Elections Unwind and a Homage to Our Veterans

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Hi there, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is an author, scholar, essayist, political, and cultural critic.

He is a veritable encyclopedia on warfare as well.

And today we're going to have a homage to our war veterans because this should be published either on

November 11th, Veterans Day, or the day after.

So we would like to do a little discussion of what our war veterans experience.

And we'll look at a few battles.

But we also want to look at the elections because what is everybody fighting for after all, but that we have democracy and freedom.

And so our elections have just finished.

And this is the first opportunity after the elections that Victor has had a chance to talk about the some of the outcomes.

I realize that the elections are not complete as of today which is Thursday November 10th but we will hopefully come to some conclusion.

I realize the Georgia race is going to go on for another month or so but we'll get there.

Before we go into the show today, let's go ahead and have a moment for some messages and we'll come right back.

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Welcome back.

And I would like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin Annely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Well, hello, Victor.

How are you doing today?

I'm on the road, Sammy.

I had to go to Milwaukee for a Bradley Foundation, and then I flew to Tucson, and now I'm back in Phoenix for the Horowitz.

And this is kind of my swan song to speaking.

I think at the age, at the ripe old age of 69, and maybe under the influence of long code, I think I'm retiring from out-of-state speaking, but I've enjoyed it.

And the people have been very hospitable.

I love

my former, my fellow Bradley board members.

Everybody's been talking about the election both before and after.

So it's, but I haven't been able to, because I've been working all day at events, I haven't been able to do any media on the election, but I have been staying up kind of late and reading about it and talking to people.

So that's the value.

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm sure that I'm going to learn something new.

I'm sure your listeners will too.

So let's go ahead and get into the election.

It seems to me, just as kind of

a novice at this, both sides are claiming victory on this election.

And it does seem that the Republicans have gained more seats, but the Democrats seem to be saying, well, we didn't do as bad as we thought, either in the seats that we lost or in the percentage that they lost by in some of those seats.

So what I thought we would do today is look at the

positive side first, some of the better victories and your thoughts on what they are showing us about our political culture at this time.

And let's go ahead and start with the really big victory for DeSantis and Rubio in Florida.

What are your thoughts?

Well, that's pretty amazing because just four years ago, as everybody's pointed out, he only beat a very mediocre Gillam.

Remember the person with a sort of sordid aftermath to his failed gubernatorial bid?

He ended up in a hotel room under dubious circumstances.

Anyway,

in four years, he's transmogrified into this powerhouse that won.

He didn't just beat Charlie Christ.

He obliterated him.

And his coattails brought Marco Rubio, who obliterated his opponent.

And there wasn't one Republican that won in this supposedly purple, I mean, one Democrat that won in a statewide office.

So now, and, you know.

His critics say, well, that's because he's got 300 to 500,000 ex-patriot, ex-patriot New Yorkers or Californians that have moved there.

And they're pretty right-wing.

There's more to it than that.

He was right on the lockdowns.

He was right to take on Disney.

He's right to take on critical race there.

So he's got a very successful

record.

And

before we get into the midterms, there's three dynamics that everybody should be aware of.

One is this,

I mean, in an otherwise somewhat disappointing night, he's...

It was brilliant what happened in Florida.

Nobody had anticipated that margin.

There were even people saying, well, maybe Charby Chris is going to close the gap.

He's only seven.

He's six behind.

No, he was obliterated.

And he won Dade County.

He won 55% of the Latino vote.

He won a liberal enclave.

He won almost all the liberal enclaves.

So it was pretty, you know, 60%.

How do you do that in Florida if you're a Republican?

So that was one factor.

The second factor is, and we'll get into it, is Joe Biden now claims that

he was successful.

So his sort of night phantom of the opera, semi-fascist, un-American, things that we criticize in this podcast, together with they want to kill every woman by denying her an abortion, together with

Paul Pelosi was attacked by a mega zealot who happened to be a nudist, a commune, a hippie, an illegal alien, and a BLM pride supporter is nevertheless under the influence of tough Trump rhetoric.

Well, that all, we said that that was demagoguery and McCarthyism, and people would see through it.

No, we were wrong.

It worked.

And we thought, you know, we being the conservative side thought

that was a fatal error of Biden not to try to defend his record on inflation, fuel prices, the border, crime,

deteriorating racial relationships,

maybe foreign policy, most notably Afghanistan.

And he didn't talk about any of them, much less did he defend them, much less did he alter course.

He just said, you know what?

These people are insurrectionaries.

They want to destroy democracy.

And if a Democrat loses, that's synonymous with democracy being destroyed.

And you know what?

It worked.

It worked.

And so he is going to run, I think,

barring his health.

He's 80 years old, but he's now giddy.

He's rubbing salt in the conservative wounds.

And he's, and

so that's the second thing.

And the third thing is Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump is being blamed and then defended.

He's being blamed because his candidates, with the exception of J.D.

Vance, did not do well.

And then his defenders say, well, either that O'Day in Colorado, so he tried to distance himself.

So they're going to go back and forth over that.

But Donald Trump did, on the eve of the election, do two unwise things.

He winked a nod that he was going to run.

And, you know, there's no law against doing that, but you take away attention from the midterms coming up.

And more importantly, you galvanize some left-wing nuts to go out and vote against any Trump-affiliated candidate.

And then, two, he attacked Ron DeSantis.

He called him Ron DeSantimonius.

And why would you do that?

Split the ranks right before the election.

And then, of course, he was sitting on a $100 million packet.

And I know that that was being saved for his primary fights, but when you have Blake Masters outspent and and you have Oz outspent, you might have wanted to spread 10 million bucks around because it would have enhanced his name, but he didn't.

And then after the election was over, he attacked O'Day and was kind of happy that he lost.

And he said some other things.

He said, you know, I really didn't like Oz.

It was, you know, Melania watching TV.

And so, and then he attacked the

New Hampshire candidate, the general, Bolduk,

is that his name?

Bolduck.

Bolduck, yeah.

He attacked him and said, you know, he should have gone the whole nine yards on, you know, election denial, and he didn't.

He was running against that Hassan.

He lost by a lot, did he?

He did.

So the point I'm making is, before we get into winners and losers, is that Biden a winner in his mind, but

he avoided a wipeout, and that's victory.

And then DeSantis a winner and Trump a perceived loser.

Now, how does that figure out?

It means the following that

Biden will run now and that's bad for the Democrats because he will lose.

He's a flawed candidate, a flawed individual.

He's not going to win.

But he would have a greater chance, I think, against Trump at this early date than he would DeSantis.

So

given DeSantis showing and given Trump's criticism, you might see that

you're going to a 2024 runoff between these two people,

an election between them, and that would favor the conservatives.

That's one way of looking at it.

The other way is expectations.

You know, the average is 21 seats and one or two Senate that a first-term president loses.

And Joe Biden was bragging that he only lost five seats, but we're not out of this yet.

And so we're not going to learn.

I think as I'm speaking on a Thursday afternoon on November 10th, and I'm in Phoenix at 3.30 in the afternoon, there are a lot of seats out there, and there is a lot of

pickups that people did not expect from.

Republicans in Long Island, Lorraine Babbitt apparently has just been

that she was behind and now she, I think she's been declared the winner, or she's going to win.

And it looks like there's a pathway where they could win 18 to 20 seats.

If that were true, that would be pretty good.

And there's a pathway.

I don't think it's going to happen.

But if Adam Laxalt hung on and Blake Masters

came back and they won Herschel Walker's, they would get the proverbial 52 seats that everybody had predicted.

So, what I'm getting at is

after all this sturm and and drag, you might end up with the Republicans getting,

doing okay,

but they're going to seem like they didn't do okay.

And why was that?

Because you had everybody predicting in the Wall Street Journal power, all, you know, I thought, I said that on one of the, I said it would be, they're going to have a rendezvous with a reckoning.

I said that about the Democrats.

But there were people, Newt Gimrich said they would, they could lose up to 50 seats and they could get 55, the Republicans could get 55

Senate seats.

So the expectations were so high.

And what those expectations were fortified by was that really good pollsters, the inside advantage people.

I really like Robert Cahaley, and he's got a good record.

He's fourth or fifth-rated poll in the United States out of 30 or 40 polls for accuracy in the past.

But he was, he was,

he was giving polls that were astounding that had Kerry Lake up by six and he was right about J.D.

Vance but Kerry Lake and Lake Masters was even or up a point and in New Hampshire Boldwick was going to close within one and Patty Murray was in danger by that wonderful Tiffany Smiley and Tudor Dixon whom I really liked was

Gretchen Whitmore he was she she had closed the gap and so there was this impression that

not only were they going to do very well, they were going to blow them out of the water.

And so

that has colored everything that didn't happen, and people are blaming and blaming and pointing fingers.

But if you just take a deep breath,

there's about a 90% likelihood today on a Thursday that Joe Biden is dead in the House of Representatives.

He's not going to have any more legislation.

They will have discipline and they will stop all of his legislation.

And there will be House investigations of Hunter's laptop, of the Wuhan lab,

et cetera.

And there is a 50-50 chance

that

they're ahead 49

to 48.

They need two out of three seats.

They need Herschel Walker.

And it's very hard for an incumbent once he loses to then win

because, you know,

and Warnick didn't win.

Well, he got more votes, but he didn't get his 50%.

And we'll see what happens.

But there's a 50-50 chance that Herschel Walker could win.

There's about a 30%, 20%, 30% chance Blake

Masters could win.

I'd say there's a 55% chance that Black Salt can hang on.

So there's a possibility they could get 51 votes.

If that were true, they would unleash a lot of investigations and there would not be another Supreme Court or high federal court, appellate court, circuit court appointment.

Wasn't there about 70,000, I think, libertarian

votes for for libertarian in Georgia.

That's a very good point because

those ballots had already been cast when the Libertarian candidate pulled out.

So everybody said, well, Herschel Walker,

he's a beneficiary that the Libertarian candidate pulled out.

So they obviously, because he was

he was more conservative, he picked up those votes.

No, it didn't happen that way because most of the votes, or a great deal of them at least, had already been cast.

So I think the guy's name was Oliver, but there were, I think it was more than 70, it was like 80,000 votes.

And, you know, he's only behind.

He ended up only behind by 40,000.

If he only got half of the libertarian votes,

that could make a big difference

if those votes all go to him.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, if they go in to vote, because they may be just so disgruntled that they don't go vote.

But probably.

What we don't want to do is you don't want to do

what Donald Trump did in 2021.

Excuse me, 2000.

Yes, 2021 in the last special election.

He was so angry at the national vote that he essentially told people to rally that your vote was not going to count.

And he got in a big fight with Kemp and he got in a fight with the Secretary of State.

And then he offended swing voters.

And he didn't think that it it would be possible for Georgia to elect two socialists, but they did because the base sat out and the swing voter turned on Trump and they took it out at Kelly Lawfer and Purdue.

So you don't want to do that.

I think the best strategy, I think Kaylee McEnany said that, that Trump stays out of Georgia, but he

fervently hits the airways and as rallies tells everybody to vote in Georgia for Herschel Walker.

And then he taps some of that $100 million.

I know it's his money, it's his pack, but he sends $10 or $15 million down there.

And then you send in all of the Senate colleagues of,

would-be colleagues of Herschel Walker, if he were to win.

You send in DeSantis, you barmstorm the state, and you watch

the mail-in ballet.

One thing, one lesson of this election is that when you're getting 60 and 70% of people not voting on Election Day and you throw into that existing mess, ranked voting, like what you saw in Alaska or this majority necessary you see in Georgia,

we're not going to get results anymore.

And a lot of this is tech-based,

getting the word out or mastering the data points in ranked voting or organizing people.

for mail in.

And the Republicans are just,

they're not techies to the degree that leftists.

And they've mastered this non-election day voting, and it's killing the Republicans.

So they either have two choices.

They either have to get in these red state legislatures and say, you know what, we're not going to go back to an absentee ballot that you have to have a reason that you're not going to go.

You have to request it.

You're not going to get it mailed automatically.

We're going to get down to 10 or 15 percent.

We're going to have the returns done by midnight of the election day.

And there's not going to be any third-party vote harvesting.

Or they're going to to have to do what Devin Nunes did very successfully and brilliantly in his last congressional race.

He out-vote harvested the vote harvesters.

He just said, you know what?

I can't change the crazy laws in California, but I see how they operate and I'm going to trump how they operate.

In other words, I'm going to do what they do, but far more efficiently.

And so they sent, you know, 15 million or might have been even more.

to destroy Devin Nunes in his last congressional race.

And he still won by eight or nine points.

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Can we, um, there's another positive side that I wanted to look at, which was the

victory in Georgia of the Governor Kemp over Abra, Stacey Abrams, and the victory of Abbott over Beto O'Rourke.

And I was wondering those losses for Abrams and O'Rourke.

Is that

the $200 million couple?

Yeah, there's that end to their political careers.

The $400 million couple.

Yeah, well, you know, there's an article somewhere,

maybe it was on Powerline.

That's one of my favorite avenues on the internet.

That they're kind of like the Harold Stassen.

You know, he was this character that had,

he ran for every presidential, in every presidential rate.

He ran for everything and he lost.

He ran in his 80s.

I was a teenager, and every time they had their election returns, there would be Harold Stassen.

And that's Beto Rourke.

This is the third election that he's lost.

He lost as senator against Cruz.

He lost in the presidential primaries in 2020.

And now he's lost against Abbott.

And he keeps getting worse each time that he runs.

And he does little videos of him at the dentist.

And he does some little, wears his tight pants and does his dad.

But he's a completely fabricated media invention.

There's no there there.

He was a three-term congressman that was undistinguished.

Stacey Abrams is an election denier.

She got rich and made a career.

When she ran the first time against Kemp,

she was known as a trashy, mediocre novelist that wrote basically sex scenes and romance novels.

And she had hundreds of thousands of dollars out on her credit card.

And she was a non-entity.

And then she created this myth.

that she was Barbara Jordan, the articulate Black woman that was an intellectual.

It was a myth.

Barbara Jordan was a genius and very highly educated.

And Stacey, you know, Barbara Jordan.

And she toured the country claiming that after she had lost by over 50,000 votes, that she was the real governor.

And all these people who are now calling Republicans election denialists,

they were welcoming her as the real, true.

virtual governor of Georgia.

And then she ran again, she lost.

If you total up the millions she spent in two races and the millions that Beto spent in three, it's over $300 million.

We can add another name.

You know what I've just thought?

Let's add Charlie Chris to that.

Yes, that's true.

That guy has his own contribution to the Hall of Loser fame, and that is Hall of Fame for Losers.

And that is he

although he was governor for one term and he was two-term congressman, but he has a distinction of running for a senator and as senator and governor in three different parties.

He's run as a Democrat, he's run as a Republican, he's run as an Independent, and he's lost in all three manifestations.

So these people are all media creations.

There was never anything there with them.

They were never going to win.

And they were useful to incite money or grip money on the internet or to make an abbot or Kemp spend more money.

But the idea they were going to be serious contenders was all mythology.

They were mediocrities.

All three of them were mediocrity.

Yeah.

Well, and one more thing before we go to a break.

The house seats in California and New York seem to have gone red, or at least that's my read.

Whereas you see places like Colorado and Connecticut and New Hampshire where they're all turned blue.

But did you get that impression about California and New York?

Yeah,

we don't have all, and I want to be careful, we don't have all, because California is a mess.

It's just as bad as Arizona.

And it's, you know, nobody,

there's no consequences for being a mediocre registrar in California like these other places.

There's no consequences.

But it does seem that races in Orange County, San Joaquin Valley, Sierra Foothills, people like...

Mike Garcia, that everybody said was going to lose in the Tehachapi area and David Valladeo, who I think there's only two people who voted to impeach Donald Trump the second time in the House that have survived of the 10.

And I think he's one of the two.

The other guy, I think, is in Washington that won.

And I think David Valadeo is going to Valadeo is going to win.

He was supposed to lose.

So, California, I think, you know, we were down to seven in 2021.

And then in,

excuse me, we were up, we were down to seven seven in 2018.

Then we went up to 11 congressional seats out of 53 in the state.

And I think we could get up to maybe 14 or 15.

And California, this is what's ironic about it.

For a so-called blowout,

the sweep in Long Island were those four congressional seats and maybe a couple of pickups or two in California.

Kevin McCarthy might have more than seven or eight.

He could have 10, 15, even 20 in theory.

And that wouldn't be too bad.

I think think

Nancy Pelosi, ironclad Nancy, ran the house for two years with, what, five or six seats on depending on vacancies.

That's the only margin she had.

She had enough discipline to give us the Inflation Reduction Act, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's take a moment for some messages and come right back to talk about the less inspiring moments on Election Day.

We'll be right back.

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We're back and Victor, so let's look at, I guess the least inspiring of all the races was Federman won.

That's just incredible.

That's like the Democrats have proven that they can have basement Joe and

compromised Fedderman both elected.

That just stuns me.

You know?

Well, what are your thoughts?

An 85-year-old won an election who is dead for, I guess, three weeks in Pennsylvania.

So what it means is that mostly young people, but not always, they just vote a straight Democratic ticket.

They're told just to vote D.

And I think it's a larger issue, though.

When you look at these races now, the country is so divided.

And when you have a federal system where people can immigrate from state to state,

in the short term, what's happening is Illinois,

California, New York,

places like Massachusetts.

People are leaving and they're leaving to sunnier climates, but they're leaving to places like Texas, Texas, Tennessee,

Florida, where they're so-called free states.

There's fewer taxes, there's fewer hassles, there's less crime.

I know that AOC and say, oh, there's higher crime.

Well, there's only higher crime in red states because of these big cities that are run by blue mayors in red states.

So my point is this, that

it's going to be very hard

for

anybody in the opposite state to win.

By that, I mean, you have really good candidates, even though they were first-timers in two cases, but Tiffany Smiley and Tudor Dixon.

I don't want to trash Trafalgar or insider advantage, but I think they contributed inadvertently to these expectations that these two candidates in Michigan, respectively, and in Washington could beat Gretchen Whitmore or Patty Murray.

And that wasn't going to happen, given the institutional power and money and get out the vote and vote harvesting and all that that goes on with the Democratic Party.

But nonetheless,

those were good candidates.

And Patty Murray is a terrible senator.

Gretchen Whitmer is a terrible governor.

And Kathy Hochill is a terrible governor.

But it doesn't matter.

People are just voting as they self-separate.

Each place is getting redder and bluer, is what I'm trying to say.

So California is now unrecognizable to the Reagan-Duck Mason, Pete Wilson, California.

And you're never going to have a George Pataki be elected in New York because those people are gone.

They've moved away.

That's what Andrew Cuomo, remember Cuomo and Hochel said, get out of here.

We don't want you here.

Take your values to Florida.

So they did.

And so people just vote straight thing.

The second thing is,

I don't think debates matter anymore.

I think that you're just

welded into the idea that I'm a red guy and it's on my team.

You know, we just talked about Beto, but Beto was never going to win in Texas.

You could put a trillion dollars there and he was never going to win on a statewide race.

So same thing with, you could give

Stacey Abrams a trillion dollars.

She wasn't going to do it, even in a now a purple state, but it's still red.

Georgia's still red.

If you take away, you know what I mean?

If you just look at it, it's still red.

So my point is this, is that debates don't matter.

The candidates, everybody everybody said, bad candidate.

No, I think it's just that we are two nations now, and our team versus their team.

And so, Kathy Hulchell had a terrible debate, horrible.

It meant nothing.

Fetterman couldn't, that was the worst debate performance in the history of U.S.

elections at any level, major election.

He didn't matter.

Holmes avoided

Kerry Lick.

It didn't matter.

You see what I'm saying?

It doesn't matter.

Kelly didn't want to debate Blake Masters.

Ryan didn't do very well against J.D.

Bance.

I think J.D.

Bance won those debates.

It doesn't matter anymore.

It's just how much money can you get?

And are you, your party, and your team

there?

Are you in a congressional district or a state that is there?

And so when you look at that election map, it's kind of scary.

It's 90% of the area of of the United States is really red and getting redder.

And that blue corridor is where half the population is getting bluer and bluer.

But you seem to be telling me that the people that went in and voted for, because the Republicans really emphasized policies.

They emphasized energy.

emphasized the inflation problem, et cetera, that they're not looking at policies anymore.

And for example, if a Democratic candidate had come up and said, I've always been for

reducing inflation and

freeing up energy.

Yeah, they didn't.

That's true.

But would a Republican voter not vote for that Democrat?

Do you think that they're?

No, I don't think so.

I think that

I think

we on the conservative side thought this is so McCarthy-esque and such cheap shots, this tying Republicans to

Paul Pelosi's attacker, like saying that

leaving abortion up to the states is going to get thousands of women killed because they can't get an abortion.

If they happen to be in, you know,

Wyoming, they can drive across the border somewhere.

But that's what they did, and it worked.

And Joe Biden's Fan of the Opera speech that we caricatured on this podcast a lot, that worked.

And it got his team out there.

So

nobody said,

well, this is what I'm going to do to stop inflation.

And I objected to an open border because I know it polls 70% negatively.

They didn't do that.

They just didn't mention it.

They just said, if you vote for a Democrat, you're for democracy.

If you vote for a Republican, you're destroying democracy.

That was their message.

And then you're going to kill everybody from abortion.

The Republicans could have done better, though, because they kept saying they harped on those issues.

And the problem was,

it was this.

They kept saying

the election's about the stuff of life.

It's about filling your gas tank up.

It's about the ability to buy meat in the store or to not have to choose between your heating oil and

having a hamburger or being able to walk.

in broad daylight in Chicago, a million dollar mile, or being able to walk in San Francisco, and you can't do that.

Okay, yeah, if you want to make that the issue, but then you've got to say what you're going to do about it.

Here's what I'm going to do.

I promise you, in the first hundred days, I'm going to introduce legislation that tries to rebuild the wall, stops catch and release, deports people who haven't been here for more than five years.

Come up with a formula.

I'm going to get federal attorneys.

I'm going to try to pass a law or go after racketeering to get stopped this crime wave that the state and local attorneys won't prosecute.

I'm going to build the Keystone.

I'm going to introduce legislation to reopen ANWAR.

I'm going to

jawbone to support the East Med pipeline overseas.

Any of that, they didn't.

They just said, Joe Biden did that.

He did.

Yeah.

But if you're going to make those issues resonate, you've got to tell the people what you're going to do differently.

And they didn't.

And that hurt hurt them.

And I think, though, that the voters, the independent voters, which seem to be the people on the margins or that throw the margins, are a lot more thoughtful than just, I'm, you know, going to vote Democrat.

And that they must be buying into this message.

That's actually where I'm going.

Like, okay, we have the Republicans with real policy issues.

And Carrie Lake, for what you were saying, is the one that seemed to get onto television and say, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that immediately, right?

And, but, but the Democrats, it was all threat and fear mongering, really.

And it worked.

And it worked with what killed the Republican.

It didn't kill them.

We'd be, but I want to clarify that.

They're going to pick up anywhere from, as I said, 10 to 20 seats.

I don't know how much.

And they have a 50% chance.

of taking the Senate,

maybe 45%.

So if a miracle, I mean, not a miracle, but if every, if votes broke a particular way, and they're not giving us information, they just say this county is conservative, but they don't give us one of my complaints about this election.

All of these news outlets, the New York Times does a little better job, but most of us don't want to pay them, and we're behind their.

paywall.

But what they should be doing is this is how many, this is 900,000 votes.

Here they are.

This is the last three elections, how they've broken down Republican versus Democrat.

If these votes are all counted and that follows a traditional breakdown, this is what this candidate will get, and this is what that candidate.

It won't be a sure barometer, but it would sure help.

But we don't get, so we're, you, we're, you and I are talking in the dark, but it's, it could be less, less bad.

I mean, it's, it's all about expectations.

If the Republican just said, you know what, it's hard when we're outspent against the party of wealth.

New Hampshire, they were outspent in the senatorial race 17 to 1, but mostly it was 3 to 4 to 1.

And so it's very hard to win over those conditions.

And yet we're going to take control of the House, despite Silicon Valley, deside academia, despite the print media, despite social media.

We're going to take in Wall Street.

and the money.

We're going to take the House and we're going to try to get close.

If they had said that before the election, rather than get swept up with this Newt Gimmitch's 50 seats, you know, and I think they wouldn't be in such self-recrimination.

Yeah, that's true.

And so that's one thing to remember: that the expectations were just such that

it was almost impossible to meet them.

Yeah.

And without all the data you're talking about, the Democrats seem to be happy that their method of campaigning was

positive that they had, it was successful.

They got

of women that are not married,

70%.

70%, those are, that's a rubric that's usually a professional woman without kids.

I'm saying that's unmarried and without children.

There's a lot of them.

They got 70% of that rubric.

And so they were telling them the most important thing in your life is abortion.

And

there's nothing wrong.

If you get pregnant and you hesitate or you think you might want to bear the child or not, that's your decision.

And if one day before your due date, you decide that you just can't do it, then you have a perfect right to have that baby terminated.

And it happens seven or eight

thousand times a year.

You can terminate that baby in the birth canal.

And that issue resonated.

And the Republicans

didn't.

express it and articulate in the in the manner I just said

because they got into incest and rape and all that,

and that was the end of them.

But that hurt them.

And then the independents, I think they lost by two points.

They thought they were going all the polls.

And I said I didn't want to criticize the pollsters, but I think the method that we were using on our side that liberal polls are traditionally two to three points discriminatory against conservatives.

And conservatives, by nature, given this oppressive McCarthy atmosphere, they don't want to answer the phone they don't answer text messages so inherently they're underrepresented and therefore you're going to add points to make up for that and that give gave you all of these encouraging polls that were off they were off yeah and so that led to these unreal unreal expectations as well yeah

okay victor well i am just a quick we've already talked about Laxalt and Masters and Walker.

And I was just wondering, do you have any prediction for the Senate given what we know today about those races?

Well,

Blake Masters is about 100,000 votes down.

I think there's about 25%.

Can you believe that?

Here it is on a Thursday afternoon, and we're getting close to 48 hours after the polls close, and they still don't have the vote.

But my point is that

there are some rude, crude calculations that he has no margin of error and he would have to get about 65%.

He'd have to get, put it this way, in the conservative areas, he'd have to get about 85 and then maybe split in the Democratic areas.

And then you'd have to assume that all these Election Day dumps, that people actually voted in person at the last moment.

Those were conservative who, you know, just put it off, but they vote in person more than mail-in.

If you put all of those and everything was right, then he could win.

And Laxalt

has, he's not 100,000 down.

There's less votes in Nevada.

He's about,

depending on what hour you look at it, 15,000 to 30,000 ahead.

So I think he has a much better chance.

If Laxalt were to win,

right, that would be 50 votes.

And then Masters were to lose, then the Democrats would have 50 votes.

And then we'd be right back where we were in late 2020 with Georgia deciding once more with the same Ralph E.

O.

Warnick

what would be the fate of the nation.

And I think for all the criticism of the inarticulate speech of Herschel Walker, he's a stronger candidate at this particular time in this particular mood of the country

than

Purdue was having to deal with all of the controversy over the 2020 election and the hatred that was starting to be expressed to Donald Trump.

So I think there's some reason to be

optimistic.

Optimistic.

Of course, there's all, you know,

that also assumes that you have 50, if you were to do all this,

that you have

51 senators.

Just because they say they're Republican doesn't mean they're Republican.

Do you really believe that Mitt Romney is a Republican now?

Do you believe that Susan Collins is a Republican?

Do you believe, and I don't know who's going to win.

I think that Shivaca is...

Kelly Shibaka, I think, is ahead as of today, but because it's ranked voting, which is the most bankrupt idea in the world,

if if none gets a 50% majority, we start to look at those other down ballots.

And so you really believe if Lisa Murkowski, Kelly Shabaka, if she could win, that's a great thing.

But Murkowski always has a way, whether it was right-in or ranked voting, to defy the will of the people somehow.

And if she gets in there and gets re-elected, then you have Murkowski and you have Collins, and you have Romney, and you really don't have 51.

You have 48.

Yeah.

Because they're

I mean, they voted for again.

They both both women voted against Kavanaugh.

Yeah, well, at least we will have a Congress that won't be.

Maybe Susan Collins did, and I want to take that back.

But Murkowski did.

She voted against.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like I was saying, that we at least will have a Congress that is not going to try to court pack or create new states of D.C.

and Puerto Rico or in the filibuster, I think.

They can't get that through.

They cannot get that through.

They cannot get that through the House.

But

so what, let me just finish this discussion very quickly.

What happens now?

What you can you and can you not do?

It gets back to your point about what's to be optimistic and about not to be.

Okay, in the House, you can, if you want to shut down the government, I wouldn't recommend it.

You can

by not approving a budget.

There's not going to be any reconciliation reconciliation anymore where majorities pass it, you know, without worry of a filibuster.

There is going to be a lot of investigations on the House side, and they're going to have people, bulldogs, like Jim Jordan.

And I think they'll move to have a special prosecutor.

I don't think get that through for Hunter Biden, but that would embarrass Joe Biden, especially after the left said that Donald Trump had to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate himself, which is crazy, which Jeff Sessions allowed to happen.

So given that precedent, they could probably say, let's just keep it out of politics and go out and see what Hunter did or didn't do and look at the laptop.

That could be very embarrassing.

There won't be any more legislation.

It'll all be executive order like Barack Obama, and we'll see what happens.

And then in the Senate,

That isn't more important in a way because they have subpoena power and Rand Paul would be a wonderful advocate to clear up what happened with COVID and go after Fauci.

And in addition to that,

they could demand,

you know, the Iran deal was a treaty and they circumvented it when some senators kind of went soft and allowed that to happen under Obama, but they could stop that.

They could stop all of those circuit appellate

Supreme Court appointments.

And now, given the atmosphere, I think they will.

if they get 51, they just, I don't know if you can count on Romney, but

so there's things you can do.

And more importantly, and this is very important, because 33 senators,

either 33 or 34 come up every two years, there's wild gyrations in the number of incumbents that have exposure.

This year it was the Republicans had the exposure.

More of them had to come up for re-election.

But next two years, it's about inverse, that there's a lot of Democrats are coming up.

And they're going to,

I don't want this to happen, but Joe Biden economy, Joe Biden's economy is going to be a lot worse in two years, I think.

And I'm not sure that a lot of other things won't be worse because he just said he's not going to change, he's going to keep going.

And that means more illegal immigration, more crime, less energy, more inflation, more instability abroad.

And then these senators are going to have to run on that.

And I think if anything happens,

any good happens, that the

Republican Party is going to understand how the Democrats operate.

And what is that?

Vote harvesting, nobody votes on Election Day if they can help it,

October surprises.

This October surprise, it was the way that they manipulated the, not that they planned it, I don't mean to suggest that, but once it happened, the Pelosi breakdown then was, you know, that was very convenient for them to use that as a libel writ against all Republicans.

Yeah, I think part of the problem is the Republicans, everybody out there listening is a sane for the most part.

I don't know you personally, but

I read your comments and you're sane, sober, common sense people.

And so our problem is that when we look at things, we look at it rationally.

So you asked me how Fetterman won.

And then somebody in the audience will say, well, how could they possibly tie the Pelosi thing to MAGA or somebody else?

Exactly.

How could they vote for people who are allowing criminals to get out the same day and commit the same crime?

Or why would they vote for somebody that drains the strategic petroleum reserve or begs the Saudis to pump what we have in abundance and won't?

Or don't you understand, you people, that this president, with a

flip of his pin, illegally just canceled a half a trillion dollars of student debt and injured the fiscal

status of the country as a cheap campaign gimmick to get young people to vote for him.

And if that didn't work, he gave amnesties for marijuana.

And he was doing anything possible at the expense of U.S.

domestic and foreign interests for his own selfish political agenda.

So we asked these questions, and then the answer is:

these people are different.

They don't, that's not, they don't, they play for keeps.

The bottom line is we are better than you are, and any means necessary to get power so we can be better than you and stay better than you is justified.

Yes.

Well, the fact that they're in the bigger cities, they seem to dominate the bigger cities that the left does, shows you that their population is, you know, the very poor and the very rich, as you've been telling us for a long time.

Yeah,

long term, everybody listening should be optimistic because if you look at the fertility of red states versus blue states and stability and

all of the indicators.

Somebody's been very good at this.

I keep praising him.

I'm not sure that we all would agree politically, but Joel Kotkin has been very, very good about this.

And he shows you that on a lot of key indicators, marriage, family stability,

the red states are ahead of the blue states.

And when you get into other areas like physical insolvency, crime, etc.,

it's not just the country's going to be in two different sectors, but there's going to be a more stable, less crime-ridden, and more physically responsible and freer America in the red state and a growing America and a shrinking blue America.

And nobody talks about that because it's considered politically incorrect.

But for all of the celebration of gay marriage and for all the celebration of transgenderism and for all the celebration of abortion and for all the celebration

of the working professional woman,

a society, a civilization, a nation depends on fertility or it shrinks and falls in decline when it's not 2.0 or 1.9.

We're down to 1.7.

And that 1.7 is not uniformly true of the...

of every state.

It's basically because we're about 2.5

in places like San Francisco, you know, and abortion is, some years, it's been up to a million aborted children a year.

And so, and those are not, you know, those are not the Hillsdale faculty member with nine kids gets an abortion.

They don't do that.

It's the young professional left-wing liberal person, or it's the transgender gay couple that's not having children.

And so these are things to keep in mind that the left hasn't even thought about.

That's one of the reasons I think that

their architects really want illegal immigration,

that they will have children.

Well, because they'll be having children.

For one generation, we know it's about 3.8, that immigrant families from south of the border have about 3.

Then within a generation, they adjust down.

Within two generations,

they're indistinguishable in their fertility rates.

But the left sees, besides that they're cynical and they want cheap labor, as Nancy pelosi said who's going to pick our crops that they do want a fertile population constituency because they don't want to have children themselves it's too much of a drag from their

yeah exactly their sophisticated lifestyle we're gonna you you said sammy we're gonna talk about the taboo subject are we really gonna talk about that

donald trump versus desantis oh no you know why don't we save that for another time or maybe you and jack can talk about that because we need to go on to our homage to the veterans.

And first we need to take a break.

Yeah, so let's go to a few messages and come back and we'll talk a little bit about veterans and some of the battles that our veterans have been in.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

I would like to remind everybody that Victor has a website, VictorHanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

You can subscribe to get VDH ultra material, but it has lots of other things on it.

So you can always come on and get a free subscription and get on our mailing list.

But the subscriptions that have, that include the ultra material are $5 a month and

$50 a year.

So come join us if you get a chance.

Yeah, so Victor, we would like to, you know.

a little homage to our to veterans by looking at a couple of battles.

I know that we're going to look at some historical ones.

So our current veterans,

we aren't looking at a current battle.

So, you know,

I want to apologize for that, but I also would like to look at these earlier ones.

And I thought maybe we don't hear a lot about things.

And so those are why I chose them.

And the World War I

offensive that we don't hear a lot about is the Meus-Argonne offensive.

And it's a, it was actually an allied offensive.

I had always thought it was the German offensive, but the Germans were trying to defend themselves.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So everybody should remember what happened, that we declared war in April of 1917, and we had no army.

And

by November 11th, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, Armistice Day, which became Veterans Day, we had landed

2 million soldiers into

France and Belgium.

That's just a phenomenal.

And we didn't lose anybody transporting them over to enemy action.

Just a phenomenal record.

And we were producing more artillery shells at the end of the war than our two allies combined.

And so what had happened is with the collapse in February, very quickly of 1918, the Breslau-Tavis Treaty, there was no Eastern Front.

So Germany had about 2 million soldiers in the field, and they had a critical decision to make.

Were they going to be occupied soldiers?

And they were, you you know, they were 150 miles outside St.

Petersburg.

They had, you know, it was a huge amount of land,

50 million people, a million square miles.

And

they got to their head.

And so what they should have done is just sent everybody to the Western Front, but they sent only about 500,000.

But still, that was more than France or

England could handle.

So suddenly, after these nearly four years, the exhausted Allies are in a pinch pinch because this huge German invasion is now the final invasion of the year to get to the channel, is fortified by 500,000 battle-hardened veterans who, in the magnificent German rail system, are now on the Western Front.

And

they're very good troops.

And the Allies buckled.

And they started to retreat and

that spring German offensive was just a question.

The Americans were trying to plug gaps, but even at St.

Mahill, you know,

that was in September, it took a long time for us to get there, and we had to train.

And they held on.

And then the question was: well, now you have a million and a half Americans.

It's September of 1918, and it's kind of like a rubber band.

The Germans went all the way in, and now they're starting to, even with these reinforcements, they're starting to be Ludendorff

and Hindenburger sort of shot their wad.

And so these Americans then decided after the St.

Mahill battle, they got, they decided to put everybody in and go for broke and along with the French break through in the Argonne at the Meuse River.

And, you know, people don't remember that

that battle was the largest battle.

I think

over a million Americans participated and it was the most deadly of a single, I mean, it went on for, oh, you you know, almost 50 days, but there were about

a quarter of a million casualties, dead, wounded, or missing in them, 27,000, 28,000, the deadliest battle in U.S.

history.

And they went on the offensive against Americans did.

And

all these battles, it's kind of fear.

I did not serve, but I grew up with these stories of my family.

And I realized, you know, I was about 40 years old.

And I said to myself, wow,

I never gave due to all these people.

My Swedish grandfather was at the Musa Argonne in the 91st Division that was one of the first divisions to go on the offensive.

And then I remember, you know,

his stories that they broke through the German lines, and he didn't want to shoot young kids and old men.

But every time, he had a Lewis machine gun.

He shot people and he said that they were just kids.

Their Germans were on the run.

They had them on the run.

And he got cut off.

And

they had a counteroffensive that failed, but he was gas, phosphine gas, got on food.

He ate the food.

It ate part of his stomach out.

The fumes destroyed his lungs.

And he was disabled for a lot of his life.

And I, but he would, in this very thick Swedish accent, he never talked about it.

I got this secondhand from my father.

And I'd say, why is grandpa just kind of a hermit?

And he lives by, he's a widow and he lives in his kitchen.

And he said, well, you know, he breaks horses.

He doesn't have any money.

But he had a really,

he was almost 30 years old, Victor.

He was married.

He was on a little farm in Kingsburg, California, and they drafted him.

The draft board came up and they said to his immigrant dad, Neville's, you got four boys and we got to have one of them right now.

So they took the oldest, but he was 28 years old.

And they just yanked him out, left his wife there in a little farm.

And off he went.

And he got gas and he left left and

he went to Fort Lewis and trained and then he didn't get back till almost 1920.

He was in a Belgian hospital.

And he was right there at that battle and the Americans won.

They took a terrible beating because as good a general as John J.

Pershing was, the French had so much more experience.

And Marshall Folk and others had told us that you cannot, with a Springfield rifle, jump out of a trench en masse, go through artillery shelling and then

expect to have enough people to survive no man's land and with machine gun

attacks.

And they did and they just were mowed down.

And finding sheer manpower and American artillery, it prevailed, but we paid a terrible price.

But the point is, we're on Veterans Day, that

Mus-Argonne offensive that started in September, it ended on November 11th.

That was the last battle of of the war and it it ended as i said with an armistice remember that was not a surrender and

as you know pershing and other people had said to wilson these people are losing but they're not defeated and we haven't entered german soil and they've been 70 80 miles into belgium and france and they've called caused billions of dollars of destruction to a four-year occupation.

And they do not know the sting of defeat.

And we have to go into Germany and march on Berlin.

And once we do that, they won't do it again because we'll occupy the country and we'll oversee their government.

And they didn't do that.

That was Wilson's progressive, idealistic 14 points.

No, no, we don't be vindictive.

And no sooner than the armistice took place,

November 11th, they didn't get into the serious Versailles discussions till what?

February, March of 1919?

So what had happened in November, December, January, February?

Well, 70% of the troops had gone home back to Britain, and half of them were more than half back to America.

And all of a sudden, the Germans thought, hmm, we really didn't lose.

We were stabbed in the back by a bunch of commies and Jews.

And that myth took hold because they were never occupied.

And it was tragic because all these people had been killed and died, wounded, and they were finally on the offensive.

And there's nothing stopping them to go into Germany.

Oh, man.

That battle then was the most significant really of them all.

We always hear about the Psalm and very...

The Battle of Bulge.

Yeah.

It wasn't nearly as deadly as Passchendae and Psalm and Verdun, but for Americans it was.

Yes.

Because we lost about 117,000 and about 28% of them were killed in that one battle.

And it was a huge army.

I mean, my God,

it was Americans.

They put in a million point, 1,200,000.

I can remember my grandfather did tell me this.

You know, he had a very thick accent and he said, you know,

when we walked through

these

Belgian towns, they just loved us, Victor.

They just loved us what we did.

And he had been a quartermaster and was in a reserve at St.

Nahill.

And then they activated the 91st.

I mean, not a quartermaster, but he was a

logistics person with, he was a master horseman.

So he ran teams and trained Black soldiers.

Not that, as I said earlier in a pod, not that they needed any training because many of them were from rural America and were farmers, but

they had him in charge of working with African Americans to master wagonry and logistics.

And then they activated that,

I think they called it the Fur Tree Tree Division, the Wild West Division.

They were all cowboys, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, rural California.

It was very famous.

And I have it, we have it as home, the helmet with a little evergreen tree with 91 on it.

And I think my twin brother has his gas mask.

And they gave him, when he left, they gave him his training rifle, a 3040 Craig rifle that my brother has.

That's incredible.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

He still has it.

And my father used to have a few drinks on New Year's Eve

and say, okay, boys, in honor of your grandfather,

Private Frank Hansen, he'd take the 340 Craig and shoot it.

My mom would go, that's a pretty big slug.

And what comes up goes down.

My dad, oh, hell, I'm shooting it.

He'd say, I'm shooting it over there in the pond area.

It'll go into the water.

Don't worry.

I don't know where it went, but that's how he celebrated.

He had all this 340 Krag.

It was a big, big,

people know better ballistics than I do, but it was a pretty heavy shell, although it lacked the velocity of the 1906 Springfield regulation rifle.

I'm talking out of my head now by memory, but

anyway, we have a lot of his memorabilia.

And that was one member of my family that kind of set.

And if you go to Kingsburg, California today,

there's a park called Memorial Park in downtown Kingsburg, California.

And on the,

let me get this right, I think it's the

south,

the

northeast corner, there's a monument because that was his home.

And his father gave

the farmhouse to the city.

They made a park out of it.

And there's a memorial there about that family, about all four.

He was a wounded veteran of World War I.

His son, my father,

was a B-29.

It's hard to know where they gave him credit for the last six missions,

all of them, but it was 34 combat missions, 40 total missions.

And then Victor that I'm named after was killed on Okinawa.

We can talk about that.

And then Bob Hansen was in Iran ferrying materials to the Soviet Union.

So all four of them were there from this little family.

Yeah.

Well, Okinawa, now that you've spoken about it, was one of those battles that was one of the worst in the Pacific, I understand, at least for the Japanese, if not for the United States.

So the United States lost 12,500 dead and 50,000 casualties.

So it was no small fight.

And yes, I would like to hear a little bit about your.

Yeah, very quickly.

That was,

we didn't use the word Okinawa when I was growing up.

It was not spoken about.

And every once in a while, my dad have a drink and he'd get angry.

And

his first cousin's mother died in childbirth.

And then his father had a sulfur accident, sulfur machine.

Anybody who had grapes knows how to use that.

And he was blinded.

And so

my grandparents kind of raised his first cousin, Victor Hansen, who looked kind of like him.

They were the same size, big Swedes, and they were inseparable.

They were born about the same month, I think.

And

they both joined the Marines together out of the University of Pacific.

They were tight in and split-ins, or guard and tight-in for Alonzo Stagg.

And

they had heard of this new 6th Marine Division that they were hiring or hiring, enlisting people with college degrees.

It was supposed to be a super division.

They were going to bring people from the old breed, 1st Division, Marine Division, and they were going to integrate them, make a new

division that would train in Guadalcanal and be expertise.

And they were going to unleash them for their first big battle at Okinawa.

And that was on April 1st, I think, of 1945.

And the idea was that after Iwo Jima, they had mastered in Tarawa and Pelelu, they had mastered the arts of island hopping.

And so when they landed, and by the way, it was dreamed up, I think, in the Fairmont Hotel.

I don't know why they did it, because, you know, we're getting very close on April 1945 to the test.

dropping of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico.

You see what I'm getting at?

They knew knew that they had a weapon that could perhaps work, and they had two more ordered.

So, the idea that you're going to go into the largest of all Japanese islands that's the closest to the Japanese mainland, and you're going to unleash the entire Pacific fleet in the height of kamikaze

attacks.

Kamikaze only had 350 miles one way to go get the fleet.

And you were going to, these people knew you were coming for a year.

It's a huge island, and they were three stories deep into the coral and volcanic rock of the island.

And you were going to pry them out, and you were not going to allow the Marines to have amphibious

landings behind enemy lines.

You were just going to say, The Marines, you go in one direction, and then you go back up to the island and help out the army.

And you're going to go right at full blast against the Shuri line, which was a fortified subterranean line, and it had castles in it and ruins.

And they did that.

And unfortunately, the Battle of Okinawa lasted over 80 days.

And highest ranking officer, Simon Boldor Buckner, the

third or second, second, was killed.

by a freak coral fragment from an artillery strike and was killed.

And it went in, you know, depending on what date you use, whether it's June 22nd or July 10th or something, about when it was finally pacified.

But it was a disaster, 50,000 casualties.

If you count the Navy dead,

I think there were 19 ships that were sunk, 5,000 sailors, 7,000 Army and Marine killed.

And you can really read about it in two great books.

E.B.

Sledge with the Old Breed.

That is just a classic book.

I wrote a book called Ripples of Battle, where I have a chapter on Okinawa.

And I got a nice letter from E.B.

Sledge.

And then there was a less,

there was a very well written by William Manchester, the popular historian called Goodbye Darkness about the 1st Marine Division.

But it was factually incorrect.

But anyway, I talked about that.

But when you read about what they endured, it was just horrific.

And Victor fought that when they hit Sugarload

Hill Mountain, it was a small mountain, but they called it Sugarload because it was a prominent focus of defense.

And they took it.

It was only about 250 feet, but they took it.

We paused, took it, repulsed.

On the last day, May 19th, they had almost taken it, and he went up and was shot in the leg, and they couldn't evacuate him.

They could talk to him, apparently.

And he bled to death.

And as I said on an earlier podcast,

when I was was writing that chapter i really looked at all of his letters and nobody wanted to look at them literally he had written them to my grandfather and nobody opened them they did not want to open them so for the first time i wrote that i was doing this about 2003 they had been there for 48 years oh my gosh and i had the name of all of his commanding officers.

So I went on the internet, the new internet, and found the person who wrote the letter to my grandfather that he had been killed.

And

I don't know why he didn't write it to his own father, who was also named Victor Hansen.

But nevertheless, I wrote him a letter and he was alive at 93.

And he had the letter that he wrote my grandfather, and he sent it to me.

Oh, wow.

And then he called, there were three or four other people still alive.

And they all wrote me and said, what a wonderful person.

And he said that when he was bleeding to death, one of the people in that regiment, the 29th Marines, ran out to try to rescue him that had

five four victor was six four six five and this kid was like five six but they were best friends and he he was killed trying to save him then nobody ventured forth wisely i suppose and then one of them wrote and said you won his ring and i didn't know what that meant i'm a classicist but I get it in the mail.

He said, it's been on my mantle for nearly 50 years and nobody's ever claimed it.

And he was one of my best friends, so they sent it to me in the mail.

And guess what?

It was a ring with a Roman soldier on it.

But I grew up with his briefcase, his Louisville Slugger bat, his baseball cleats.

I used his little briefcase, and there was a little letter.

And as I said earlier, I have all of his letters, and it's very sad because he's on Guadalcanal, and he says, Hey, dear mom and pop, things are swell.

A little hot, got a little touch of malaria, but no big deal.

But hey, everybody says in the 1st Marine Division that if you got a 1911 automatic 45, you got a better chance of living.

There's a pawn shop in Fresno.

Could you please go get it?

And there's this change of letter about his grandparents, my great-grandfather, who, I don't know, he and his wife got a $50 check.

from Victor, their grandson, and they went all over Fresno and finally they found it and he drew a picture of it, exactly what to get and they sent him that 45 automatic with a case of ammunition.

Isn't that funny that Marines, here it's 1945 and they hold Juggernaut of American productive capacity, they still didn't have the money or the resources or I don't know what, to equip Marines with a 45

in case they're M1 jammed or something.

Anyway, he had that and he was killed and then

He was an only child, so that family line died out.

Victor Sr.

was blind.

His mother had died.

He got killed.

There were no of that one branch of the family.

They were completely wiped out.

And then my father named me after him, and he gave me this big lecture that really had an impact on me that,

you know, and my mother knew him really well.

My mother was dating my father, and the three of them were best friends, so they would go out.

And so my mother joined in on these lectures to me that.

This guy was a very superb, straight A student, football player, very shy.

My dad said he's He's not like me.

He was not boisterous.

He was very shy and studious.

My dad was a good student, but kind of outgoing.

And then he said, You have a, I'm going to give, we gave you this name, and you're going to have to live up to it.

I don't want you ever to be arrested.

I don't want you ever to be publicly drunk.

I don't want you to take drugs.

I don't want you.

He gave me all these lists.

I said, Hey, I see you drinking.

And, you know, he said, That's enough.

Don't.

And

I would say until I was 30, I was haunted by that.

I had to live with somebody I'd never met, but I had all the stuff in

the barn.

I had his spat shoes that when he was in high school, prom.

I had his baseball mitt,

baseball hat from Kingsburg High School.

Very sad.

Well, that's awesome.

Yeah, that is sad.

And your father as well was in the Air Force, however.

And

another battle that we don't hear much about, and I think it's because it's overshadowed by the atomic bombs for some reason, I don't know why, is the night raids on Tokyo and especially that March 9th and 10th

very severe days.

Everybody should remember that date.

It was the most deadly day in the history of warfare.

100,000, according to Japanese and

post-war American studies.

But I mean, there's been some accounts lately based on population densities and photographs of the destruction, they've suggested maybe 150,000 had been killed.

But it was the deadliest day.

And I think out of the 335 B-29s that took off, that

I think 200 and I don't know what it was, 80 made it to the target.

And there were over 30 that were shot down, 11 men in each one.

Of course, my father said nobody wore a parachute because you'd rather be incinerated on the way down than beheaded you know yeah but the idea was that

since uh

december both in china and india then after the capture of the marianas at chenyan saipong saipan

and guam that this b-29 experimental plane was flying at 30 000 feet and burning the engines up to get high with a load of 10 000 pounds of bombs you know

20 uh 10 ton of bombs it could in theory carry out almost up to 20,000.

And they were not hitting it.

There was a Gulf Stream over Tokyo, 300 or 400 miles an hour at those elevations, you know, high.

You drop a bomb, it blows a mile off course, and they were not getting the results.

They didn't have fighter escort, and

it was very hard to take off.

They were having a very high 2% or 3% loss rate per accident, and they were doing nothing.

And this thing was a bigger expense than the Manhattan Project.

The B-29 cost $2 billion.

Wow.

It was a huge behemoth airplane that was the first pressurized cabin.

A lot of listeners know it better than I do.

So I want to be careful what I say, but to be sure I'm accurate.

But my father

was

in the Marines with Victor.

They joined together.

And as I said, it's kind of a taboo subject.

We don't know who hit who, but one of them hit a senior officer at a bar who said something and one of them had to take the blame and my dad took the blame probably he was the one that hit them and they to punish him they put him in an experimental b-29 and transferred him out of the marine corps and the idea was that he was going to get killed because the first experimental planes had been crashing in nebraska but he didn't and he not only didn't get killed he flew as i said 40 missions 34 in combat on this

B-29 as a central fire control gunner.

And I have the pictures are pretty frightening of the March 9th, 10th raid, of the aerial pictures of the bombing of Tokyo.

And the idea behind the raid very quickly was that they had dispersed their construction of aircraft, industrial goods.

In other words, they had subcontractors all through Tokyo.

And then at night, they would assemble the parts in factories.

And so they felt that

even though they had criticized the British for what the British called area bombing or we called carpet bombing, they're not quite synonymous, but nonetheless, we did what we criticized Britain for doing over Dresden or Hamburg, and we began

carpet bombing.

And unfortunately for the Japanese, it coincided with

the discovery of napong, which was the DuPont Corporation's

ability to make sort of a liquid petroleum gel that would burn for four or five minutes without any combustible material.

And when they added that to traditional incendiaries that had, you know, magnesium and aluminum and stuff.

It was a lethal mixture.

And so LeMay said, you know what, you guys are getting a lot of publicity, but you're not getting any results.

And so

in March, right before March, they had tried it on some cities with various boats.

But he said, you know what?

All of the disadvantages are our advantages.

Yes, this plane can go up to 30,000 feet, but if you go down to 5,000 or 6,000, it can carry a hell of a lot more weight.

So we'll have fewer missions, more payload.

And yes, it's very windy up there.

And

you get blown off course.

And, but if you get in a tailwind, you're going to zoom in.

And then you're at that speed of that B-29 is going to go up to 250 from 250 up to 300 plus when you get on the jet screen.

And guess what?

If you're not doing specific Norden bomb site, precision bombing, you're just dropping napalm and traditional incendiaries, and the wind is your ally, not your enemy.

It's going to blow.

And this is not the brick and mortar construction of Germany.

These are wood, bamboo, and rice door, mixture doors, and it'll go up.

And so he said, you know, two things will happen if it doesn't work.

If we lose a war, I'll be tried as a war criminal.

And if you all get shot down at five or six thousand feet, I'm going to be sacked like his predecessor was.

And so he sent them in on March 9th and 10th.

300, as I said, it was over 300 of them.

And I think actually 280, 279, 280,

they came in with the napon cluster bombs.

I even remember the M69, and there's a long story about it with the DuPont Corporation.

And my father said that when

they came in,

I don't know what they had Pathfinder planes.

He was lucky because he was, I think, within the first 50 that went in from Tenyon.

But I'm not sure about that.

I'll have to check.

But he did say that he could smell human flesh from where he was.

And

they looked back

and they could smell the smoke from about 75 miles away, and he could see the glare.

They could see the glare for over 100 miles after they got done.

And that was not the end of it.

And so, what happened in the next 30 days, they destroyed 45% of the industrial urban cores of Japanese cities.

But that night was

over 100,000 Japanese dead from the firestorms, right?

It reached thousands of degrees.

It was much more deadly.

I mean, depending on whose figures you use, somewhere on either side of 50,000 at Nagasaki and either side of 80,000 at Hiroshima.

this was far deadlier.

Yes,

LeMay, remember,

was against the atomic bomb because the idea of taking Okinawa was to get B-29 bases 350 miles from Japan, not 1,500 miles in the Marianas.

And you can see what he was getting at because instead of flying for eight or nine hours and dropping bombs and flying home, you could take off and in two hours be over Japan.

and then drop the bombs and come back in four hours.

And you might even, instead of doing that three or four times a week from the Marianas, you could do it every day from Okinawa.

And they had 2,400 bombers in the Marianas and they had 2,4 or 2,500 on order that were being delivered.

So you take Okinawa and as I said, it was declared, depending on what date you use, late June or July, then think about it.

You were going to have 5,000 B-29s.

flying fire raids against Japan that had already been half burnt out.

And they had a whole secondary list of small cities.

And, and, and the war had been over in early May in the European theater.

And guess what?

There were 5,000 idle B-17s, Lancaster bombers, and B-24, all four-engine heavy bombers.

And there were plans to bring a lot of them over to Okinawa.

So you can see that conceivably, if you had not dropped those two bombs, you could have had from the Marianas and Okinawa 10,000 four-engine allied bombers.

And that would have been...

People keep saying, well, the atomic bombs saved us from an invasion.

There was a million men on both sides that were saved, maybe a million casualties on the American side.

Yes, that's true.

But had the war gone on

under LeMay's fire raid strategy, there would have been 10 million people killed if they didn't surrender.

So

it was a pretty nasty business.

And

I think it made a big impression on my father because

I don't know how to say it, but he farmed and then he taught in Reedley, California at a little college called Reedley College, and he was an administrator there, and he farmed at the same time for a number of years, and he was a football coach.

And

I guess what I'm saying is that town in the 1940s and 50s had a lot of Japanese immigrants.

And it seemed to me that

we were always having Japanese Americans at our home.

And when we went to meet my dad for dinner, we always talked to Japanese.

We stopped at Japanese markets.

And my father loved Japanese Americans.

And I think part of it was, I don't know if it's guilt or what it was, but he, you know what I mean?

It was just

something.

And then yet it was schizophrenic.

At the same time, he didn't want us to buy Japanese cars from Japan.

Yeah.

Well, you know, probably some sense of having been involved in that, the desire for a peace or a reckoning with anybody and everybody ran into that was Japanese, perhaps.

Yeah, I didn't.

When I was in high school, ignorant and arrogant as you are, you always want to go out with your buddies, but my father never had a drink of alcohol until he was 50 years old.

Can you imagine that?

And that wasn't, you know, that wasn't not until the early 70s when I was graduating from high school.

And then he started to drink and drink heavily.

And I didn't want to be around him because he would get into these, he wouldn't talk about the war, but he would talk when he was, you know, half a bottle of whiskey.

And some of the stories

he told were frightening.

I mean, absolutely frightening about what it was like.

You know, a Benzendrine-like drug

to get up with coffee and then a second all-like drug to go to sleep when they got back.

And

your eardrum, all his eardrums were ruptured.

The pressurized cabin wasn't so pressurized because they did, they didn't just do in fire raids.

They also did conventional heavy bombing in between the raids at 30 000 feet and

they also mined the harbors of korea and japan so they it was they really wore out the planes they wore out the men and as i said i think with the jack i'm jack's podcast i met almost all the people in the crew at one time or another came and visited over my lifetime and

My mother, as I said earlier, always said,

they were all remarkable people.

and she had met them earlier of course before I was born and she always said the same thing all the attributes of those men that made them

fearless and

indomitable in war unfortunately sometimes are

are antithetical to success in peace.

There were two of them that were very successful, I shouldn't say that in business, very bright, the navigator and one of the gunners, but the rest of them,

it was like the ability to not be afraid, to just jump into a B-29, to volunteer for a dangerous mission, to

stare down a Japanese raiding fighter coming at, you know, diving at 400 miles right at you and not blackout.

Or the pilot was a guy named Alan B.

was a genius and saved them so many times.

It's almost that those

those traits of audacity are not the kind that will get you promoted or get you tenure in a job, You know,

I said earlier, my mom was always saying, Well, your dad's on his 41st mission, unfortunately, or what is he going to do today?

And I'd always say, What does that mean?

She said, Well,

if you want to bomb Tokyo, you need guys like your dad.

If you want somebody

to keep his mouth shut while they're firing a teacher, you don't want your dad in the room because he'll mouth off and try to save the teacher's job

and he will pay a big price for it.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, I would like to just say this has been a wonderful homage to our veterans, and we're very thankful for all of our military veterans, their bravery, and their defense of our nation and our nation's interests.

Yeah, I agree.

I mentioned with Jack that some special forces came and saw me about a month ago.

And it was quite moving to see the caliber of professional soldiers that we have.

It's just amazing.

Every time I see them,

you know, it's like watching a 1950s Western, you know what I mean?

It's the same type of can-do attitude of these people.

And it's very rare to see people that have such

intellectual ability and muscularity.

And it's almost Olympian-like, you know, that you have to be a balance between mind and body.

But when you see these people and,

you know, and they'll come up to your office once in a while and and they're six one or two and they're solid muscle and they've been wounded or they have all these experiences in Afghanistan, Iran, and they come up to talk to you about Thucydides.

It's really strange.

And I hope to God that people in this country

understand that.

And that's what I really get upset about the Pentagon sometimes with this indoctrination and this wokeness.

Do they realize that they have a rare talent, that this country, more than any other country in the world, has produced some of the best soldiers in the world.

And they're still there, those families.

And please, please, if you're listening, anybody in the military, don't tamper with that.

Don't tell these people they need to have woke indoctrination.

Don't tell them that they're suffering from white supremacy.

General Milley and General Austin, do not suggest that these people are under any cloud of suspicion because do not pull out of Afghanistan the way that we did.

If you doubt their service or their efficacy, or you in any way make them lose confidence in the military, they won't join.

If without joining, we're done for because we have about 1% of the population that's keeping this country safe.

Yeah.

Thank you, Victor.

We're way over time, but that's okay, because that was such a wonderful discussion of

all of your uncles and grandparents and the experiences in our

earlier wars, World War I.

They seem so far away now, I confess, back in the early 20th century.

But thank you so much for all of that.

And also the discussion of the election.

That was

your first discussion from the...

That's my first take.

I'm sure by the time people listen, a lot of it's out of date.

But that's my take on it.

And we'll talk about, if Jack and I don't, Sammy, we'll talk about the ongoing saga, and it's ongoing between Trump and DeSantis.

Yeah, and I hope it is a way to find some solution where they combine their resources, but yeah, instead of destroying each other, huh?

I hope not.

I hope not.

Yeah,

all right.

Okay, thank you very much for listening.

Thank you, and thanks to all of our listeners.

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