From the Bedeviling Left to the Battle of Britain

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording on Sunday, July 10th, 2022.

The star and namesake Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin N.

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

Victor writes a lot and a lot of what he writes that's exclusive can be found at victorhanson.com about which we will talk a little bit later in the show.

Today's show, Victor, let's start off talking about the hounding of Justice Kavanaugh and some news that has just come out today, a bounty for the sightings of any of the bad conservative Supreme Court justices.

And we'll get your thoughts on all that and plenty more right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So, Victor, I'm sure our listeners have heard the news about the assassination attempt against Justice Kavanaugh, but the other day he was hounded out of a restaurant in Washington, D.C.

He was cited by some lefties who then called the owner and demanded he not be served.

He

and his family had to leave through the back door of the restaurant.

And then, of course, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about it, mocked him.

So we have the public hounding of our justices.

And then on top of that, Victor, this morning, I found on Bongino report a link to this

article.

It's called, it's from PM, Bounties on Siting of Supreme Court justices offered by left-wing activists group.

It's called Shutdown DC, and it posted this.

If you see Kavanaugh, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Coney Barrett, or Roberts, DM us with the details.

We'll Venmo you $50 for a confirmed sighting and $200 if they're still there 30 minutes after your message.

I wonder what America Garland would have to say about that.

But more importantly, I wonder what you have to say about it, Victor.

Yeah, nothing.

You know, they really pushed the envelope.

So

just absorb all of what's going on.

We have a new precedent that if you're left-wing, and that's who did it, you can leak a confidential preliminary opinion from the Supreme Court, which is illegal.

And it's a felony under the federal code to mass at the house of a judge for the purposes of influencing their decision making.

And that was not, Merrick Garland didn't do anything like that.

We got to remember that I think his his name was Nicholas Roski.

He showed up right near the lawn of

Kavanaugh with an intention to kill him.

And then he sort of, I guess, had second thoughts.

This comes after two years ago where the Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said, you have sowed the wind and you shall reap the whirlwind and you won't know what hit you, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

This comes after Elizabeth Warren, a law professor at Harvard, no less at one time, said that the court was illegitimate.

This comes after Joe Biden goes to Spain and in front of his Spanish host trashes the court.

And then, of course, he, I don't know the circumstances, Jack, about the 10-year-old tragic rape victim, but there's a lot of alternative news that suggests that they have not, there is no perpetrator that has been prosecuted for that crime.

And there's some question, but it didn't stop Joe Biden because he demagogued.

My point with all this is at some point, somebody's going to get shot because there hasn't been a word from Joe Biden or Merrick Garland saying, you know what, stop it.

And what is really irritating about this is, believe me, if Mitch McConnell went out there and said, Kagan, so to my ear, you don't know what's going to hit you.

And if Trump went overseas and said, this damn court or this,

you wouldn't be able to even monitor the outrage.

If people went to Kagan's house or Sodoma

or our new justice and started screaming and yelling or they put bounties on them, there would be outrage.

So what I'm getting at, Jack, is that we have been presented with an asymmetrical situation that's predicated on this narrative that the left is morally and intellectually superior and therefore is not forced to face the consequences of their own bankrupt ideology.

So they think they're exempt and don't do what we're doing.

Only we can do it.

That permeates the entire political discourse, whether it's sanctuary cities or anything.

And it's got to stop because we're headed down to a Claudius and Milo late Roman Republic civil warring back and forth.

And Joe Biden hit 30% in the civics poll today.

And I think he's going to get into the 20s.

So he is being utterly repudiated.

And I think

everybody's take a deep breath and say, if you want to stop this,

10, 20 seats in the House ain't going to do it.

You're going to need 50, 60, 70.

You're going to need four or five Senate.

Anybody in that party that doesn't speak out against this is complicit.

And this goes on at the same time, of course, that the media is going gaga over Liz Cheney for a bunch of buffoons that went into the Capitol, committed felonies by desecrating the House chambers and rightly were punished, but she has made this into a moral crusade and she's raising millions of dollars and et cetera, et cetera, but nobody says a word.

She hasn't said a word.

Nobody says about this is life and death, as we saw with Steve Scalise,

almost.

So I hope that people realize what's going on and it has to have a vote of the people against this.

And it's got to be an Old Testament.

And we've had this discussion before, Jack, when the Republicans take the House.

And there's the New Testament and the Old Testament approaches.

They're not mutually exclusive.

They have time to do both and the ability to do both.

But at some point, if Joe Biden does not enforce the laws, and that's primarily at the border, and Merrick Garland politicizes, people are going to have to be impeached.

They won't be convicted in the Senate unless they get 60 votes, but they need to be impeached.

Just to let them know that you started a precedent that you can impeach a first-term president when he loses the House.

And And you did it on a phone call.

We're doing it on a constitutional question of not faithfully executing the laws as sworn to do so.

And they need to have at least five or six concurrent investigations of Hunter Biden and his tax problems and his father's interrelationship and tax problems with him and the politicalization of the FBI.

What is it doing at school board meetings?

What's it doing as a family Biden retrieval service?

So these things need to have consequences, and they don't have consequences right now.

And they'll keep going until somebody says, you know what, you cannot sustain a republic when the Supreme Court is attacked.

And it's highly ironic because when the court had a liberal majority for 30 years, the Warren Court, we were told that the court should be a

executive, legislative, and judicial branch.

And it was, and it legislated.

And every time they tried to, Eisenhower or Nixon or the Bushes tried to put a judge in there, whether it was David Souter or John Paul Stevens or Potter, whoever they were, they flipped.

And that's what the left was giddy about.

And now they don't, other than John Roberts.

And they, it's, it's like a teenager, you know, I'm losing the game, so I'm going to throw the destroy the board and throw all the players off my table.

That's how they act on everything.

Well, they They need a message.

They need a message.

That assumes they

accept the rules and to abide by them.

But I'd like to get a little more into, but Victor, on your, not a rant,

your elaboration of what should take place in 2023 politically.

And I would like to suggest a little bipartisanship investigation approach outside of Capitol Hill, but more towards K Street to see

who has their hand in the China till.

And Frank Wolf, who was a congressman from Northern Virginia, very active, very pro-life, very active in human rights, and he's still

active in that.

And he contacted me a while ago about the disgrace of his former colleagues, both sides, Democrat, Republican.

You would not have seen in 1970, 1980, a retired Republican senator or congressman working in any way for a firm that was benefiting Russia, a Soviet Union, excuse me, or any Eastern Bloc nation, or at the time, China.

Now,

you swing a dead cat and you'd hit a dozen of them.

So I think that needs,

that's not a congressional investigation, but some intrepid journalists should strap on a set and do a thorough investigation of who's.

I think we all know the people involved it's about four institutions it's academia and i'm speaking as a sort of member of the stanford university community and remember during the trump administration they were fined i think several million dollars for not reporting gifts from the chinese government the department of education find them We had a member of the Chinese military masquerading as a visiting professor, I think, of neuroscience.

And we have these Confucius Institutes, which are fronts for observation and surveillance of Chinese students, as well as propaganda.

And so why would Stanford or Harvard Yale do these things?

Because of the money.

380,000 Chinese students, and most of them, I think, are highly connected in China, and they're the children of party members and functionaries.

And so academia is compromised, professional sports are compromised.

I mean, Steve Kerr can't open his mouth without trying to have some moral relevant argument about China versus us.

And LeBron James, nothing to be said.

He can talk about every little petite injustice in the world that justifies not, you know, standing up for the flag that's made him rich, but he can't say one word about this atrocious fascist government in China that puts a million people in education camps.

He won't say a word because he's got a lifetime contract that will be monetized at about a billion dollars.

and we know the corporate boardroom no need to talk there i mean all bill gates was praising the chinese reaction to the epidemic at the very moment when china was stonewalling and not turning over documents and he was still bragging about how wonderful they had reacted and he of course microsoft was one of the first companies to invest heavily in china And so we know the media as well.

I mean, Hollywood was told by the Chinese government, we do not want darker skin actors, too many of them, and movies that will be shown in China.

And they click their heels and say, absolutely, we'll do that.

This is liberal Hollywood.

And the media, of course, ran with the Chinese lie that we were racist for having a travel ban.

So it's those four or five institutions that are doing it, and they're all being enriched by the Chinese.

And they have contempt.

I think everybody should remember that.

They think that these wealthy American Westerners are decadent and they can be bought for 10 cents on the dollar.

And they can.

And they feel that they can steal technology.

They can bully their neighbors.

They

can unleash, whether on, you know, deliberately or by accident, a virus that pretty much killed a million Americans.

And if you dare object to that, you're a racist.

And so they're insidious, the Chinese communists.

It's scary.

And yet here we are, 330 million people with a GDP, even in our decline, that's about 40 to 50% still,

however we measure it, greater than the economy of China that has

as its potential, 1.4 billion people.

And so we only have about a fifth of its population and we produce almost

some years we were producing almost twice the goods and services.

So we still have the wherewithal to confront China if we want.

Trump did it.

And of course, he was called, as the institutions rallied to save their financial investment.

He was called a racist.

That's what the left does, Jack.

Anytime that their money is threatened or their elite status is threatened, they call people racist or sexist.

But it's usually about class.

I mean, they're very, they're very selfish, wealthy people now.

They're the party of Marie Antoinette.

And that's not fair to Marie Antoinette, because we know she didn't say let them eat cake.

But, you know, they did say, let just go buy a Tesla.

Buy a Tesla.

Right.

Well, if you can, go ahead.

Victor, back on the teenage tantrum aspect of what you were talking about before, strikes me, it's stricken us all our whole lives that America has been called a nation of laws, right?

That's what we're about.

Not unless, for some people, not if the laws don't please you.

So, what we have in some of these reactions to the recent Supreme Court decisions, last week, Joe Biden issued an executive order.

I think that tantrum might apply to that,

directing various agencies of the federal government to do what it can to circumvent, not the technical term he used, but essentially to circumvent the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, task force being formed.

We've heard talk, you know, use of federal lands, et cetera.

So we have this,

you know, flipping the bird at that decision.

And then the Supreme Court decision on the New York gun laws has, you know, received a tip, I'll call it typical, similar reaction.

The court has spoken, has spoken clearly.

We are in a blue state.

What do we do to circumvent, obfuscate, disregard the Supreme Court decision?

So in New York, I'm looking at Legal Insurrection, by the way, which is a great website.

Legal Insurrection, I recommend folks check it out.

Bill Jacobson runs it.

One week after the Supreme Court struck down a law limiting the spread of concealed handguns in New York, state Democratic leaders on Friday were expected to respond with new measures that would prohibit people from carrying firearms in many public settings deemed quote-unquote sensitive places.

The ban would apply to places like colleges, hospitals, subways, parks, the latter two are where you're most likely to get mugged and raped, by the way, stadiums, and even Times Square, a last-minute addition to the late-night negotiations.

It would also extend to any private property, such as bar, restaurant, or home, unless the property owner expressly allows guns, which they can do by placing a sign on their premises.

So, Victor, we don't like what the Supreme Court ruled.

Essentially, we don't like our Constitution, and this is how we're going to react, deal with it, America.

Your rights are not your rights.

Your rights are our rights, and we're going to deem them if and when.

So

it's the same theme that we were talking about.

I mean, JFK and RFK in 1963, rightfully so, nationalized the Alabama State Guard because George Wallace defied a court ruling about integrating the University of Alabama.

And so the federal government had a right to do that.

And so what they are saying is it's sort of a reversal that the federal government obeys the Supreme Court and there are insurrectionists.

They're saying, no, we're going to find a way with an executive order to certainly.

I don't know how they're going to do that because it's unconstitutional.

And remember, the Supreme Court didn't say, it didn't say abortion shall now be legal in the United States.

It just simply said the state shall decide what.

the position on abortion will be the law within their state jurisdictions.

And so now Joe Biden, and remember, Jack, about 10% of abortions take place in so-called red states that will probably have some restrictions on abortion.

But the left is saying, we're going to go into those states and we're going to allow that 10% of the women who want to have an abortion to have an abortion somehow.

And

they've had all different strategies.

They're going to have, you know, you can have abortion pills sent in the mail.

And it'll be a Herculean task to check whether that, and that's not very safe to do it without a doctor's supervision, but nevertheless, that's what will happen.

And then they want to have federal facilities, national parks, military bases.

That is not only defying the Supreme Court, and that goes back to the Civil War about federal property within state jurisdiction, but more importantly, it violates that 1980 Hyde Amendment that said no federal fund shall be used to facilitate abortion except in the cases of saving the life of the mother.

And I think that saved 300,000 children from being aborted in a year.

And so they are lawless and they're revolutionaries.

I think everybody has to realize that going back to ancient Athens, the Deimos, or you go into the Roman Republic in its last few years, or you look at the French Revolution, or you look at the Bolsheviks, how they took power.

The left is lawless and look at what happened in Cuba.

What I mean by lawless is they feel that their revolutionary fervor and their commitment to radical equality and equality of result

entails them to use government power to ensure that everybody beneath them, beneath this elite is equal.

And because that is so morally superior to any other idea, they have the right to ignore the law.

and make their own morally superior law.

And that's what they do.

And they do it with sanctuary cities.

They do it with destroying federal immigration law and opening the border.

They're going to try to do it with abortion.

And the one thing to remember about the left is that it's not symmetrical.

If you're some

little county in Utah and you say, hey, sanctuary cities is the thing of the day now, okay, no federal gun registration for handguns.

Or, you know what, if you want to go bulldoze that little three-spotted lizard, go ahead.

We don't have anything federal endangered speech.

You're going to be in in trouble.

And so I think everybody should take a big pause, Jack, at this point and say, you know what?

We have given Joe Biden a year and a half.

This is the worst presidency in modern memory.

I can't think of it.

James Buchanan is happy right now.

Yes, he is happy, but he was probably better than Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is not only non-compos mentes,

but he has unleashed people to act in a fashion that is utterly illegal.

And whether it's putting Navarro in chains or

going after James O'Keeve for the SWAT team, he has absolutely politicized the Department of Justice and the FBI.

And I don't know how you If you have a Republican president, the first thing they should do is fire the entire hierarchy of the Washington FBI and then break that thing up and put it in Kansas City because we're going to see it as a personal retrieval service of a president.

It goes after diaries.

It goes after school board parents.

It goes after laptops and to keep them on ice for the election.

And

the Pentagon has been completely politicized under Mark Milley and Austin.

And almost every institution is now a revolutionary institution that's woke.

And you can see it.

You can see the symptoms of it, the symptomology.

You see 40% shortfall on enrollment and recruitment into the military because people don't want any part of that woke revolution.

And they know what's going to happen if they enroll.

And the same thing, we have a million less students because a lot of students in the United States say, you know what?

I am not going to borrow $50,000 to $80,000 and walk on a campus with a big target on my back as a racist or a sexist or a predator.

I'm not going to do that.

I have young people that write me all the time and college students, and they say things that are just absolutely incredible, or their parents will say something like, can you imagine a mother telling her child going off to a four-year institution, I do not want you to date anybody on campus?

That's what they say.

Don't date anybody on campus.

Do not get involved in any political organization, left or right.

Do not say anything.

Do not go on social media, erase your high school account.

That's what they tell their kids because they understand that they're going into an Orwellian world.

right?

And well, that Barry Weiss, I just quickly read through one of her substack pieces, and she mentioned, I forget the person's name now, but it was to be to be an editor of Teen Vogue, who then was quickly

canceled because of high school posts, you know.

So, you know, you hear, you hear that a couple of times, and you know,

yeah,

it's

hard, but maybe very practical parental advice.

But Victor,

you mentioned the military and the wokeness, and we've talked about this many times.

And there's a little bit of a reverse on that now.

And it's about a general getting canceled.

And I would like to get your thoughts on that, but right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Again, we're recording on Sunday, the 10th of July.

This particular podcast will be up and at you on the 12th, Tuesday, the 12th.

I want to recommend to our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com.

That's the website where it's the catch-all of everything Victor writes, including material that is exclusive to that website.

Those articles are called Ultra, and you can't read them unless you subscribe.

And subscribing is so damn reasonable, it's not funny.

$5 a month.

Just once,

take out a $5

try.

Test drive, VictorHanson.com.

You're going to love it.

Full year is $50.

Most recent ultra up there is

Victor gets around to this every once in a blue moon, and it's called the Angry

The Angry Reader.

And he responds to Angry Reader and takes them apart.

Victor, we don't have to get into this, but I just have to say, here's one angry reader, Vince C that you got an email from.

Subject, you should have been aborted.

Conservatives like you are the scum of the earth, worthless pieces of trash.

Blank you, Vince C.

And then you respond to that and others.

Victor, you're a funny man, I have to admit.

I get a lot of those.

I have an assistant that goes through them, and some of them we can't put on because they're scatological and stuff.

But there's more intellectual stuff than that.

But it's nice to see you kneecap

people who need kneecapping.

So speaking of being kneecapped, Victor.

Here's a headline from USA Today.

Retired three-star general suspended from Army contract after tweet that appeared to mock

Jill Biden.

So, our readers will just bear with me here a second.

And, you know, we're constantly talking about problems with the higher echelons of the military, but here's one that's a little different from the kind of stuff we've talked about recently.

A retired three-star general has been suspended from a $92 an hour contract consulting the Army and is under investigation after posting a tweet that appeared to mock First Lady Jill

Jill Biden on a hot-button social issue, according to the Army.

Retired Lieutenant General Gary Valesky, the Army's former top spokesman and recipient of the Silver Star for Gallantry in Iraq, has been a quote-unquote senior mentor, advising senior military officers, staff, and students, participating in war games and other military activities.

Guess what?

Lieutenant General Theodore Martin, commander of the Combined Arms Center, suspended Valesky Pending the outcome of the inquiry, Cynthia Smith, an Army spokeswoman, told USA Today.

What happened?

On June 24th, the first lady posted a tweet condemning the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v.

Wade.

Quote, for nearly 50 years, women have had the right to make our own decisions about our bodies.

Today, that right was stolen.

That's what Jill Biden tweeted, to which Valesky replied with his own tweet, Glad to see you finally know what a woman is, end quote.

That tweet has been deleted.

He also

had some controversial tweet, by the way, Victor, earlier in the year, mocking the January 6th committee, I think in a not inappropriate way.

So, wow, you have a

retired general.

I think it's kind of funny, right?

Certainly.

It's free speech, but go ahead, have out of it.

It's actually a complex issue because

Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice justice says that no commissioned officer shall use i think the word they used was contemptuous to be contemptuous words and that would be directed i mean it's a whole group of people about top-ranking public public elected officials the president and the cabinet it so the first thing to remember it doesn't say anything about the first lady she's not an elected official So that's one issue to keep in mind.

The second issue is he's not being punished.

And I want to note here that a lot of courts and legal opinion have said

that retired military officers on a pension and subject to recall are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, just as are active.

So he's retired, and he's used contemptuous words in a way.

They're not all that contemptuous, they're sarcastic toward the first lady, but she's she's not an elected official.

So he's not being punished under the Uniform Code of Military Justice because he can't, because he did not insult a, there's two things, remember, he wouldn't anyway, if he was liberal, but he, as a conservative, he might have been, but he's not because he didn't do that.

So what he's doing is the Pentagon has decided that in this politicized atmosphere, that he shall, I guess, Lloyd Austin has decided that he shall not get contractual employment anymore.

Okay.

The problem with all this is it is so asymmetrical.

Because if you really want to look at contemptuous words, not directed at a non-elected official, but directed at a elected official, in fact, the highest elected official in the United States, Donald Trump.

then you have a whole rogues gallery of retired officers subject to Article 88.

You've got Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, four-star general, comparing Trump's border policies to Auschwitz.

You have Stanley McChrystal, who says

he's a liar,

liar.

You have General McCaffrey, who said he's a Mussolini.

You have General Mattis, who used a D-Day simile that suggested the president was playing the role of a Nazi.

And I could go on.

Nothing, nothing happened to them.

If any one of those officers had said the same thing right now about Joe Biden, there would be a call to subject them all to Article 88.

So we have to be careful here when we put it all back together, Jack, is that the gentleman question

was not prosecuted in a court-martial, which the statute said should happen

to active officers and which has been interpreted to apply to retired officers.

He has not been

indicted or brought up on charges for his language of using contemptuous words, but he has had his consulting

job terminated.

So this begs the question, of all of those generals that I mentioned that violated Article 88 without consequence, did any of them have ongoing government contracts?

And that would be something I would like to know.

I mean, because there's a lot of them.

I just mentioned seven or eight, but there's 20 or 30 of them that came out.

I mean, General Allen, who now has had to resign at the head of the Brookings because he's under suspicion of being a foreign agent in the sense that a foreign lobbyist did not declare that under the Foreign Agent Act, he was very contemptuous of his commander-in-chief.

So my point is, did any of them have continual

ad hoc financial relationships with federal bureaucracies?

And if they did,

why weren't those contracts terminated?

And by the way, contemptuous words, making fun of Jill Biden about, you know, you're against abortion and you're saying women's rights, I mean, you're for abortion, women's rights have been abrogated, according to you, but then you're also suggesting that women don't have exclusive exclusivity.

Men can have babies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that was, it was sarcastic, but it was not your Hitler, your Mussolini, your Auschwitz.

Right.

So the left just does that.

And again,

this is a question that's going to permeate every one of our podcasts in the next few months.

And I hope every single person who's listening, this is an existential dilemma that everybody has.

So when you select your nominee from whichever party, but if you're angry with the situation, you have two considerations.

A, the electability of your favorite candidate,

the issue, I should say three, B, the issues on which they're going to run and advance, but more importantly, to the degree they have fire in the belly.

Are they just going to go in there and, you know what I mean, they're just going to say, well, this is just the same.

Mitt Romney, you know, here's Mitt Romney telling everybody that Joe Biden is a fine person

when in 2012, his Republican establishment was sending out emails, chain emails to all columnists and so-called opinion makers suggesting that it was very unfair that Joe Biden had called him a racist by saying, put you all in chains.

And that was just one of his felonies.

Remember,

he tortured dogs on top of the woof.

His wife was an elite that had a

horseback riding apparatus.

Gave a kid a haircut that he didn't want in prep school, something.

Had an elevator in his house,

didn't talk to his garbage man, all these felonies in Mitt Romney.

And so he was all angry at Joe Biden.

But this is what I can't understand, getting to another subject.

If you look at every issue that he advanced in 2012 and you put them on the other side of the ledger with Donald Trump, what he ran, they're almost the same.

He said he was tough on the border.

He said he was going to deregulate.

He said he was going to reduce taxes.

He said he was going to promote energy development.

And he said he would have a deterrent foreign policy.

So here he is saying basically to the American people, Joe Biden, who had slandered and smeared me and tried to destroy my character is a fine person.

But the Republican nominee of my own party who endorsed me to return to the Senate and help me get elected in Utah is not.

And he shares the same ideology and policy agenda that I do.

I don't understand that.

Even though I wished he had appointed me Secretary of State.

Yeah, well, that was Trump.

That was something that I think Trump, to be fair to Romney, I think Trump said a moment.

He's probably rubbing his snout in the muck.

Hey, since we're okay about mocking Biden a little bit, let's not mock Jill Biden.

Let's mock Joe Biden.

And I hope we can keep this a little short because

later on in the podcast, Victor, I'd like to.

us to talk a little bit or hear you talk a little bit about the anniversary of what today is and battle Britain commenced on July 10th in 1940.

It was also a significant day in the Pacific theater

as massive bombing campaigns against Japan began on July 10th, 1945.

And so we'd like to get a little of Victor, the military historian, and then hopefully have a little time left for your thoughts about Abe Shinzo, the assassinated former prime minister of Japan.

But before that, Victor, we saw with our own eyes and heard with our ears Joe Biden reading from the teleprompter the other day, where he

repeats the line, end of quote, repeat the line.

And of course, he was immediately mocked by people who reminded him of the movie Anchorman, where the goofball anchorman reads directly from the teleprompter.

So this is what happened on Twitter.

Of course, somebody put up, well, the Anchorman, you know,

he read from the teleprompter.

And so white house assistant press secretary emily simon said no

he said quote let me repeat that line end quote what biden said was repeat the line clearly was so but that this is such a you know it's a tiny thing right but it's a big thing like a barefaced public lie by the and the white house of course also doctored the transcript of of uh of biden's remarks let me repeat that line no he the word let

the word me was not the word that were not in what biden said he said repeat the line victor your thoughts about

the thing about biden is the right and his opposition doesn't have to lie with trump because he was undisciplined in his speech sometimes but it was usually in a minor fashion he said things that were cruel but the main things i mean he didn't say that they were suckers at Normandy.

That was one person in a room that lied to the media about that when everybody else denied that he had said it, or any of these other things about drinking bleach.

Remember that one?

He just said, wouldn't it be good to have a disinfectant that

people could use somehow without, you know, he didn't say swallow bleach.

But my point is that with Biden, you can't because

he says things that are on record and people hear them and they cannot be explained away.

There's nobody,

I mean, there's nobody in that room who heard him and said, no, no, he did say, let me repeat this.

So you would just have to, you're stuck with that reality.

It would be as if 28 people in a room said, Donald Trump said they were suckers, but they didn't.

Only one did, and everybody contradicted them.

So with Biden, what do you do if you're the press secretary?

I mean, you just say, okay, you heard it.

I don't know.

I mean, you know, if I were the press secretary, I would say, if you're president of the United States and you're speaking all day long, which he isn't, and you have all of these different lectures, once in a while, that teleprompter mesmerizes you and you do the prompt line.

Big deal.

But they can't do that.

because they can't admit the obvious, that he's not able

to perform the duties of president.

And right now, as you and I are talking and our audience is listening, believe me, there are some big billionaires in Silicon Valley and Wall Street and Hollywood, and they are on the phone 24-7.

What are we going to do with this wreck of a president?

He's going to take us all down.

How do we get rid of him?

It's sort of murder in the cathedral.

I don't mean murder literally, but who is going to relieve me of Joe Biden?

Yeah.

Who will not rid us of this priest?

Yes.

Troublesome priest.

And so they're thinking, how do we

do we own Camilla Harris?

Can we control her?

Can we muzzle her with her 500-word vocabulary and her repetitive nonsense?

Can we just put her on it?

That's what they're talking about.

Right.

And so he's not sustainable.

And he's just, and for the rest of us who told everybody that, I wrote five columns saying this was going to be a disaster if you put him in.

And I got really chastised.

I think

I won't mention the anchor person, but on Fox News, I said he was reptilian-like.

He was.

He looked reptilian.

I said he looks bloodless.

And somebody thought that was cruel for me to say that, but I didn't mean it to be cruel.

I was trying to warn people that whatever your ideology, he's not up to it.

And if you go back and look at those primary debates, Jack, in 2020, people on the stage said that.

Corey

Brooker was making fun of Biden's confusion.

They all did.

And that was one of the things they used against him, that he was not there.

And so this is a situation where,

again, irony, irony, irony.

We had a president that whatever you said about him, that guy worked 20 hours a day, Donald Trump did.

And yet, On the 11th day, Rosa Brooks wrote in Foreign Affairs, How You Get Rid of a Military Coup, 25th Amendment, Impeachment.

And then we had the 25th Amendment, the 20.

Remember the Bandy Lee, the Yale psychologist that came and said that he was crazy.

She testified before Congress and he needed an intervention, i.e., a straitjacket to remove him.

Right.

And we had that psychodrama between Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe about who was going to bail the cat, wear the mic or something.

Weren't they going to survey or did they survey the cabinet to find the votes to remove him?

And here you have a guy who who finally, for the first time in the history of the 25th Amendment, fits all of the categories of being disabled.

Right.

And no one says a word.

No one.

Where is the FBI?

You know, where is Merrick Garland?

Is Christopher Wray and Merrick Garland going to wear a wire?

They're out looking for parents at school board meetings.

They're going to be at school board meetings and turning the other way when people go to justices' homes to harass them.

Well, Victor,

let's talk about

today's anniversary and we'll get to your thoughts, Victor, the military historian, right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Again, we're recording on July 10th, and it dawned on me doing a little research that today

was the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain in 1940, which lasted nearly four months.

And then, coincidentally, as the war was ending

today,

in 1945, July 10th, began the really massive air campaign against Japan, carrier-based.

I read somewhere like a thousand bomber raids a day.

I mean,

how many planes

were flying?

Three to four hundred in each one.

Of course, I want to recommend to our listeners to,

if you haven't gotten it already, The Second World Wars by Victor, bestseller from, I think, 2017.

It is really one of the best,

kind of a new perspective from when it was published

of that time period.

Victor, any general thoughts you want to share about how let's take the Battle of Britain.

How vital was it?

Well, everybody should remember that Britain was the only belligerent, the only combatant in World War II among the major powers that fought the first day of the war on September 1st to 2nd, 1939, to the end of the war, September 2nd or 2nd, 1945.

No other power fought the entire six years.

And then secondly, it was the only country that went to war for the principle of sovereignty of another nation.

We didn't do that.

We went to war because we were attacked.

Russia went to the war into the war because they were attacked.

Germany attacked people.

Italy attacked people.

Britain was different, and they sometimes don't give their due.

But after the fall of France, remember when Hitler invaded France in the Low Countries, Belgium and Luxembourg and the Netherlands on May 10th,

by mid-June, June 23rd, it was all over with.

And at that point,

there was no Europe as we know it.

The EU today was either neutral but pro-German, that would be Portugal, Sweden, Spain, or it was occupied, France,

Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark,

Yugoslavia

would be occupied, and Greece in October 1940, you know, the Oki day.

So it was all there.

It was all under German,

or it was pro-German.

And those were most of the Eastern European countries that were not conquered, like Poland, but I'm talking about or Czechoslovakia that had been conquered, but you know, Romania and Hungary.

So they had all the advantages, and they had a seasoned army.

And so everybody thought the only thing left is Britain and its empire, and they were going to cut it off.

But this was not going to be, when they call it battle, it was just an air battle.

And everybody was so scared of the Luftwaffe.

So they thought the the Luftwaffe had fought the RAF over

France, and they had lost, the RAF had lost 300 or 400 planes.

So they thought, you know what?

Once we bomb, they'll be out of planes, they'll be out of pilots.

We're going to level the, we're going to first, we're going to take out their radar, and they started that, and then we're going to take out their airfields, then they'll be defenseless, and then our bombers will start terror bombing and incendiary attacks, and they will sue for peace and if they don't then uh we're going to send our surface fleet such as it is it's small but without air cover the british couldn't do much

i hate to interrupt victor but did they have the right the germans have the right to have that mindset because did the raf perform poorly no that's

yeah that's my point what i'm saying that's what they thought right okay but when you actually looked at the circumstances they performed very well because the hurricane, there mainstayed twice as many hurricanes as Spitfires, they were 40 or 50, 30 to 50 miles slower than the BF 109, what's sometimes, you know, in slang called the Mischerschmitt 109, although it was farmed out.

And the Germans, but when you actually look at the performance, when the Spitfires were fighting, they were as good.

And Germans never admitted that.

But if you look at the initial Spitfires, it was comparable to German BF-109.

And when you look at the iterations 1 to 10, it got better, much better.

But my point is that if you look at the individual circumstances, that is British planes having to fly over the Channel and then fight with French planes that were either based on the German border or already in advanced fields, they did very well.

And so the second thing to remember is that Hitler had not conducted a strategic sustained bombing campaign.

He'd done it over Amsterdam, Rotterdam, etc., but not really.

And it's too complicated to get into, but they had never, ever developed a four-engine bomber.

And they were kind of ahead of their time in the way that, you know, airliners today, except we're going beyond the 747 or the 707 with four in sales.

You know, there's not four engine.

coverings and mountings.

So the idea is you have two and then you have less drag and the two are big engines.

So that's what the Germans were obsessed with.

And it was a flawed concept at that time.

In fact, they finally went into putting two engines in line with it and some models, I think, and it was a disaster.

But my point is this, is if you don't have a four-engine bomber that can hold 10 ton of bombs or five ton of bombs, you're not going to be in a cost-effective manner.

So they had these, they had a Derners and they had a Heinkel and they had a Junkers.

But really, when you look at it, the the only one that was really a workhorse was the Heinkel and it had two engines.

And the Junkers was fast, but they didn't have the up, and this is the time, the comparable force.

And Britain had been flying, they were slow, you know,

Hanley Page, Stanley, all these precursors.

to the Lancaster bomber, but they had been flying four-engine bombers for a long time.

And when the Lancaster came and then the B-17 and then the B-20.

So the Allies were were the only two powers that could do a four-engine bomber that could carry a heavy bomb load.

So what I'm getting at is these planes were not very fast and they didn't have a high bomb load

and their tactics of taking out the radar and getting rid of the airfields was working, but it was very slow and they had to first get rid of the RAF.

And the problem they had was the RAF was not static.

They were improving their radar.

They were producing while bomb, three to four hundred airframes a month they were getting pilots from all over the free world that were volunteering some of them pretty good and they were using the first they had discovered high octane aviation fuel and they were really supercharging their engines and they were the hurricane was getting not comparable but close and then they had some brilliant people dowding was a really good commander and he said you know what we'll put the hurricanes high they'll dive down they're a little heavier and they'll come in and hit these formations, and they'll go after the bombers, and then we'll turn the Spitfires against the German supporting aircraft, the fighter aircraft.

And it worked.

And then when they started to bomb Germany haphazardly, ineffectively at night, Hitler went crazy.

And Goering was ordered to shift emphasis away from airfields and radar stations, which they had almost completely eliminated.

Had they done it another two weeks, they probably would have won the war.

But then they started firebombing London and Coventry, and it was spectacular, but it gave a needed breathing room for the RAF to recover.

And then once they mastered their tactics and then they understood that

The advantages were all in the British side because they were flying over their home country.

When you shot down a Spitfire, there was a 50% chance the pilot wasn't killed.

He bailed out.

He was picked up by a special British service.

He was sent right back to an airfield.

He was given another airframe and he was right back in the war.

The German pilots, as the British had discovered when they were fighting over France, got captured.

And so

the Germans didn't have very good airfields in France.

They had grass airfields, makeshift.

as an occupational force.

Some of them tried to bomb from Norway.

It was too far.

They had to fly across the channel and they were met, just as the Allies discovered when they flew over Europe.

They were met with relays of British fighters.

And it went on and on and on.

And finally, I think around November 1st, Hitler said,

this was very strange.

You know, he said, this is not going to work.

And the Navy came to tell him that we don't have enough amphibious class.

We do not have the U-boats have not obtained maritime superiority.

Of course, the British fleet is still the largest in the world at that time, right before the American push.

And we don't have air cover.

So we can't invade Operation Sea Line.

We cannot invade Britain.

And Hitler said, it doesn't really matter because they're neutralized.

We only are facing one combatant.

The United States is not in it.

The Empire has trouble supplying it because of submarines in the Atlantic.

We'll invade the Soviet Union.

And the Soviet Union has not done well.

When we chopped up Poland, they were tardy.

They went into Finland in 1939.

They were laggard there.

In the 20s, they had tried to take Poland.

They didn't do well.

They just don't fight well when they're outside.

And he was completely wrong.

So he invaded, according to Hitler, we know from some of his musings that have been recorded, he invaded the Soviet Union.

to take it in a month and then tell Britain, well, we weren't able to crack you, but now the Soviet Union is destroyed.

We have its resources and you're completely surrounded.

And of course, that didn't work out very well.

And so

one of the reasons, I think this is very important to remember, one of the reasons, not the reason, but one of the considerations why he invaded Russia on June 22nd, 1941, is that he had utterly failed in Britain.

And he felt that the

Wehrmacht, the war machine, was much better on land than it was in the Air or Sea, and it could defeat the Soviets, and then that britain would be would be isolated and of course that didn't work out too well it was a very important battle to stop the momentum it was the first time that the

wehrmark had been defeated and it was a defeat and one last consideration is

we don't give the french enough credit i know they they lost 25 000 dead they folded in six to seven weeks But, you know, they had a Dewante fighter, and it was very good.

It was almost so people had noticed that when germany went into france the french chartank was better than the mark ii and three and some of their aircraft were better or as good as the bf-109 but they just didn't have the operational discipline and control and logistics but on and the will to fight but what i'm getting at is if you total up lost aircraft to the French and British over during the battle for France from May 10th to June 20 something,

1940, and you total up all the airframes and pilots that were lost from

mid-July all the way to the fall, July, the next November, that November, and you then go into the battle for Crete and Greece in spring 1941,

and you total up the Luftwaffe's capability and what it should have been given a year and a half of preparation after Poland to go in the Soviet Union.

it's shocking they had lost about 16 1700 planes and they were mostly all to the british whether over greece over crete but especially over britain and over france so the british raf

had pretty much ensured that there were no air reserves for Hitler should he hit a bump and he hit it very quickly and he needed air support he didn't have it he didn't have logistical support he didn't have bomb he lost so many bombers over Britain he was unable to have any strategic bombing campaign in Russia of any consequence.

They tried it, but

it was never successful.

Victor, give this one minute, but because we do running out of time, we do have to get your thoughts about the assassination of Shinzo.

You mentioned before the two-week period that really saved Britain here.

Was the British bombing of German cities that made Hitler irate and switched the bombing of England to the major cities.

Was that calculated?

Was there some thought that if we do this, somehow or other, that will

impact the German strategy against Britain?

Or was it just a payback thing that happened to work out that way?

I think

it's hard to know because of the propaganda later, the tit for tat back and forth.

We know that Hitler started to bomb Coventry because for the first time, not only had the British, they had targeted Berlin and the Germans felt they had targeted and they believed in something called, they don't like to use the word, it's taboo, carpet bombing, but they had a strategy called area bombing.

And that would be famous under Bomber Harris.

And that meant that they didn't feel they had the capability to drop a bomb down a smokestack of an industrial target.

So they were going going to bomb the area.

And if they hit workers' houses or they hit water mains, all the better.

They felt because they even had a word de-house.

They were going to de-house the German workforce that came in later.

But what I'm getting at is that anytime a British bomber took off, it was going to area bomb.

And Hitler was enraged that while he was attacking Britain, they had the ability and the desire and the upy to, they were so uppity that they dared to go into Germany that he was going to retaliate.

And there was a great controversy because of the ultra-intelligence that the British had advanced warning.

You know, they were going to go after Coventry, which was a historical site.

And they had to ask themselves,

will we vector the RAF to stop that bombing raid?

And they had the ability probably to do it.

And they decided not to.

And allowed Coventry, I don't know how many people were killed,

five or six thousand.

And it was a disaster.

But we know later that there was not any notion.

The Germans did not have any idea about the ultra ability, that intelligence.

So in hindsight, had they, I shouldn't say six or seven thousand, probably six or seven thousand, I meant injured, missing.

I think there was about 1,500 killed.

Casualties, yeah.

Yeah, casualties is what I meant.

And that was in a variety of raids.

They didn't just do it once, but

they were having two 200 bombers in April, and then they did it in August.

And they went all the way to 1942, and they kept hitting Coventry.

But my point is that had they defended Coventry and were waiting for them, the Germans would not have known that that strategy came from advanced intelligence.

Victor, thanks for this worthwhile history lesson.

So let's end the program today with your thoughts on Shinzo Abe, the assassinated Japanese prime minister.

He had served for 15 years in that capacity.

Would you, as someone who is through your job at Hoover Military Strategy Organization that you run there, a lot of thought has gone into the Pacific nations and the countering of the China threat.

He was central to much of that.

Is he a great figure?

Or what's your assessment of him as a national leader of the 21st century?

Well, the thing to remember about Japan is that they had never gone through the confessionals that Germany did.

I'm not sure Germany really did a good job either, but about World War II.

And so...

In their constitution, they were not supposed to be offensively armed, et cetera, et cetera.

And so most Japanese leaders didn't want to talk about World War II.

They did pay some reparations to some of the people they slaughtered.

And

he was the first Japanese leader.

At some point, is what I'm getting at, Jack, is at some point there was going to be a Japanese leader who had said, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, I get it.

Our fathers and grandfathers were militarists and they committed atrocities and we've apologized.

I don't think they did sufficiently, but it would have been a lot worse to have a Hitlerian figure that would have marshaled nationalist sentiment because everybody's got nationalism, especially the ethno-nationalism of the Japanese.

So he comes along and he wants to ride that wave.

And he's called, you know, I don't know what they called him.

And the left after his death was calling him fascist, right-wing, nationalist, and all that.

But the point I'm making is He was really the first Japanese minister that said, we're going to start thinking about rearming and we have come to terms with Korea.

What we did was wrong and we understand

that we have things in our past, but that's it.

We're done with it.

We're going to look at the future and the future means China.

And we're worried about China.

We know we've committed atrocities in the past with China in World War II, but that's over.

China is the aggressor now.

And South Korea will not benefit anymore by trying to leverage us for more reparations.

And that was very controversial for him to do that.

But he didn't do it in a way that was, you know, like the Chinese are doing today.

So he didn't, I don't think anybody was threatened in the area by the Japanese.

It was just a radical transformation in the early 21st century that a Japanese leader would say, we are transitioning into

a defensive, purely defensive power to one with offensive capabilities.

We are worried about China.

We're not reluctant to admit it.

We

are not going to dwell anymore on World War II.

We're not going to be psychologically leveraged by any of the people who our grandparents, you know, murdered.

It's over with.

And then he applied sort of a, you know, a Ronald Reagan open up the Japanese economy, and that had mixed results, but it was probably better than what came before him or after him.

And so he was very pro-American, too.

And he was much hated in the United States.

I was very struck that the, you know, the obituaries that you saw in the major newspapers were not favorable.

And a kind of a cheesy initial comment from Biden also.

Yeah.

Trying to play domestic politics off.

this guy's murder.

He was a bestseller, I remember.

That was a big deal right during the Iraq War.

I don't know what the name of it was, but it was sometime around right when we were in the Iraq war.

It was sort of like we're on our way to making toward a great country or something.

It was a good book.

I read excerpts of it.

It was in English.

Well, the fifth largest economy in the world.

It's

part of the way there, of course.

tremendous demographic problems like many nations have, including America

is starting to have now.

You've talked about that with Sammy on recent podcasts.

But we're running out of time.

So Victor, I just want to cap the show, as we always do, with a comment from one of our listeners.

No matter what platform you listen on, we appreciate it.

Google Play, Stitcher,

iTunes.

I said iTunes and I said it for purpose.

Some people do go to iTunes still.

Some people go to Apple Podcasts.

If you go there, you can leave a rating, one to five stars.

Please consider that.

Victor deserves 10, but Nimosi can give us five.

So you can also leave comments and we read them.

And one: Excellent podcast, outstanding host, spectacular professor, and exemplary citizen.

That's the title.

Everyone would benefit from this podcast.

Give a listen, even if you disagree here and there, you still learn something, gain wisdom, and be entertained.

I guarantee it.

If not, you can sue me.

And by the way, Mr.

Fowler, stop listening to millennials chiding him for referring to iTunes.

iTunes is still in use in addition to Apple, the Apple Music Music app.

I know, because I use it every day for podcast downloads on one of my older computers.

I prefer the interface.

Also, it has fewer bells and whistles, and I find it simpler to use.

So, and sadly, I cut the name off of the person that wrote this.

So, appreciate it.

But appreciate you taking the time to correct, you know, have my back a little bit,

my ancient back.

Victor, thanks for all the great wisdom you shared today.

Appreciate it immensely.

Thanks, listeners, for listening.

And we will be back soon with yet another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

I very much appreciate it.