Under the Rock of History

55m

In the Saturday edition, Victor Davis Hanson talks about many misconceptions of World War II and some modern misconception about inflations, Obama, and Biden. Listen in with cohost Sami Winc.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the listeners of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We have a great show for you today.

The Saturday edition always is a little bit different.

We like to talk a little bit about history and a little bit about the modern world.

Today we're going to look at some of the misconceptions of World War II and then maybe some recent misconceptions.

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Welcome back.

And Victor, how are you doing today?

Very good, Sammy.

Very good.

Very well, I should say.

Sorry.

Awesome.

Well, hopefully you'll get your rain in California and things are going pretty well.

Do you ever get over to the coast?

I was at Palo Alto hard at work at my day job and I got a good view of California driving across the west side and my four-hour trek.

And that was depressing given the infrastructure and the poor roads.

And then I did cross the Stonehenge high-speed rail route again.

Every time I cross it, it's very sad.

Okay, I didn't know I was going to bring out Eeyore this morning.

So maybe we better move on a little bit.

I think you should move on.

Okay, I'd like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Nealey 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.

Victor, we were talking on the Friday edition about your World War II book, and I thought We really didn't have enough time.

It's a wonderful book.

It's absolutely chock full of facts and research and evidence.

And I know that you do about six or seven things new or study and come to conclusions of about six or seven new things that often are misconceptions of in history.

And I wanted to see if we could talk about a few of those things.

And the first one is that Britain was the weak link in World War II or that Britain really didn't perform up to the standard and World War II was won by the United States and the Soviet Union collectively on both sides.

Could you address that for us?

Yeah, you know, this was very popular in Britain because that was a theme throughout the book that because of, I guess because of GDP or population, the Soviet Union had about 180 million.

We had about 140.

Britain was about 40, 43 million.

But that was a misconception for a lot of reasons.

First of all, Britain was the only of the three, only power of the three, the main, the big three, the Soviet Union, us, and Britain, that started the first day of the war.

When Hitler went in on September 1st, they declared war on September 2nd.

And they were the only power to last the entire war.

So when we, September 2nd, 1945, when the formal Pacific theater ended, they were there.

So we came in late.

Obviously, we had reasons for that.

In December of 1941, the Soviet Union was an ally, an ally, basically de facto under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact until June 22nd, 1941, but not Britain.

And they were the only power, think about this, Sammy.

They were the only power who went to war that was not attacked by the Third Reich.

In other words, they went for the principle of the sovereignty of Poland.

It was a principle for them.

And they fought the entire six years.

That's underappreciated.

The second thing, when we say Britain, that's a construct.

What we're talking about is the British Empire.

At that time, that constituted Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, South Africa.

And so what that meant was in terms of oil or natural resources or production, because of American-Canadian joint ventures, say, and trucks, Canada supplied more wheeled vehicles to the Allied effort.

and more ships than did Hitler to the Axis effort.

People forget that.

So it was drawing on a huge empire and a huge population.

And then there was British technology.

If you think very quickly, if you go through all of the main developments, say in cryptology, or I could call it cyber warfare, it's not cyber, but I'm talking about breaking codes, the ultra secret, getting the fourth wheel on the Enigma machine, a sonar, sonar.

All of those ASDAC, all of those inventions were British.

Even the great innovations in radar were British.

And when the war started, Britain had the largest navy larger than our navy that only lasted for a year and a half but the british navy was everywhere and it fought a two-front war it was i mean everybody says you can never win a two-front war that's what destroyed hitler hello when hitler went into russia he didn't have a two-front war the war was inert all there was left was britain and it was static that north africa was contained but when britain went to war it immediately fought the Nazis in North Africa and they were trying to bomb them over the continent.

And then the Pacific War started, and they went into Burma to protect India, et cetera, et cetera.

We did, and Britain did.

So, and then finally, under terms of production, it simply out-produced itself, itself, maybe not in artillery and tank production, but in terms of airframes.

During the Blitz, when it was being bombed, it produced more Spitfire airframes than the British, than the Germans did with all of occupied Europe under its heel, than they did VF-109.

So, it's a pretty amazing achievement.

And we also got the leadership of Winston Churchill, which was an asset as well.

You mentioned the Enigma machine.

And if it's not too much of a digression, I wanted to ask a question about that, that the British were able to apprehend an Enigma machine early on in the war, right?

And then it was very useful.

I was reading a book by Martin Gilbert, The Second World War.

And I noticed that was one thing I had a very big impression of in the beginning of the book that that Enigma machine was very important early on in the war.

Is that true?

It was because the Poles were the people who snuck out an Enigma machine.

There were three wheels.

And until that fourth wheel was added, for example, when the British were in some of their worst moments of the U-boat war, they were getting information on everything from how many U-boats were being produced, how many troops were being diverted to the Eastern Front after June of 41,

and actually where the Wolfpacks were going to assemble.

But there were a couple things, remember, for a while everything went blank because they made a more sophisticated fourth wheel.

They had little spinning wheels that

were essential to the code.

decoding process.

And then they found a submarine and they got the fourth wheel.

But at the same time they were doing this, remember, they cracked the British naval codes in Egypt.

The Germans did.

So they, for about

a few months, they had an advantage and then it was lost forever.

And then the question was: do you tip off the Germans by doing it?

Should you tell everybody in Coventry, England to get out of Coventry, England and evacuate the city?

Because they were going to firebomb it the next 24 hours?

They didn't do that.

I think they should have, but they didn't.

And because they wanted to protect that information.

So on D-Day, they knew the size of the German forces and where they were arrayed, etc.

So very valuable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's move on then, speaking of the Africa area, and I think where at least I'm most aware of the first introduction of the Sherman tank.

Another misconception is that the Sherman tank was a death trap.

What are your thoughts on that?

Well, when I started writing the Second World Wars, I had an uncle that was in the Third Army, and that was the perception of the soldiers themselves.

Because on rare occasions, when the Americans really got into Europe, I mean, they had Lee and Stewart tanks that weren't that good in North Africa.

Then they got the Sherman at the end.

We gave 200 Sherman tanks to the British right before LLMA, and they were very good.

The problem was that we were not a continental power.

So we're over here in North America with friendly Canadians and friendly Mexico with no threat of an invasion by land.

And we didn't really, we stressed air power and naval power.

That was what was going to be preemptive, unpreemptive war.

So we didn't really catch up on tanks.

So when the war started, we really were way behind.

And then we decided to make the super tank, the Sherman.

And it had a very easily, you know, there were American automotive companies outsourced it, GM, et cetera, Chrysler.

It had a very reliable.

power plant.

It had a very easily maintained transmission.

Up to the time of 1942, November, December, it had about two to three inches of armor.

It was comparable to the German Mark III, Mark IV, maybe, and better than the Mark III.

And so for a brief window, it was superior.

But we didn't know what was going on with the Soviets and the Germans.

We didn't understand the T-34, which was diesel engine, lightweight aluminum engine, sloped armor.

high-powered 76 millimeter.

So we had a short-barreled 75 millimeter, and it was really good in North Africa.

And then guess what?

And this tit-for-tat challenge and response, soviet german warfare tank engineering blew up i mean it just went crazy so all of a sudden you had to have a 76 millimeter high long barreled gun there was no more you know 37 millimeter 50 millimeter and the sherman 75 which had been superior short barrel but everybody else had a 50 millimeter and 37 and then you started getting three and four inches of armor and then when you look at the panther tiger came out before the panther but 60 tons and up to 70 with the King Tiger.

And then when you look at the Panther, which supposedly was the best tank of the war because it had four inches of armor and it had a high-powered 76 long-barreled, and then the tiger had the 88 flat gun on it.

So everybody says when you saw a panther, but especially a tiger in Normandy or as you got near the German border, they were going to blow you to pieces and you couldn't do anything about it.

And that's true.

if you look at production of american shermans it was five or six to one

they only made 600 king tigers and about 1500 tigers and i don't know how many it was four or five thousand but you know they we finally produced 340 depending on how we define them 45 000 shermans i think they were the most popular tank except for the t-34 and remember another thing we had to transport tanks not by rail so they had to be light enough for a crane to put them on a ship and not too big.

So 30 tons was maximum.

That was the time we built them.

They were sort of, that was the maximum of any tank.

But when these tanks started getting to 45 tons or 50 tons and with these huge guns, we didn't really understand what was going on in the Eastern Front.

So when we went into Normandy and Italy, If you were an American tank crew and you were in a Sherman in late 1944, nine times out of 10, you were encountering infantry and light armed vehicle.

But if you had the misfortune of bumping into a tiger or a panther, they were going to blow you apart.

But that being said, I'm quoting from memory as I remember.

A lot of sophisticated studies showed that when a Sherman went up, it was not a Ronson lighter, like everybody said.

In other words, there was a trapdoor in later models at the bottom of the Sherman.

And three out of five crew members of every destroyed Sherman survived.

And the main thing was in tank warfare, what is the number of hours that a tank can operate vis-a-vis the number of hours it's downtime for maintenance.

The Sherman was 10 to one.

The Panther was about two to one.

So in other words, if you were in a Panther, the tracks, the transmission, it was so finely calibrated, it couldn't stand up to the conditions of war.

They had to send the transmission on a rail back to the plant in Germany.

And what Patton said won the war for Americans were Americans came out of the Depression.

They had no money.

Everybody got an unused car.

They were shade tree mechanics.

So in his Third Army, when the Sherman went down, these American kids could take out that transmission in five or six hours.

And they brought spare transmissions with them.

They were doing, you know, putting new heads on the trench.

Americans were.

So that Sherman was always in use.

And a tiger and Panther were always having maintenance problems.

And finally, just to sum up, when the war started to be ending, the T-34 was sort of the future.

It was a diesel engine and diesel doesn't ignite like gas.

It had a very powerful upgraded 76 millimeter.

And finally, the advanced post-34s had 88 millimeters, sloped armor, wide tracks, low profile.

The Sherman idea of high profile, narrow tracks, roomy interior, underpowered gun was not it.

I I will say in finishing that the British, we're talking about the British, Sammy, and they did a lot of other things.

I didn't mention.

One of the things is they came up with the idea of putting a, what they called a 17-pounder.

And that was a huge long barreled gun with a little tripod.

It was so long.

And they call on a Sherman because the Sherman was so reliable and it had a range comparable or exceeding the Panther's.

And they would put a high velocity anti-armor round in that that sable round or something.

They could go through a Panther or Tiger and it had the range.

So one out of every five Shermans in France was a firefly, they called them.

The British ran.

And they blew apart most of the, they blew apart most of the famous German tank commanders from the Eastern Front that had been transferred.

And they weren't very comfortable, but when you put that gun on a Sherman, and even when we ended the war, we came up with something called the Pershing.

We tried to say, well, we're going to adopt these German German and Russian ideas.

And the British had some good ideas.

We made a 90-millimeter gun, lower profile.

But you know what?

When we got to Korea five years later, a lot of people said, You know what?

The Pershing is too heavy.

It's underpowered.

It's not as reliable.

Let's go get an upgraded Sherman.

And they used a lot of Shermans in World War II in the Korean War.

So underappreciated.

Yeah, definitely.

So, on to my next question, then, and this is the big one: that it is always bad to have to fight a two-front war.

And so I would like to listen to you on the American addressing a war on two fronts in this war, in World War II, in the wars of World War II.

Well, we say it's bad to fight a two-front war because of the German experience.

It used to be that With the formation of Germany in 1870, 71 after the Franco-Prussian War, they had what they called the central location, and they had the sophisticated rail network.

So they could send troops to one side or the other from all the way to what would become Poland to France in a matter of hours.

So everybody said that was an advantage.

Then they went to war in World War I, and guess what?

They took on two armies, but actually they won the Eastern Front.

They won it.

So by November of 1917 and then formally in February of 1918, they defeated what would then Bolshevik Russia.

Why they didn't win the Western Front were two things.

The Americans were coming in at 10,000 troops a day, and they had to win quickly, and they were greedy, and they used about 700,000 occupation troops.

Had they just shut down the Eastern Front that they won and sent another million, maybe, all the way over, they would probably would have won the Western Front.

In World War II, Hitler was so traumatized by that experience.

that he promised his generals he would not have a two-front war.

So he went to war because of the molotov-ribbentrov track of august 23rd 1939 so he was just going to fight poland with no western group because of they he said he was not interested in replaying world war one so then when he won poland he had signed the pact with russia they split up poland he went west and he had won everything in the west except britain He tried to bomb it.

Operation Sea Line would never work.

He didn't have naval superiority.

And guess what?

He said to his generals, there isn't a two-front war anymore.

Europe is all occupied and Britain is inert and America is not in the war.

So we'll go into Russia.

And then if we get into Russia, that will stop Britain.

What a weird logic.

You're going to win World War II by taking on a huge new enemy to defeat an enemy that you can't defeat in the West, Britain.

So that was the idea.

And then...

You know, what happened?

He got bogged down in Russia and he didn't conclude that theater.

And then he didn't know what was going to happen happen with Pearl Harbor.

He declared war on us and bang, he had the Soviet Union on one side and America and North Africa, Italy on the other.

However, the United States and Britain fought two-front wars.

Why did they do that?

You can fight a two-front war if you have two assets, three assets, a huge productive economy,

a sophisticated air.

arm and logistical transport and a blue-water navy.

The only two countries in World War II that did were Britain and the United States.

And they were the only two countries that fought successfully on a two-front war.

And we also have the idea that the Pacific theater was shorted of materiel and men in World War II.

And is that true?

Well, you know, it was a big discussion.

After Pearl Harbor, everybody said, why are we going to preserve the British Empire?

Or why are we going to worry about continental Europe?

Because Hitler has not attacked us, but Japan Japan has.

So let's go finish the people who are at war with us.

And then that sort of crumbled from December 7th to 11th because Hitler declared war on us for a variety of reasons.

U-boat concerns.

He wanted to attack the West Coast.

He had a very faulty idea of American productive.

I can't get into it, but my point is at that point, then we were at war with both.

Italy and Germany, the whole Axis powers.

Okay, so what do you do?

Well, England was threatened and we had to get out of, to get rid of Hitler, we got to go in there.

And maybe we can go into Italy, maybe we can go into France.

But it was the idea, Roosevelt said, Europe first, Pacific second.

They had a very unrealistic estimate of Japanese power.

They didn't know anything about Japanese destroyer designs, the long tong torpedo, Japanese naval carrier excellence, and they didn't really understand that.

And it was a much better navy than Hitler's.

They were in a better strategic position than hitler so we divided it up and everybody said well we shorted the pacific but the weird thing was that no one in their right mind thought that this economy that was 25 stagnant 1939 remember the 38 recession got us back to 18 unemployment so much for the new deal but it was underutilized within four years the gdp by end of 1944 was larger than germany's italy's britain's the Soviets, and Japan's put together.

And then we had this huge continent.

So we had these West Coast ports and East Coast ports.

And it made sense to just divide the country more or less in two and divide militarily.

So what we did was all the Marine six divisions went to the Pacific.

There were no Marines actually in combat.

of any number in Europe.

And then we said, after the first few months, the carriers, we don't really need them.

And then Britain has carriers.

We'll go put all of the carrier forces in the Pacific where they can leapfrog to Tokyo.

And the same thing was true of submarine warfare.

We had some in Europe, but most of them were in the Pacific.

And then we started using Oakland and Portland and Seattle for Liberty ships and victory ships.

And the population, I know, I had a lot of relatives that were in the European theater, of course, but most of them were in Alaska or they were on bombers or they were in the Marine Corps.

And so when we're here in California in the Central Valley, when you talked about World War II, most of the people's family, people, members that were killed or wounded were killed by the Japanese.

People forget that because that horrible Japanese internment, and I've written against it, they never found one Japanese American who had betrayed this country.

But the anger that forced liberal Democrats, remember Earl Warren signed the order as Attorney General

as a liberal, and then the FDR was liberal Democrat.

But my point is, we were the proximate state, and we weren't really going to regret that mistake because California was at war mostly with Japan.

And it was a brutal Pacific war.

I mean, I know the Germans committed a lot of atrocities, especially at the Bulge and elsewhere.

But against American flyers or British flyers, they did not behead them.

Or maybe civilians did once in a while.

This is even after Dresden and Hamburg and all that stuff with the British.

And they did the same and we did the same.

But in the Pacific, if you were in a B-29 crew and you bailed out, there were some prisoners, but mostly you're going to die.

And most Americans that went into a Japanese POW camp died.

And if you look at, read about E.B.

Sledge, the old breed about Okinawa, or read some accounts of Ibojima.

It was a different type of war.

It was no prisoners whatsoever.

The Japanese did not surrender like the Germans did.

So what I'm getting at, there were two different wars, but the United States was so big and had such productive capacity and had 140 million people.

And it put, I think our listeners should remember this about that generation.

We had 40 million people less than the Soviet Union.

We put 12.1 million people.

in uniform.

The Soviets put about 12.4 million.

So as far as population size versus army size, it was just incredible.

We mobilized the greatest number of people.

We had the biggest donkey, and we could fight two front wars.

And as I said,

we did not really, we said, oh, we're privileging.

That's what Roosevelt said to Churchill.

We're privileging you guys.

We're going to go to.

But in actual fact,

if you look at the number that we deployed ships by tonnage, submarines, marine, it was not short in the Pacific.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you mentioned the New Deal and that getting out of the depression happened with the spending of World War II.

So I would like to hold that thought with our audience as we take a moment for a word from our sponsor and we'll come back with some modern misconceptions.

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Welcome back, Victor.

So we're going to turn from World War II, and I want to ask about the modern printing to get out of a recession that inflation, according to our current politicians, is all all not all that bad.

What are your thoughts?

Well, remember, with Biden, you have to keep current.

Inflation wasn't all that bad for the first year when it was really bad, because as Jen Saki said, oh, you know, it just means supply problems, your Peloton didn't come in time.

Oh, you know what?

Workers' wages are going up.

But now

It's not funny because it's at 7.5 in January at an annualized rate.

The Consumer Price Index does not count fuel that's up about 40 to 45%

and food that's up about 12%.

So if you really look at the actual stuff of life, you know, housing, food,

gas, it's up about eight or nine or 10%.

And they know it.

And so now the narrative is inflation is something that we're very worried about.

And it's because of the supply chain and COVID.

It's not because, i.e., they are borrowing $2 trillion

last year, $2 trillion this year after Trump primed the economy during COVID with a trillion and a half.

And then the infrastructure thing, you know, Build Back Better.

And the infrastructure, they want Build Back Better, it could be $5 trillion.

So they have a new theory, modern monetary theory, that says if you print money and expand the money supply way over increases in both GDP and population, and you keep interest rates very low, what happens is that people get money in their hands directly from government subsidies and from an inflationary economy.

Wages go up, and it erodes the power of capital.

So, if you're a listener out there and you have $50,000 of your life savings, you're getting zero interest.

And now, with inflation, you're getting minus seven interest.

So, you just do the math, you're losing $3,000 or $4,000, $300,000 a month on that $50,000 passport.

And that is good because you're a privileged person and you're not a marginalized person who needs to get their hands on cash, easy money.

You're being facetious.

You're being facetious, of course.

Well, according to the Biden administration,

I've been talking to a lot of economists and I've been reading a lot about economists and modern monetary theory.

I mean, there's been a puff piece in the New York Times, and they love these new, many of them are women, the economists.

They think, you know what, the old boy, Milton Friedman, monetarist, we don't need them anymore.

We've got a new group of different types of people.

So it's kind of the economic counterpart to critical race theory or critical legal theory.

And again, it's a Marxist in

its inspiration.

And I think it's going to destroy the country.

I really do.

It just tells the middle class, you idiot, why are you thrifty?

Oh, you play by the quote rules.

Now you've got money saved up and you're too stupid to go into the stock market or you're too stupid to flip houses like Elizabeth Warren.

Is that it?

And so, oh, you're just sitting on your little tiny pile.

Well, guess what?

The poor and the people less, they are going to need some money and we're going to spread the wealth.

I'm quoting in Barack Obama.

So I don't want to be too facetious, but it's a bad idea.

Inflation is not, you know, 2% or 3%,

it's not a problem.

But when you get up to seven and a half, it's a psychology.

I'm speaking to somebody who was destroyed farming by inflation because farmers take the hit first.

And we were, I was, as I said again and again, people are sick of these stories, but every time I bought a bag of sulfur or, you know, I bought a can of Roundup or whatever it was, they had the price crossed out.

That meant it sat in the warehouse for three months and then they had a higher price.

And sometimes I got a sulfur bag that say $1.40, $1.60, $1.70 written on it.

And you could never keep up.

That's what it is now.

I went to Walmart yesterday, and guess what?

There were no stakes there, not one steak.

And you're going to say, well, that was because they're being snapped up.

No, because they're $40 or $50

and they've had a problem with people stealing them.

And it's kind of like when you go to the drugstore now and your allergy medicine or whatever you have to have, it's locked up.

Now it's even toothpaste.

Al Sharpton said the other day, well, you know, I mean, my toothpaste is locked up.

Well, yeah, because not because it's dangerous, because they steal it.

It's easy to steal.

Well, stakes are locked up or not.

They don't appear.

Yeah.

Well, let's look at another one.

Barack Obama.

We have the popular conception that he was a moderate and a racial healer.

What would you say to that?

Okay.

Is that too much of a, I don't know, too much of a joke, huh?

Put it this way.

Had Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice been the first African-American president, we would not be in the fix that we are now.

Not because they were less authentically Black.

They were more authentically Black.

Barack Obama was only half Black.

But because they were traditionalists, they believed in the redemptive powers of America, assimilation, integration, intermarriage, et cetera, et cetera.

So.

Barack Obama was nursed by Mr.

John Marshall Davis or Franklin, whatever his name was, the Marxist tutor that he went.

He grew up on his crackpot grandfather's socialist ideas, his mother's socialist ideas.

I'm not blaming him.

I'm trying to contextualize why he was so radical.

And then he was a beneficiary of not just affirmative action, but wealth and affirmative action.

The key to that guy was his grandmother.

She was a hardworking woman.

And she made from nothing, she went up and supported her lazy husband and her crazy daughter and Barack Obama and his sister as a bank vice president.

Finally, I think a president.

He went to prep school and then he went to Occidental and he didn't do very well.

And we don't know what he did at Columbia because they won't release his transcript.

We don't know what he did at Harvard Law, but put it this way.

He said, I'm going to quote him.

He said, my problem is I'm too lazy.

What he meant by that was, I have natural talent and I don't have to use all of it.

I can relax because people want to give me things.

And he resented people who gave him things.

He always did.

No sooner than he got into the campaign, and it was for my white liberal audiences, I'm going to be the great redemptive person that makes them feel good about a nice, as Joe Biden said, articulate and the first articulate and

mainstream, clean black.

And then Harry Reed said, another great liberal said, he's the first person who can talk like a Negro or talk non-Negro.

He changes it.

So

that liberal racist Democrat liked him and he knew that.

And so it was then it spread the money around, and then it was the Henry Louis Gates right out of the blocks.

He said the police were racist, stereotyping Henry Lewis Gates.

Remember the beer summit?

And then we got into punish your enemies at the polls.

He told the Latinos.

And then it was the son I never had would look like Trevon.

And then he unleashed Eric Holder, who told us we were racist.

And then there was the apology tour about the neo-colonialist, imperialist white people.

And that's what he did.

He got the rappers to the White House.

I think one of their ankle bracelets went off.

We had Lamar Kendrick with his kill the police line at the White House.

So that was the narrative that he got edgier and edgier.

And then we...

we got Michelle, the great partner.

She'd never been proud of America, she said, downright mean country.

And she was off to the races, too.

And then they got Axelod, you know, took her aside and said, listen, you always say that you're being stereotyped as an angry black woman.

I'm just being facetious, but somebody like Axelrod did that.

You're an angry black woman.

And so you don't want to sound like an angry black woman because they're going to stereotype you as an angry black woman.

I read her, Christopher Hitchens, the late sent me her Princeton thesis, and I read it.

I urge all you readers, I think you can find it online.

It's incomprehensible, A, but its arguments are preposterous, but they're racialized.

So that's what he was.

And I'll just finish by saying he had one contribution to race that really has got us in this bad idea.

Before he was president, diversity was a arcane term in the university.

It was affirmative action.

And affirmative action had started with the historical racism of Jim Crow, 90% of the population, at then 10% African-American.

And what do you do about the black population that was denied freedom?

So we're going to have repertory affirmative action.

And then that was added to with the Hispanics.

That was kind of a leap, and I don't think we should have done that, but we did it.

And not so with Asians.

So when I was involved in academia at the ground level in my late 20s, 30s, 40s, you would have people from India complain, people who were Japanese.

They would say, we don't get affirmative action.

And we're not white.

Well, he came in with this word diversity.

He said, you know what?

He stole it from Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition.

That was a failure.

But he said, it doesn't matter what your income is.

It doesn't matter that my daughters are going to be multi-millionaires.

It doesn't matter that Oprah is a billionaire.

If you're not white, you're diverse.

And you know what?

This new diversity is not 10% of the population.

It's 30.

And everybody, if you're from India and you're a multi-millionaire family, it doesn't matter.

If you're an aristocratic investor from Bolivia, no problem.

Trillium are.

So it brought, if you're a wealthy South Korean immigrant heart surgeon, you are diverse.

And therefore, you are a victim.

And therefore, you have historical complaints against that truck driver who's making $29,000 a year in northern Illinois or southern Ohio, whatever.

And that's what he did.

He destroyed the whole idea of class.

So suddenly, in his bizarre world, if you were a poor working white guy in a forklift in Bakersfield, you had it it made.

And LeBron and Eric Colder and

the BLM architects and Oprah and, you know, Prince Harry,

all those people were victims.

And that's what he left us with no class considerations whatsoever, but a fixation on DNA.

And you can see what happened.

Everybody wanted to get in on it.

So Elizabeth Warren was all of a sudden got her DNA and she had high cheekbones.

Ward Churchill, Rachel Dozo, Sean King, everybody thought, wow, if it's not being black, it's just not being white.

And I'm going to say I'm not white.

And why not?

If you can construct your gender, why don't you construct your race?

Wasn't it Donald Trump that got Elizabeth Warren to do that genetic testing for?

And then she's like 1,000th Native American or something.

It's a little worse than that, Sammy.

It's a little worse.

She not only was, I don't know, some of the smallest possible inkling of most Americans had more Native American blood than she did, but then she bragged on it.

And she said, look, I've got a trace.

I am legitimately the first Native American law professor at Harvard.

And so, and Trump being Trump, you know, Pocahontas and all that stuff.

And she broke the cardinal role with Donald Trump.

You never, ever, ever get into a slogging mess in a wrestling ring with him.

He's been in a wrestling ring.

So if you're a never-Trumper or you're Elizabeth Warren and you want to go tit for tat with Donald Trump, he doesn't care.

You can call him anything in the world.

He doesn't care.

He's been called worse, but he can call you stuff and you will get mad and go down to that, you know, brawling level and you're not going to win.

And he knew that.

And he just, he destroyed her.

To this day, she's never been the same.

she's

also psychologically she's traumatized he can't even mention his name hilly can't mention trump's name because they all started it with him and he finished it and he doesn't care if you said to donald trump hey trump you're an sob you blah blah blah he said i don't care

he'd go right back at you that's why the base likes trump because they say you know what no more marcus of queensbury rules no more john mcam polite mitt romney You started it.

Donald Trump is our pit bull.

We cut the leash.

We pointed him into the right direction.

And yes, there's going to be some collateral biting, but he'll more or less get beyond target.

And that's the essence of Donald Trump for the base.

And to get back to the point,

so...

Barack Obama was not a racial healer.

No.

But he was more moderate than Joe Biden has been,

hasn't he?

Wasn't he?

He's 10 times smarter than Joe Biden.

He's 100 times better, more charismatic.

He's 1,000 times reading the teleprompter better.

And he's 20,000 times more vigorous.

And as he said about Joe Biden, whom he picked for respectability, said, don't ever underestimate the ability of Joe Biden to F things up.

And so, yes, he was in control and he understood that after he got that shellacking in 2010,

that he had to act like he was a moderate.

He would never get re-elected.

He was willing to do anything.

Think what he did.

He was more dangerous than Joe Biden.

Yes, he was more moderate, but I mean, he cut a deal with Putin, told Vladimir, give me some space.

And then things on missile defense, I'll be more flexible.

But this is my last election, i.e., I'll give up the security interests of the United States and Eastern Europe and get rid of missile defense if he doesn't go into Ukraine until I'm elected.

And they all won.

And remember what he also did.

You know, he was up for re-election.

He's Lewis Lerner on all the so-called non-profit conservative groups that were organizing for the election.

He got them all decertified or never certified at all.

He terrified the AP reporters.

They were leaking like they all do, and they got surveilled.

And so

he acted like he was very moderate.

He got re-elected.

And then he got back to himself for about a year.

And his, remember what his, he couldn't open his mouth without insulting somebody.

And it was usually the code was a white male of the working class whom he despised.

These were the deplorables of Hillary, but he started, remember that, he's the architect.

Hillary, when she said irredeemables and deplorables, and when McCain said crazies, and when Biden said chumps and dregs, they were just taking their cue from Barack's clingers.

The stupid people who were white and clung to their guns and religion and were not able able to appreciate the singular genius and brilliance of Barack Hussein Obama.

He started it.

And so, yeah, he was, but what the most brilliant contribution was somewhere around 2000, I don't know, 15, after the Iran deal and all that, he got into a room.

I'm just telling you my impression.

He thought, you know, people don't like me.

And I alienate people, not because of my race, it's because I'm arrogant and obnoxious.

So you know what I'm going to do?

I'm going to go play golf for a year.

And I'm going to be not seen and not heard.

The more you don't see me and the more you don't hear me, you like the idea that the first African-American president, I look pretty good in the picture if you don't have to hear me and don't have to see me in action.

So I'm not going to be around.

And I'm going to turn over the new spotlight to Donald Trump, who will be in your face and Hillary Clinton, who you despise.

And they're going to drive up my ratings in comparison.

And we didn't see him from, I don't know, we didn't see him the entire year of 2016 and guess what when the election was over he retired first thing he did is he by himself he left the kids and michelle and he jetted over to tahiti to that yacht with david geffen or whoever they were and he was back in his malu

his celebrity you know wealthy person malu and then he signed netflix and he was off to use that term again he was off to the races to be a multi multi-millionaire colorama mansion martha vineyard building this this huge mansion in Hawaii, violating local environmental codes about his retaining.

That's Obama.

You know, climate change, we're all going to die.

We're going to be flooded, but I'm going to build up.

I want a place right on the coast.

So, yeah, and it worked.

He was very popular.

When he left office, he had like 53, 54%.

It was amazing.

Not since Bill Clinton and Reagan had we seen something like that.

because he understood that if you don't see him and you don't hear him, you like the idea that you elected the first African American.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thank you for that.

Let's have another word from our sponsor.

And when we come back, I'll give you another topic to talk about, Joe Biden, the nice guy.

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gitter and mewee and we're starting an instagram as well and now back to the topic Biden the nice guy.

So we have that image of him, at least by the left-wing media, and I guess they're the mainstream media right now.

What is your impression of Joe Biden?

Not such the nice guy.

Old Joe Biden from Scranton is old Joe Biden today.

We think that he's non compos mentes.

He is.

But doesn't mean that all of a sudden old Joe Biden from Scranton, we all love, is now sadly in decline in his dot age.

No, he was always obnoxious SOB.

He was always a liar and a fake.

Remember that in the Senate, he had two mentors, Robert Byrd and James O.

Eastland.

And they were the Dixiecrat hardcore.

Byrd was in the Klan.

Eastland was a segregation person.

He even bragged to people in the Senate that George Wallace thought favorably of Joe Biden.

He told people later, remember that, hey, Delaware was a slave state.

You know, I'm not liberal.

I'm in that tradition.

When he ran for president, remember 1988?

He plagiarized Neil Koenig's speech.

And it wasn't just that, by the way, now that I'm thinking of it, he plagiarized parts from JFK, from Robert Kennedy, from Hubert Humphrey.

Is there anybody he didn't plagiarize?

And then he started talking, what really sunk him, he started lying, as he usually does about his law school, his great law school record near the top.

That was all a lie.

And they caught him on it.

And he had to bow out.

And then we have at this period, shortly after, we have Tara Reed.

who was sexually assaulted.

We know that was probably true because her mother was on a radio station station and called in and said her daughter worked for a prominent senator and had been sexually assaulted.

And she asked what to do and a call-in advice.

Same time.

And Tara Reed was, remember Senator Hirono, women must be believed.

Well, they didn't believe Tara Reed.

And she had more legitimate claims.

And then we go into the, I don't know what we call it, Sammy.

Put it this way, if you saw me on YouTube and every time I saw a girl between 12 and 18, I wanted to go hug her and blow in her hair and get talk into her ear.

I think I should be, yes, I think I should be jailed because that is a predatory sex act against a small defenseless girl.

And then it was older women.

Everybody knew that you don't hug the guy.

Okay.

So he did all that stuff and he still got a pass.

And then he destroyed Robert Burke and he destroyed Clarence Thomas in very personal, vindictive ways.

And then we, as we we mature, he ran again and he had another dismal campaign.

And what did he say?

He got into his real Joe Biden and he said that Barack Obama, forget Shirley Chisholm, who was brilliant, or Barbara Jordan, who ran for president for a while, as I remember.

He said, I'm the, Barack's the first articulant clean black.

What does that mean?

Clean black.

Does that mean that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton wore sweaty track suits or what?

I don't know.

And then he said, you know, you can't go into a donut shop and not see a lot of it.

Okay.

And then there was a corn pop saga.

I got six foot a chain.

He cut me.

And I went out there and I told corn pop, come on, man.

And then he said, all these African-American kids looked at my golden legs and my golden hair and they touched them creepy.

And then I took that kid who insulted my sister and I slammed his head on a donut shop.

Oh, by the way, if I had seen Donald Trump, I would have taken him behind the gym and beat the crowd.

He said that twice.

And then he got to, you know, the thing about put you all in chains, people forget.

That crowd was a very distinguished group of African-American professionals.

And he talked down to them and said, they're going to put you all in chain.

Mitt Romney, Mr.

Never Trumper, put them all in chains.

And then he's president now.

So they all tell Joe Biden, don't be Joe Biden.

You're president.

And what's he do?

He says to a very accomplished person in his administration, I have a boy down here, a boy African-American.

And then he talks about Satchel Page, this Negro.

Somebody said Negro on the right.

That's a word that's almost equivalent to the N-word now in the black community.

He said that.

So he's obsessed with race.

He's obsessed with,

I don't know what to say about gender.

And he's not a very nice person.

When he had the tragic accident with his wife, who perished, I think their young daughter, that truck driver tried to avoid that wreck and he did heroic efforts and he was not drunk.

And he went around the country for about a decade and said oh my poor wife the truck driver drank his lunch and and that person died very unhappy and depressed and their family begged him begged him to stop that and they finally did but it took him years to do it and only under pressure from people and there was a lot of good reviews articles about this in national review and then finally we come to Biden Inc.

Biden Inc.

As soon as that guy got into a position of real real leverage, I mean, forget that he was always a Chisler, but when he got real leverage as vice president, he unleashed Hunter Biden on us, the big guy.

Remember that?

Joe Biden became suddenly transmogrified into Mr.

10%.

And Hunter, according to the laptops, was basically paying some of his bills.

And Joe Biden, remember...

He turned the FBI into his private family retrieval service.

They took the laptop.

They kept it under ice during the election.

Then James O'Keefe somehow got his hands on the diary, and there were some embarrassing passages by his daughter.

So the FBI went after him.

And I could go on, but my God, $30 million Peter Schweitzer thinks that Biden Inc.

got from Ukraine and China.

Why was Hunter Biden on Air Force 2?

I could go on and on.

No, he was not a nice guy.

He was not an honest person.

He was not a healer.

He had a hang up with race, something about, he bragged about he was tough on the predators of the 70s and his mother was endangered by black criminals it's every possible button you could push to show you were going to incite racial he pushed but he was left-wing and he was moderate and his hour came in 2020 because they put I don't know, 15 candidates and America got a good look and they said to themselves, Beto is nuts.

That guy is totally insane.

And then they looked at Mayor Pete and they said, this guy is the most drippy, sanctimonious, egotistical scold.

He's obnoxious.

And they looked at Julian Castro and said, this guy is, he's back in the Caesar Chavez movement.

He had to learn Spanish.

And then they looked at Lisbeth Warren.

They said, oh my God, it's like going into the library and having the librarian follow you around and saying you tracked in mud.

And she's the biggest scold.

And then they looked at Bernie and they said, this guy takes it seriously.

He is really a commie.

He's an old commie.

We haven't seen an old commie like this in years.

He can hardly walk now.

He's had a heart.

He's a commie and he'll ruin the party.

And they looked at Corey Booker and they said, Spartacus, he didn't even watch the movie right.

He doesn't know what he's talking about.

We're Saul Spartacus.

What the hell is he talking about?

He's nuts.

And then they looked at Kamala Harris and they thought, wait a minute.

Where did this woman come from?

Willie Brown's ex-girlfriend.

And she's, God, she doesn't know.

She didn't win one delegate.

And so they said, oh my God, we're going to get Trump elected.

Let's go resurrect good old Joe Biden, who looked like he was insane.

Or I don't want to be mean, but he didn't know where he was in the debates.

Suddenly in the South Carolina, Nevada, the African-American community, to their credit, stepped up and said, that guy.

That guy is our ticket to power.

And we're going to tell the BLM and the Antifa

in the aftermath of George Floyd as the summer wore on, we're going to get behind him.

I mean, he was nominated right after George Floyd in 2020.

But my point is that the African-American community told the hard left, we're not on board with you.

We don't want the AOC agenda.

And they got behind Joe Biden, but they made a Faustian bargain with him, Sammy.

They said, you carry us across the finishing line and then you go blabber on all you want, but you're going to do what we want.

Critical race theory stuff open borders stuff big spending stuff defund the police stuff sorrow stuff and that's where we are no not a nice guy very pernicious mean spirited person

no but you can see why hunter biden thinks he's going to get a pass on everything too because joe's been getting a pass on so many thanks he's pretty smarter smarter than you and i he got a pass on everything i mean if you were if you were somebody at the handler and you said to joe Joe Biden, look, I know every family had Donald Nixon.

We had the Clinton brother that Roger Clinton that was always in the stake.

We had the, I don't know,

Billy Carter.

Billy Carter.

We had the Obama progeny that were always popping up.

You know, okay, we understand that, but we just have a few rules.

Joe, make sure your son does not do the following.

A, leave a crack pipe in a rented car.

That's all we ask.

And then do not take selfies with a prostitute in a hotel room.

And don't lose, you can lose one laptop with confidential business, but not two and not three laptops.

And make sure your daughter doesn't write intimate details about your family and forget to leave her.

diary when she moves out.

Is that and then tell Hunter not to get on a plane and leverage foreign countries for is that too much to ask?

Well, Hunter has done one thing for us.

He's open to all the public to see the inner workings of the very seedy world.

You know,

I actually wrote a column of this and I think it stood up pretty well.

I said Hunter has a sick relationship.

If you read those emails and I read all that are available, he's angry at Joe Biden, Mr.

10%, the big guy, because he didn't give Hunter appreciation for being the bag man.

And Hunter got all the downside, but.

Biden got all a lot of the money.

And so Hunter's complaining, I had to support this family.

When people came to me, I, not the big guy, I paid for stuff.

And no one he's doing is doing,

okay,

we'll see how they like little Hunter Biden now that Joe Biden is quote unquote pure and president.

So maybe I just kind of, maybe we'll go into art now.

Hunter, make sure we're going to give you a pause, Hunter, but be sure you're, now that your dad's president, you have to behave.

Yes, okay.

I'll be an artist.

I'll throw a bunch of stuff on a canvas and I'll get an anonymous

buyer deal and I'll get a bunch of wealthy Chinese to pay me a ton of money and I'll get a girl pregnant and I'm just going to be hunter buying.

How do you like that for what you've done to me?

Make fun of your bag man.

So I'm going to get, and I think he's getting back at them in a very subtle way.

Not too subtle, but back up.

Yeah.

I'm starting to believe that theory of yours.

So Victor, we've got to call this to a close here.

And thank you so much for all of your historical wisdom on World War II.

I know that that book is just fascinating.

Everybody should read the Second World Wars with an S.

And we would like to thank you, Victor.

Thank you.

And I got off topic.

Somehow we went from Sherman tanks to Hunter Biden's crackpipe, but maybe that's maybe you guys out there can find the connection.

I think there's a connection that we live in a very exciting world, but I'll leave it to you guys to make the connection.

All right.

Thanks, everybody.

And this is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen.

We're signing off.

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