santos, I'd love to hear them before

get into

things ancient and military.

Well, she and her

very, you know,

you not talked about that.

I think about her, for someone who is not a television anchor woman,

and you see all of these guest hosts all over Fox and she's got the most poise about it.

You know, it's almost as if she's a natural.

So she's very professional and she smiles and she's not a vindictive person, but she, you're right.

she had a stiletto and she just carved him up because he's a pathological liar,

every single thing.

But

he had two points that she could have, I think,

dissected him even more.

And his two meaculpas were,

but that's not what people cared about.

Well, they do.

They cared because I had a particular political agenda that affected their lives.

So what does my line mean?

That's a bogus argument, but she could have, you know, said they were inseparable or something.

And he's a vote for the Republicans in a closed house.

That's the subtext of all this controversy.

And then, if it was 50,

believe me, if the Republicans had a 50-person lead in the House or margin of safety, they would cut him loose like you wouldn't believe, just like the Democrats would.

When they cut Al Franken loose, it didn't make any difference.

Right.

They still

about the math.

And then the second thing is

it's, and Sammy and I talked about that, it's the calibration.

The left is arguing that nobody has lied to this extent.

I would argue that Joe Biden's lies were as existential, if not more so, than Santos's.

Because think about it.

What is more existential than, you know, we're hammering Santos, rightly so, because he tried to play the victim, right?

Concocted victim status, and then he concocted a fake identity that he was the

descendant of a Holocaust survivor.

Now we go over to Joe Biden, and what did he do?

He said he grew up Puerto Rican, didn't he?

Or a veritable Puerto Rican.

He said he was.

He was the League of Nations.

Did he say he went to Shul?

He was Jewish as well as Puerto Rican.

And then you wrote about it years ago and really on National Review.

And Sammy and I talked about it.

I mean, what is more despicable about lying about the circumstances of your first wife's death and destroying the life of a trucker who tried to avoid her when she went too far in the intersection and then

smearing him as a drunk?

That was horrible.

And he did it for years.

And nobody has said said a word until he finally got so much and he was, what, on the verge of being in vice president or something.

And he

finally was forced to.

And he lied about his identity.

He's lied about everything about his identity.

He,

I mean, some of these are really important lies.

I mean, he didn't get arrested in South Africa.

That was a complete lie.

He never was going to the Naval Academy.

That was a lie.

He was never a standout football player.

He was never in the top part of his class.

He was never a scholarship winner.

His family were not coal miners.

All of that was a lie.

The whole corn pop stuff was a lie.

They couldn't find corn pop.

That was just.

Can I add one victor that is really off the radar screen for a lot of people?

That he said, now here's Joe who walks around with rosary beads in his pocket and threatens to jam them down people's throats.

But he said, you know, he grew up going to a Black Baptist church.

And

nobody remembers hey i can top that i can top that he said he went to a black school remember a black college he said he enrolled in it that was a complete lie he never went to a black college

every time you get me a every time i cite a lie you trump it and every time you cite a lie i can trump it because there's no int to it right he lied about the vaccination he said to the american people

that when he entered office, nobody had been vaccinated.

17 million people had been vaccinated.

That was a complete lie.

And so, so my point is that,

yes,

I, you know, I was, I want to, I wanted to look what the left was saying.

So, when you want to know what the left, don't go just to MSNBC website or something or New York Times, go to the bulwark because, and, because they are, and the dispatch, because they are, for all purposes, more left than left.

And they're outraged at Republican liars because they haven't, you know, kicked out Santos.

Well, he was elected.

So

it's not the choice of

they can unseat him and say, you know, you voters gave us the wrong person and we're going to unseat him.

But they need to have some standard about the magnitude of lies, I suppose.

Or as, you know, who else would be

they've had people lie that they were Jewish in Congress.

They've had people like Blumenthal lie that he was a veteran.

What do you do with Elizabeth Warren?

Ryan,

first Native American law professor.

She lied her way into the Harvard faculty, right?

Right.

And her DNA had less than the average, what was it, 0.00?

So my point is, you need a standard.

And he's probably, I agree.

He's such a pathological liar, but I've never, then they said, well, Trump lied.

Well, Trump exaggerated in salesman fact.

You know, and Trump this and Trump, he was a huckster, but he didn't,

I mean, he didn't claim stuff that could be verified, right?

That was a complete lie.

Right.

Barack Obama lied.

Barack Obama's whole dreams for my father was a fable.

It wasn't true.

His first girlfriend was a composite.

Yes.

Was your first girlfriend a composite?

He lied about his identity.

He was.

I guess his birth certificate said Barack Obama, but he was a prep school kid whose grandmother was a bank president and sent sent him to prep school and he was known as Barry Sotero.

Was it Sotero?

His stepfather from Indonesia.

And then all of a sudden he went back and created a new identity as

Barack,

probably the first time since birth that anybody had referred to him as Barack.

And he became Barack Obama.

And then he wrote this memoir, which apparently is just impressionistic, because I guess that's the euphemism for lying about it.

But that's pretty serious to just completely lie about and then pass it off as a true story.

The left didn't say a word.

So I guess what, to conclude this conversation, yes, Soro, this Santos is a complete liar and in a perfect will.

We don't want him anywhere near Congress.

And he deceived the voters.

And we don't know, as Sammy pointed out, why the opposition,

who usually is quick to smear people, didn't find out.

But I think, I didn't think that, apparently, they didn't think he was going to win.

But

let's have a suicide pact and say, you know what?

Existential lies about your identity and

are

disqualifying.

So Joe Biden should get out.

He's a pathological liar.

Every day he lies about something.

And it's not just about policy.

or it's not just about the price of gasoline.

When I came in, you know, the price of gas was just lied about it.

It's not that.

It's his identity.

He's a complete fabrication.

He's a mythical person.

And

you layer onto that, Victor, this kind of,

the more I think about him, the more, and you know, I like, like you, I love old movies.

And I love the Manchurian candidate.

The first woman.

Yeah, yeah, but he's almost literally.

the Manchurian candidate.

He is.

I mean, he's, he's, where's the 10% for the big guy coming from?

It's coming from Red School.

It's a complete lie.

He looked at the American people and he said, I never discussed Hunter's business when you have pictures of him on a golf course with Hunter's crooked friends and Joe Biden's with them.

And did he ever say to, who are these people that I'm playing golf with?

How did I get to know them?

Why are you on the plane with me to China?

I mean,

it was just insulting, that lie.

So when I see all of these people, some of them are former colleagues on their soapbox at National Review, just outraged or the bulwark.

Oh, my God, this is a condemnation of the Republican Party.

No, you guys signed up with Joe Biden, and he's a pathological liar, every bit as

morbid, toxic as this Santos, with one exception.

This guy is one of 435 people.

He has one 1,000th the degree of power that that pathological liar, Joe Biden, has.

And it's not just Joe Biden's sonality.

He was lying and destroying a family when he was composment,

the truck driver's family.

He knew it.

There is a pattern to his lying.

It's always related to victimization.

That poor Joe was working class, that poor Joe, this drunk driver destroyed his family.

But poor Joe, he grew up in a Puerto Rican household.

Poor Joe,

you know,

he was persecuted, I suppose, for being Jewish.

Poor Joe, first one in his family that came out of the coal mines, poor, that kind of stuff.

Constant.

Yeah.

And

Victor, do you remember

some of the aforementioned friends a year after Biden is president, finally at that point saying, you know what?

He kind of lied.

He said he was going to be moderate and he isn't.

I'm shocked to fill it.

I wrote, finally, I remember

I got a letter from a reader and he said, Victor, we know already, stop it.

And what he was referring to in August and September and October and November of 2020, I was writing

columns on different topics, but I had a refrain in them that was monotonous.

And that was, Jim Clyborne rescued this failed candidate that was way back in the pack because the donor class went to him and they said,

we have a choice between socialist Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and mediocre identity politics candidates like Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigig.

Corey Brook, Berker.

And neither one of them can win.

But you've got to resurrect Joe Biden, and you have to make him the veneer of our party.

And you get the African-American voters behind him in South Carolina, and you make him win that primary.

And if he does, then he's down to Nevada and he will have momentum.

And that's what he did.

And there was a Faustian bargain.

The deal was, hey, Joe,

you're nothing.

You can't win.

We're going to make you win.

But

once you have old Joe Biden from Scranton, the working-class coal miner's grandson or whatever once you get in the white house you turn it all over to jill by jill

and this clain is that his name ron clain or whatever it is his chief of staff and

elizabeth warren and bernie and the obamas and they go to town with a hard left and you just have a nice time and hang out in delaware or or the Caribbean, do what you want.

And that's what the deal was made.

So everybody knew he was going going to be lying about that, being a moderate.

That was the deal.

And everybody fell for it.

I have some very good friends, both professionally and personally, that came up to me and said,

wow, you're really deluded about Trump.

How you can vote for his re-election?

And I tried to explain his record.

And they said, you don't understand.

He's tearing the country apart.

And I would say, no, I think the left is tearing the country apart.

If they just stop the anonymous, stop the retired officers calling him Hitler, stop the New York Times op-eds about, you know, sooner the better he leaves, stop the Rosa Brooks articles about a military coup, stop the Robert Mueller fake investigations, stop all of that.

Just let him rule for four years, and he'll do a good job.

He did.

But they were convinced that Joe Biden was going to be a uniter.

And you and I have talked before about the judicial hearings at Clarence Thomas and all that stuff.

He was never a nice person.

He was always a mean SOB.

And the only advantage of his sonality is that it masks that now.

So when he lies about vaccination or the price of gas or his own CV, or he says he's a, what, a semi-truck driver, or he nosed out Roger Strarboff

nosed him out at the Naval Academy.

Yeah.

Then everybody said, well, it's just old Joe.

You know, he's just Joe.

Joe, he's lost his mind.

Yeah.

So they're a senile.

You can lose your mind, and that's okay if you're president because you're not a liar.

But it doesn't mean you say, okay,

he's not a pathological liar because he's completely senile.

But do you want a senile president?

Yeah.

Eating jello and tapioca.

No.

Well, Victor, we're going to continue some of the deception themes and we'll get your put on your ancient

historian and classicist hat, and we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Before we delve further into things deceptive, Victor, I do want to remind our listeners, particularly our new listeners, that there is a website.

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I want to encourage you to visit it because you will find links to everything Victor does.

There's other appearances, previous podcasts, other podcasts that he's on,

articles he's written for American Greatness, his syndicated columns, Angry Reader, and

Ultra pieces.

What are they?

Those are exclusive pieces that Victor writes for that website.

There's a five-part series.

I don't know if it's finished yet, but as we're talking today, part five of a series Victor has written, is writing.

I'm moving my paperwork right now.

America at War, Successes and Failures.

It's really an unvarnished, non-jingoistic view of America's...

the American military and

some of its more glaring, disappointing moments and some of its great successes.

So that's the kind of thing that you will

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Victor,

my good friend, let's see.

Well, I'm just curious.

Speaking of things deceptive, what is there in

ancient Greek?

I should say classical, I should say classical Greek.

Ancient Greek sounds like so.

But in the classics, what do you think of any plays, any writings that are kind of spot on

to the topics we were talking about with Santos and

Biden?

You know, public lying.

Is there anything that should interest us?

That interests you?

You asked me if there's a lot of Yorgos Santopopoulos in Greek.

Yes, there were.

I guess that's what I said.

Antimenes, the Cretan, and he's a Cretan, right?

And he says all Cretans are liars.

That's a famous paradox.

Why believe that all Cretans are liars if he's a Cretan, right?

And so

what I'm getting at is they had a

pre-Christian idea.

There's no,

thou shalt not bear false witness.

In the sense that that probably the most versatile of all Greek mythological heroes is Odysseus.

And what's Odysseus do?

He lies to everybody.

He lies to the Cyclops and says nobody did it.

And then when

Cyclops yells out, Cyclops, what's wrong with you, Polymethyl?

Nobody did it.

Nobody did it.

And so he was a clever liar.

So the idea is if you're lying for advantage or for a particular cause,

apparently, and the gods lie as well.

Zeus lies.

They lie about their identity.

They lie about their birth.

They lie about their progeny.

There's a sense that the ends justify the means within certain limits.

As far as political lying, the Locus Classicus is the place of Aristophanes.

If you read about the Knights,

And you read about

the peace or the Acarney, all these people are liars.

Aristophanes, I know that the classics establishment in the modern American sense

has problems reconciling the fact that Aristophanes was an outspoken traditionalist.

Not that he was

a predictable conservative because he made fun of everybody, but he had a particular propensity to showing how crooked,

dishonest, deceitful, and lying were the demagogic class that ran the Athenian democracy.

Especially, he had this pathological hatred of Cleon, that he was a liar.

And so

they had an ambiguous attitude toward lying.

If there was, they had, I mean, where do we get the noble lie?

I know that was one of the

complaints about Straussism, Straussism, that it embraced the Platonic idea that there's Socrates has a long discussion, a couple of dialogues, about when is it appropriate or not to deceive the people

when they're not capable by feeding them, you know, sort of weapons of mass destruction, or it's not the Wuhan lab.

I guess if you're Anthony Fauci, you would say,

in a good platonic sense,

I don't think the American people can handle the fact that this thing was cooked up in the Wuhan lab that was overseen by the People's Liberation Army, and and I routed 600,000 minimal to Echo Health and Peter Dasick, and then it got over to Bat Lady, and they concocted a very virulent virus that has

no example among humans at all.

It's never our animals until it broke out.

So I can't let the people think that, because if I do, we could be at a war with China or we could destroy the CDC or the National

Institute of Allergies and Infection.

I can't let that do, so I'm going to lie about it.

And that's what noble lying is.

I get the impression with him, Victor, that he really doesn't think he's lying.

Like, I would think Bill Clinton thought he was lying.

And then when he never had sex with that woman.

Yeah.

And then we're like, oh my God, like wiped his brow and said, I can't believe I got away with that, with these suckers.

But I think Anthony Fauci does not, I does not believe he's capable of lying.

There's something about him that's above it all.

I'm a science.

Yeah, I'm cuckoo cacho.

Yeah, I am the walrus.

I mean, it's hard to find anything.

He did that deposition where I think they counted the state attorney general 175 times.

He feigned amnesia.

He lied about the mask.

He lied about the efficacy of the shots.

He lied about

social distancing.

He lied about natural immunity.

He's on record saying natural immunity before the outbreak, natural immunity is superior to acquired vaccinated immunity.

And then during the COVID, you said the opposite.

He has no credibility at all.

No credibility.

I think what happens is we just,

we got so used to him and we got so used to his lying that we never imagined what would be the alternate universe if he were not there, if he was not in charge with Burke's.

So you would probably have a discussion where a person would stand up in the White House garden and he would say, This is a very unique toxic virus, and it may have come out of the lab, but we don't know.

We're going to, we have one team that is investigating the origins of this thing.

And that's important so we can find the genetic sequence and understand why it emerged.

We're not going to prejudge it, but we're going to investigate it.

We have another.

We rush these mRNA vaccinations.

We think they're perfectly safe or they should not be too dangerous.

But we have a team because we had to rush them and we want you to get vaccinated.

We're simultaneously conducting official studies all the time to report any dangerous side effects.

And we're not ignoring off-label uses of drugs.

So we've got a team looking at PEPSIT.

Just, you know, Jack, just this week, there was a meta-analysis of, I don't know what was, 68 studies on ivermedicine.

Right.

And they came, and the aggregate conclusion by these disinterested investigators was that it had utility.

Cheap, off-label, utility, not very dangerous.

Just the opposite of what Fauci said.

And we could have had a team investigating that.

And we don't know, but there might have been, we could have had a study from the very beginning.

People were saying in China, people that were not on

phytosec but were on cheaper Pepsid had a greater propensity to withstand the virus.

And we had heard from the Australians about ivermeds, and we'd heard from people in Russia and France about hydroxychloroquine.

And instead, we just demonized all of that.

And then we had this voice in the wilderness, Scott Atlas.

And Scott is the first

to give credit to Jay Bacharia, to John Yiannidis, lesser extent to Michael Lebette, these three distinguished Stanford epidemiologists, immunologists, scientists, and they all said, as Scott did very early on, you're going to do a lot more damage by shutting down the economy, stopping medical procedures, increasing the odds of spousal family abuse, suicides, drug use, and most importantly, These students are never going to catch up if you shut them out of their school.

And we have a colleague at Hoover, very distinguished college, Eric Hanjalchuk, and he's just found out that he doesn't think that students will ever catch up.

And it's going to affect their college and later life.

I mean, they're going to be retarded.

I don't mean retarded the minimum, but they're going to be put back.

Yeah.

A year.

It's not arithmetic.

It's geometric because these were very crucial.

years for particular age cohorts and to just be robbed of all interaction and instructions it's like they lost it and they're going to be trying to catch up for years to come years

and scott said that and what was the reaction he got

the stanford medical faculty signed a group letter and the faculty senate censored him and they tried to fire him even though he was and they tried to destroy him and to this day they have never apologized and that's you know and this is the university yeah if we we've discussed this before has he taken legal action again well he threatened to and then they kind of backed off for a while they didn't pursue trying to fire him okay but he was persona non grata on the campus for what speaking the truth and he made another distinction that was very important that They didn't go after Jay.

I mean, they shadow banned him.

Twitter went after him.

And they did that to all of the others.

But they did not try to dare fire Jay Bachari.

Why?

Because Jay was not working at that and has not worked for Trump.

So the only thing that distinguished Scott was he was working for Trump.

Right.

And that meant they could go after him and they did not want to go after another colleague as much, although they hated Bacciari and Yanidis because they were.

distinguished and they were right.

And

it was very funny.

And this is the university, remember, why they were doing this

and what we know now about them.

This is a university

since the outbreak of COVID, in very sanctimonious, self-righteous fashion, tried to destroy one of their own for speaking the truth and has been not just exonerated,

but confirmed in all of his prognoses about the bad things that would happen from this policy of Fauci's.

And they've never apologized.

But this is a university that had a huge scandal about selling admissions

to fake athletes.

It had a terrible scandal in the business school about sexual harassment.

The current present president is under investigation for doctoring evidence.

I'm not going to prejudge it.

It produced the Stanford dropout, Elizabeth Holmes, and the Thuranos disaster,

who drew for her board members

some of the most preeminent people from the Stanford community, including George Schultz.

And this is.

Did anyone die from that?

That's controversial because the biggest question was

when they, I think it was Walmart, did this experimentally with them and they knew it didn't work.

There were people who had false insulin readings.

Oh, gosh.

And they took insulin.

They didn't need to, and some of them were ill.

And so

that's in litigation, I think, still.

And then I'm not even, I mean, I could do this all day, but we had the Sam Bankman-Freed, who grew up on the Stanford campus, and his parents were the most self-righteous, visible leftist law professors.

And somehow

I don't understand how they got $16 million.

That's the press report in one account, one account less of real estate.

And I don't know how you get that type of money unless it comes from your son.

And I don't know how you put up a bail for a $250 million bond.

And she was

a de facto bundler of money from Silicon Valley to

so there's that.

And then we have this word list that just came out of Stanford about words you can't use such as citizen and immigrant and what, American?

Stanford University says you can't use the word American because it's not fair to South Americans and Central Americans.

And then this is a university.

Oh, wow, who just released the statistics on their 2000, I mean, on the incoming class of 2026, 23%,

23%

are white.

And given 51, I think 52% are women.

rough calculus, an estimate, guesstimate might mean there's what, 12% white males, and there's enough legacies and athletes to pretty sure pretty much gobble that 12 percent up so it's just that university has essentially said and they don't require the sat and they won't tell people who took the sat and who took did not this optional sat now who were admitted but they did tell us it's 70 percent

70 percent of the people who got that rare perfect score were rejected and this is you put all that together and what do you come up with

You come up with a very dangerous time in a great university's history.

It's a wonderful university, but it's gone on the wrong pathway.

And they were judging Scott Atlas.

It's a crime.

It's shocking.

None of them have ever apologized.

No one has ever apologized.

No one has said we rushed to judgment on Scott.

The science now is pretty clear.

We tried to destroy Jay.

We were not fair to these people.

And we had people on the Elizabeth Holmes board coming from the Stanford community who should not have been on that board or they should have blown the whistle.

And

we should never publish a list with a Stanford stamp on it that says you can't call a person an American.

That is insane.

They did hide it.

They put it behind a paywall very quickly.

And they could have done that.

And they could have said, we do not discriminate.

We just had an investigation that in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, we condemned this university for having a quota against Jews.

And we're not going to do it again against white males and Asians.

And that's exactly what they did.

Victor Witch.

I'm apologizing for it.

Well, we're just, we talked about lying.

And, you know, I think lying is a first cousin of shame.

And there's no shame in the lie or

being found out that you're wrong, either one, right?

So the 50 people who, or however many, that signed the letter about Russian collusion, the intelligence official, not a one of them have been apologized.

They've doubled down.

Right.

They don't show up.

They had that little word.

Remember?

They had that little word where the letter, they said, well, wait, wait, wait, wait.

We said, it looks to us like it could be Russian.

Kind of wink and a nod, which means we're telling you it's Russian.

disinformation, but we're going to word it in such a way that we want you to believe it.

But when we're found out to be liars, we're going to retreat back to that refuge that we didn't quite say.

It's absolutely certain.

These people, you know, it's getting to the point where if you have a lot of letters after your name, it's synonymous with lying.

I hate to say that, but it is.

Something's wrong about this higher education system, this professional class, because

the Duke professors, same thing.

And that's 20 years ago or so now.

And

your PhD comes with an entitlement to lie, to not apologize.

We're back to Hesiod's works and days.

And basically, it's with material progress comes moral regress.

And that's

I'm not a medieval person, but there's something about the wealthier, more sophisticated a society becomes, it's no guarantee that there's moral progression.

Just because we can

talk to somebody across the globe in a nanosecond any time we want doesn't make us better people because we have that ability.

Apparently, these people think it does.

But we have an epidemic of lyme right now,

and we have an epidemic of thievery.

I'm speaking as one that's gone into the drugstore again.

Well, it's not

robbing, yeah, robbing

who's benefited from these last few years, and then it's robbing the next generation that

doesn't even exist with this.

I can't believe that.

A 10 billion is a small number for the deaf.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

Because I read these.

I always try to read the other side every morning.

I've been reading about what a great year.

You know, they sum up the year.

One of the winners, these crazy winners and losers of 2022, they said, Joe Biden is a winner because

he got this $1.7 trillion omnimus bill through and he got this infrastructure.

And I'm thinking, how hard is that just to borrow more money?

It's $31 trillion you owe.

You already owe $1.7 trillion in an annual deficit.

But it would be hard for people to hear, look, we don't have the money.

We're paying 4.5%

on $31 trillion in debt.

I can't just sign stuff and give stuff free to make everybody happy.

You're going to have to dislike me because I'm going to say no more.

or we're going to break this country.

He didn't do any of that.

You know, it's like somebody just writing checks to people on the street and saying, you know what?

Here, take this, take this, take this, on a counter that has no money in it.

Well, if it happened in our own lives, we'd know if the deadbeat kid came to us again for another $10,000, it would register

quite accurately and profoundly.

But on a national scale,

it's insane that what has gone on here with money.

Well, Victor, we're going to keep talking about deception.

I know I appreciate that you brought up Jay Bacharia, and our listeners should know when we record these podcasts,

we do two, and we're going to save him at greater length for our next podcast to delve into some of his concerns.

Maybe we'll touch on Fauci again in that recording.

But

I'd love to hear from

Victor, the military historian, and some of your thoughts related to military deceptions.

And we'll get some of your analysis on that, Victor, right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I've said this on many an occasion.

If folks are, those who are in particular who are military buffs, and Victor, you've written a lot of military history books, but you know, guys my age, our age, thrill to

tend to thrill to World War II history.

And your book, The Second World Wars, is really a must.

If you don't have it yet, you should get it.

Or tell your kids to get it to you for your birthday or whatever, whatever the excuse.

It's a wonderful book.

Truly wonderful.

Victor,

in that book, and you talk about, and we've heard this

in other places, George Patton, who's one of your military heroes, was used one of the great deceptions in World War II, but with his fake fake army that helped

duke the

Nazis on D-Day.

But

would you tell us about any other

military deceptive tactics that were used during the Second World War that were really profound?

Maybe there's something that's off the radar screen of many people.

Or go beyond the Second World War if you feel like it.

Well, I mean, in the Second World War,

there were all sorts of deceptions.

And the British destroyed the entire German Nazi infrastructure in Britain by co-opting agents and then making them file back fake, you know, intelligence reports while they were in their custody.

And that did a lot of damage, supposedly.

But as a general rule, anytime there was a surprise invasion that was successful,

there was an element of deception.

So

we went into Sicily,

but there's something ironic about this.

So we had, you saw that, I think it was 1955 or 6, 7.

Remember the movie The Man Who Never Was?

And there was a novel about it, but it was a true story that the British took a corpse.

They asked permission, I think, from the family, put it in ice, dressed him up in a uniform, and made a dossier, a bootcase with him.

And then they

went into a submarine off the coast of Spain, which was pro-Nazi.

And he washed, and they released him out of the submarine.

He washed up on the shore, and I'm doing this from memory.

And the Spanish found him.

Of course, they called him to be, so to respect their neutrality, they called in the British and the Germans, but they and then they returned the dossier to the British.

They thought he was a high-ranking officer.

But this is what's interesting.

The British had

They had prepared the dossier in a way they could tell whether it had been reopened and copied.

So the Germans photocopied it.

And then they thought that the invasion was going to be in Sardinia.

But here's the irony about it: it would have been better.

They thought that it was true.

There was a big disagreement among the hierarchy.

I think Canaris, the head of the Abuir, the

German intelligence, disagreed.

Hitler thought it was genuine.

But it would have been better to go up

to Sardinia.

Because historically, the wrong way to take Italy to get into Europe is to go from Sicily and then work your way up.

That spine of Italy is very hard to do.

You can stop, stop, stop.

What Hannibal did and others, if you want to invade Italy, you come from the north.

And Sardinia is far to the north of Sicily.

And they got stymied there.

So if they had just had a fake and said, we're going to Sicily.

Was there any debate about Sardinia as an option?

There was.

And the argument

was

that

it was much easier to supply Sicily

because it was close to the occupied North African coast.

And the British and the Americans could use their

invasion forces and marshal them right on North Africa and then just hop across.

to Sicily.

And more importantly, they did not want to go into Sardinia with an invasion fleet when Sicily was to the rear.

But I think those arguments could be overcome.

But the point is that part of the deception is the idea that, you know, maybe the deception was wiser.

So

the German, you mentioned Patton.

So after the two slapping incidents, he was put on ice basically.

for a year, a year, more than a year.

He was the greatest

armored command in, I think, the entire war effort on either side was put on ice for slapping two soldiers.

The Germans couldn't believe it.

But the point is that think about the deception.

Ike then says, we're going to make a shadow army with Patton

because he's a thruster and an armored cavalry guy that can just take off, and the Germans fear him, and they think he's our best commander.

So we'll put him over in England and we'll keep him on ice from June 6th all the way to

July 28th.

And we'll turn it over to Hodges and Bradley.

And

they'll never, you know, they won't be ready for our D-Day.

Yeah, they won't be ready because they're smart and they know that these people are not Patton and they're going to be stuck for two months.

And so the deception worked, just as in the case of Sardinia, because it was logical.

And had you taken Patton and you put him there from the very beginning, you would have been in a lot better shape.

And maybe you could have put, I don't know, Montgomery over there.

So that's the irony.

To make these deceptions work, they have to be almost counterproductive.

Take

another invasion that worked very well, and that was the invasion of the

Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, on January, on June 22nd, 1941.

So the Ribbentrop, the Malatov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Russians were cheating on it.

The Germans, they were mutually suspicious.

So how in the world did the Germans marshal

3.7 million people, the largest invasion in history, bigger than Xerxes' fleet and combined arms invasion of 480 BC, all the way from the Arctic Circle up, you know,

near St.

Petersburg, and all the way down to the Black Sea.

They had, and it was

the greatest coalition.

We don't like to say that about the Third Reich, but they had Finns, and they had Hungarians, and they had Spaniards, and they had Italians, and they had Romanians.

And how did they marshal that huge force right there

on the borders of the Soviet Union?

And one of the reasons they did, was they started increasing flights over Britain, and they had barges and they had naval traffic that the Russians were listening to and they kept saying Operation Sea Lion.

After the Blitz, we got stalled, but now we're, you know, we couldn't quite do it in late 1940, early 41, but now we're going into Britain.

And they believed them.

They believed them to the degree that when early reports on the day of the invasion reached Stalin, that the Germans were coming into the Soviet Union's soil in force that he had some people shot for trying to stir up trouble between this non-aggression pact members.

So, and the same thing, just to finish with the Japanese.

How in the world

did the Japanese have a huge force

3,000 miles from Tokyo Bay in complete radio silence

and brought six of their fleet carriers within 300 miles of Pearl Harbor, and nobody knew it when we had radar and we supposedly have patrols?

And the answer is we all think that it was our fault.

Maybe.

Maybe

our radar operators were not listened to or there was a garbled transmission or we didn't have enough and our commanders were punished later.

But maybe it was the Japanese and maybe the Japanese had a very sophisticated method of deception.

That is, with radio traffic

between ships, they were able to convince American intelligence officers who were listening in from Corregidor in the Philippines that all six carriers were home in Tokyo.

And, you know, when they asked that brilliant Rochefort who broke the codes on the eve of the Battle of Midway, he said, well,

when did you people realize that the Japanese fleet was not in Tokyo Bay?

And he said, on December 7th.

And so it was a brilliant deception on the part of the the Japanese, and they kept radio silence the entire way through choppy winter seas.

And they also had a great feat of seamanship.

Yeah, another significant force steaming towards the Philippines.

And was there not also another force moving towards

Singapore at the same time?

Or is that separate?

No.

No.

They were,

they destroyed the Prince of Wales and the Repulse,

the big battlecruiser and battleship

right in the Singapore campaign within three or four days.

And they destroyed half of MacArthur's bomber and fire forces on the ground, wingtip to wingtip the next day in the Philippines.

It was just shocking.

And they, yeah, and this was, and they had been very careful to

ensure that the Americans understood that their strategic vision was to protect the homeland.

And so America, and they kept sending out radio transmissions about strategy and texts that they knew were being listened to.

So the Americans were just convinced that these were a defensive, timid people who only bullied fellow Asians.

They wouldn't dare

be preemptive or get in the face of these American giants or superpowers like the British.

And of course, they knew that.

They knew the Americans and the British thought that, so they did it.

And they created this deception that they were timid when they weren't.

And they downplayed their abilities.

And,

you know, for the first six months, they ran completely wild.

They killed over five or six thousand British, Australian, American sailors in a series of naval battles after Parole Harbor.

I think they lost a total of 200 sailors and one tiny little ship.

They sank carriers, British carrier, they did a lot.

They destroyed the Australian, the Dutch, excuse me, the Dutch fleet.

They did a lot of really amazing things until

basically into the Battle of Coral Sea in May of 42, and then Midway in June.

Well, some someday, and

we should talk about one other thing, but separately, someday,

maybe we should talk about America and its submarine

forces

and how they performed or didn't perform.

Because we see a lot of what we know, Victor, is through the movie: is Carrie Grant with the submarine in Tokyo Bay and Clark Gable, there's some great submarine movies,

and maybe by 1933 or 34, whenever they were truly proficient, but

I don't know.

I think everybody's deluded of the reality early on.

Well, we had defective torpedoes.

The Germans did too in the beginning, but I think we're so

I guess we're so acculturated.

Sammy and I talked about the great movie Das Boot.

Oh, sure.

Right.

Yeah.

It's your favorite movie, isn't it?

Yeah.

And I think that we were so

because the German U-boats were so effective in World War I and so effective in World War II,

I think we got, we had this idea that,

and we lost some early submarines, that the Germans were just better.

And we had these M14, I think that's what they were called, torpedoes, or M6 that had been used in World War I still, and

they were defective.

And

we didn't give proper recognition.

But my gosh, when we got into the Beidou class and beyond, the Americans built by far the best submarines in World War II.

Their commanders were the best.

Their supreme command was the best.

And they completely destroyed, along with the B-29 mining program of dropping aerial mines,

they destroyed 90%

of the merchant fleet of the Japanese by February or March 1945, and about 90% of all commerce was styming.

Japan was completely cut off from its empire.

And I don't think we give them

ample credit for theirs.

Well, we should focus on that on

the

business.

I wrote about it in the Second World Wars.

I hadn't known about it, but the more research I did writing that book, the more

I was so impressed with the U.S.

Navy's submarine force,

not just the quality of submarines that were produced very quickly,

but also the quality of submarine commanders and how

brave they were.

And then

that was very important because

whereas

I tried to defend the Sherman tank, there was a lot of positive attributes about maintenance and ease of repair and standardization, et cetera.

That legacy that we did not have the armor protection firepower of a Russian or German tank kind of plagued us until we made the Abrams 50 years later.

But contrast that with the submarines, we came out of

World War II with pride in having the best bomber fleet and the best submarine fleet and the best carrier fleet.

And that tradition of excellence was continued.

And that kind of was true across the board.

What we didn't do well in World War II, we didn't correct quick enough.

And what we did very well, we got even better.

I think those are things you touch on in this, in your series at America at War, Successes and Failures, which you can read, folks, if you subscribe to VictorHanson.com.

So

do that.

Hey, Victor, one final thing, if you don't mind, before we wrap it up.

Someone wrote me, said Victor should be happy.

And they sent me a 10-day weather report from, I think it was from Los Angeles.

But then I was like, Victor doesn't live in Los Angeles.

Oh, sacramento was originally you know things could be radically different in selma but seems like a lot of water is uh that that california is getting a significant amount of rain uh is that the case

uh yes it's raining it's it's one of those um

they used to call it the pineapple express where we had a um the the high pressure in the north

off the coast of northern california oregon or Washington, all the way up to Alaska, broke down.

And when that breaks down, you get winter storms.

But in some cases, when you have those storms that come from not just, you know, Russia and Japan around to Alaska, and then they kind of circle down when they're blocked by high pressure.

Not only did they come in, we've had a really cold streak, but you start to suck up these other storms from the mid-Pacific and southern Pacific, and they get sucked in when there's no high pressure.

And they're, I mean, we've had degree, a week ago we were, I don't know, 42, 43, 44 daytime temperatures.

It was very cold.

And then suddenly we're up to 50 degrees and moisture, more moisture.

So we've had two combinations and the result is that I don't think

we haven't had a sunny day.

We've had one sunny day, maybe in six days, and often on showers and in the mountains.

I get a couple of reports, newsletters, and they look at the reservoir levels right now.

And we're about, I think I looked at one this morning, we're about 120% of where we should be at this time.

And more importantly, there's a huge storm coming in Saturday, tomorrow.

I'm going to drive to L.A., so I'm not looking forward to that.

And there's another big storm next week.

And the result of it is, I think by a week from today, we will be a hundred percent for the whole year, even though the rain year doesn't end until June.

And so

well, I think

all the prayers for rain have finally caught up with

everybody in the climate change lobby group have said that we're in a permanent drought.

Right.

And then there's no water to spare.

And so, you you know, it's not our fault that we're letting what water there is out to the Pacific in San Francisco Bay.

So let's see what happens because we're going to have the reservoirs full.

And

this is a tragedy, Jack, because the voters approved a bond.

I think it was over $7

billion to build Temperance Flat above Millerton Lake near Fresno, which would have given us...

a million and a half more acre-feet of storage.

They wanted to build another

twin to

the San Luis Reservoir on 152, I think it was called Los Banos Grande.

That would have given us another million and a half or such.

They were going to make another one on the sites.

These were all low elevation, low elevation, easily accessible, easily constructed dams and reservoirs.

Of course, already paid for, right?

Paid for it.

Yeah.

And that would have, right now, we could fill them up.

And the argument was, well, you're never going to have any water.

We're in a drought.

And if you go back and read the original California Water Project report, you can access it online.

And the Central Valley, these brilliant grandparents of ours said

these are tertiary reservoirs, and in particular years, maybe one, we don't quite specify, but you're going to get a very, very wet, unusual year, and you do not want to let it go out to the ocean.

You will have an ample stream in the San Joaquin and the Sacramento rivers and their tributaries.

But you can fill, if we build the entire system, we would have had about 10 million, and you could have raised Shasta Dam or Orville Dam, raise it higher, and we would have had 10, 15 million acre-feet, a whole year, half a year we would have had.

And now here we are.

And I think you're going to start to see the left and Gavin Newsom cheer this on.

They'll be delighted.

They're going to say, wow, the reservoirs are full.

We have to let the water go out to the ocean and have riparian 19th-century riverbanks again.

Those little salmon at $50,000 a plant could go up to the Sierra now.

I mean, so it's tragic because you know what?

As sure as the sun rises, within a year or two, we're going to have our typical California pattern of

kind of a drought and then a a real drought and then kind of a drought and then a wet year.

And climate change or no climate change, that's been the history of it.

But when you do not save the water, and I'm looking out at my pump right now, my house pump has gone from 58 feet, 57 water

level to 97.

Had to drill a new well and pump 97 feet.

And that's typically just because we had a very sophisticated Central Valley water storage and seepage program where

the spring melt from the Sierra, all gravity-fed, no pumps, just flowed into the irrigation system, the canals.

And then about every half mile, every farm had a pond.

It was a communal pond.

You gave the rights to the irrigation district.

They filled it up and that recharged the aquifer.

And we haven't been doing that because we haven't,

when we get a wet year, we don't fill them up.

We let it out to the ocean.

Insane.

Suicide.

Insane.

It's right up there with high-speed rail at the expense of safe, effective freeway construction on Highway 99, I-5, and 101.

We have archaic, deadly, deadly highways that aren't even freeways in some places where we are chasing a unicorn of a $15 billion

boondoggle high-speed rail that's going to cost eventually over $100 billion or more.

Well, Victor,

we should still, on that discouraging note, we still thank the God, God, as opposed to the gods for bringing some water relief to a region that really needs it because we all need it.

We all eat the food that comes out of the Central Valley.

So, Victor, we're going to end up with

thanking our listeners who have listened, no matter what platform.

And for those who listen on iTunes and Apple, thanks for the five-star ratings that all of you seem to leave.

Even one, I've got to tell you this quickie here.

This guy named Duke

Aru, Duke Aru.

And it's titled, I'm going to read another one, but

who's Jack Fowler?

Tell Jack Fowler to shut the heck up.

I want to hear Victor's view, not Jack.

Sammy is very good.

She tees it up for Victor to speak.

And even despite that, Victori gave five stars.

Now, here's somebody, replicant 5150,

who titles his

comment, National Treasure.

BDH is a national treasure.

He is the perfect combination of a farmer's wisdom with an academic's knowledge.

Not that one can equate the two.

As a good farmer is far superior to most academics these days.

His analysis is only rivaled by his humor.

No small feat.

Keep up the great podcast.

Thank you for the hours of wisdom and entertainment you bring to the listening masses.

Replicant, 51.50, thanks.

And even you, Dookaroo, thank you.

And Victor, thanks.

Thank you.

I would just say one closing thing about Sammy.

I was teasing her.

She's gone complete

Elon Musk Hull Hog.

That's her iconic hero.

Yes, because she has ordered Starlink

for.

Starlink.

She is now the proud owner of a Tesla, and I'm trying to dissuade her from buying a Elon Musk satellite.

Oh, okay.

Well, the next thing will be she'll want an Elon Musk satellite.

That's her Kiro.

Maybe, maybe Sammy will want to go up on one of those rides with William Shatner.

I'm a big fan of Elon Musk, too.

And

just because I define, you can define a person by his enemies as well as his friend.

Yeah.

Well, I'm betting that in the year 2023, there's going to be a podcast episode with Victor Davis Hansen and Elon Musk.

I think that's it.

Yeah, I do too.

I think it would be terrific.

Well, Victor, thanks for everything.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Thank you, everyone.