The Battles for the Philippines and Leftism Fatigue

Summary

The Victor Davis Hanson Show: The Battles for the Philippines and Leftism Fatigue

Release Date: November 23, 2024
Hosts: Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler
Co-host: Sammy Wink

Overview

In this episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show, co-hosts Victor Davis Hanson and Jack Fowler delve into a multifaceted discussion that spans current political appointments, historical battles in World War II, and contemporary legal cases. The episode weaves through analyses of recent Trump appointments, the strategic significance of WWII battles in the Philippines, and critiques of recent high-profile legal proceedings involving political figures.

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1. Political Appointments and Leftist Critique

Timestamp: [03:59] – [21:41]

Victor Davis Hanson initiates the conversation by scrutinizing recent appointments made by former President Donald Trump. He focuses on individuals like Pete Hegseth, appointed to the Department of Defense, and Linda McMahon's nomination to lead the Department of Education. Hanson argues that these appointees share common traits: they have either been critics of the agencies they are set to lead or are staunch loyalists to Trump, thus lacking the traditional qualifications and experience typical of such roles.

Notable Quotes:

• Victor Davis Hanson: "They're going to be deliberately anti appointments in the sense that they're not going to have the resumes that Trump feels will make them too acculturated to the department they're supposed to reform." ([05:56])
• Victor Davis Hanson: "He does that at Fox. Anybody who he has an Ivy League education as good as any and he was on Wall Street and not many people... volunteered to go into units that they know are going to Iraq and Afghanistan." ([06:30])

Hanson criticizes the lack of experienced leadership, particularly in the Department of Defense and the FBI, highlighting what he perceives as a pattern of appointing individuals who may not effectively manage or reform these critical agencies. He contrasts these appointees with figures like Lloyd Austin, former Defense Secretary, whom he views as inadequate despite their high-ranking positions.

Discussion Highlights:

• Department of Defense: Hanson praises Pete Hegseth's background and objectives to eliminate diversity and inclusion systems in favor of meritocracy.
• FBI Leadership: He lambastes the successive FBI directors for dishonesty and inefficiency, advocating for a complete overhaul or decentralization of the FBI.
• Department of Agriculture and Education: Suggestions include appointing military veterans like Devin Nunes for Agriculture and cautioning against nominees like Linda McMahon, emphasizing the need for practical, results-driven leadership over political alignments.

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2. Historical Insight: The Battles for the Philippines in World War II

Timestamp: [40:30] – [89:18]

Shifting gears, Victor Davis Hanson provides an in-depth historical analysis of pivotal battles in the Philippines during World War II. He outlines the strategic maneuvers and military engagements that significantly influenced the outcome of the Pacific Theater.

Key Points:

• Operation Cartwheel: Hanson's discussion centers on Douglas MacArthur's strategy to reclaim the Philippines, contrasting it with Admiral Nimitz's focus on disrupting Japanese supply lines through the Mariana Islands.
• Battle of the Philippine Sea (Great Marianas Turkey Shoot): Hanson details this decisive battle where the U.S. Navy achieved overwhelming air superiority, effectively crippling Japanese naval and air capabilities. He emphasizes the technological advancements of American aircraft like the F6 Hellcat and the strategic importance of training and resource allocation.
• Kamikaze Tactics: The introduction of kamikaze attacks by Japan marked a significant shift in warfare tactics, challenging the seemingly insurmountable American air and naval dominance.

Notable Quotes:

• Victor Davis Hanson: "The Battle of the Philippine Sea... they shoot down 450 planes, they destroy the land-based aircraft... they've destroyed Japanese air power." ([42:06])
• Victor Davis Hanson: "When you put a young American, 21 years old with two years of hundreds of hours, it's a slaughter." ([45:15])

Hanson attributes the American success to superior training, advanced technology, and strategic resource deployment. He contrasts the seasoned Japanese pilots of the early war years with the highly trained and well-equipped American forces, asserting that these factors led to the decisive victories that paved the way for eventual Japanese surrender.

Discussion Highlights:

• Technological Advancements: Comparison of aircraft capabilities, highlighting the superiority of American planes over the famed Mitsubishi Zero fighters.
• Strategic Successes: Detailed recounting of battles that shifted the momentum in favor of the Allies, emphasizing the importance of air and naval supremacy.
• Future Implications: Hanson hints at forthcoming discussions on how successful leadership and strategic innovations continued to influence the war's outcome.

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3. Contemporary Legal Cases: Daniel Penny and Jesse Smollett

Timestamp: [67:08] – [91:03]

Transitioning back to current events, Hanson and co-host Sammy Wink examine recent legal controversies surrounding Daniel Penny and Jesse Smollett, drawing parallels to broader systemic issues within the American justice system.

Daniel Penny Case: Hanson critiques the prosecution of Daniel Penny, arguing that systemic bias and prosecutorial overreach are at play. He contends that Penny, a white Marine, is being unfairly targeted in contrast to how violent felons are often treated leniently.

Notable Quotes:

• Victor Davis Hanson: "They're going after Daniel Penney, who had a career felon, homeless person who was high on drugs... and he was unjustly choked." ([68:07])
• Victor Davis Hanson: "Why are we doing this and why are we trying to prosecute people like Donald Trump, the President of the United States and Daniel Penny? And we're letting felons and we're worried more about people who hurt people than people who protect them." ([73:23])

Jesse Smollett Case: Hanson discusses the reversal of Jesse Smollett's conviction by the Illinois Supreme Court, attributing the initial prosecution to political motivations and highlighting perceived inconsistencies in the justice system.

Notable Quotes:

• Victor Davis Hanson: "Jussie Smollett came before the United States popular culture and he won the approval of Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden. They all said he was a victim of racism." ([74:52])
• Victor Davis Hanson: "They don't represent, I think, the black community. I think the black community looks at them and says, you don't care about me." ([82:25])

Hanson argues that these cases exemplify a skewed legal system that prioritizes prosecuting high-profile individuals over addressing more pressing criminal issues affecting the broader community. He suggests that this approach breeds distrust and dissatisfaction, particularly within marginalized groups who feel unrepresented and overlooked.

Discussion Highlights:

• Systemic Bias: Examination of how political agendas influence legal prosecutions.
• Public Trust: Addressing the erosion of confidence in the justice system due to perceived injustices.
• Community Impact: The disconnect between legal actions and the needs or sentiments of various communities, especially among Black Americans.

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Conclusion

Throughout the episode, Victor Davis Hanson provides a critical lens on both historical and contemporary issues, emphasizing themes of integrity, strategic planning, and systemic reform. From dissecting strategic WWII battles to scrutinizing modern-day legal proceedings, Hanson and his co-host aim to offer listeners a thorough and thought-provoking analysis of the forces shaping society and governance.

Final Notable Quote:

• Victor Davis Hanson: "This is the biggest naval battle in the history of naval warfare. Bigger than the Battle of Salamis, bigger than Trafalgar..." ([42:06])

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• Political Appointments:
  Victor Davis Hanson: "They're going to be deliberately anti appointments..." ([05:56])

• WWII Battles:
  Victor Davis Hanson: "The Battle of the Philippine Sea... they've destroyed Japanese air power." ([42:06])

• Daniel Penny Case:
  Victor Davis Hanson: "Why are we doing this and why are we trying to prosecute people like Donald Trump, the President of the United States and Daniel Penny?" ([73:23])

• Jesse Smollett Case:
  Victor Davis Hanson: "Jussie Smollett came before the United States popular culture..." ([74:52])

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Key Takeaways

• Critical Analysis of Appointments: A thorough critique of Trump's recent appointments, emphasizing the need for experienced and unbiased leadership within key government agencies.
• Historical Lessons: Insightful recounting of WWII battles, underlining the importance of strategy, technology, and training in military success.
• Justice System Concerns: An exploration of perceived injustices and biases within the current legal framework, highlighting the impact on public trust and community relations.

This episode serves as both a historical deep-dive and a contemporary critique, offering listeners a comprehensive understanding of the interconnectedness between past and present societal structures.

Transcript

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[Sammy Wink]

Hello and welcome to our weekend episode. This is the Victor Davis Hansen show and on this segment of our episode we like to look at a little bit of history in the middle segment. So stay with us for that but we're going to continue on the news of the week and we were talking about Trump's appointments so we'll finish up with those and then we'll move on to Jesse Smollett in the news and maybe some of the polls. More on polls for the election. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

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[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor's the Martin and Ailey Anderson Senior Fellow, Millie History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marshbusky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and it is called the Blade of Perseus. So please come join us there. $50 a year or try us out for $5 a month. So come join us. Well, Victor, we were talking about I know we had a hard stop on the last Victor Davis Hansen show, but we were talking about appointments and we were still looking at Linda McMahon who is to lead the Department of Education. And I know you wanted to say a little bit more about Pete Hegseth and his appointment to the Department of Defense and some ideas on who might be good appointments for Agriculture and the FBI. So any of those topics.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Well, I mean, there's two things to consider about Pete Heckseth and also the appointments in general. One is they're all going to, as I said, they all have two or three things in common. Number one, they've either been victims of or severe critics of the agencies we're going to run. So Pete wrote the War on Warriors. It's a scathing attack on the military for its political correct misappropriation of labor and capital, et cetera. And the other is they're loyal to Donald Trump. They're not going to bring in people like, you know, Rex Tillerson from Private. They're not going to be CEOs, they're not going to be people who are professors at American University Georgetown in between administrations. They're not going to be coming out of the Bush administration or the McCain campaign or the Romney. You see what I mean?

[Sammy Wink]

Yes, I do.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

And they're going to be deliberately anti appointments in the sense that they're not going to have the resumes that Trump feels will make them too acculturated to the department they're supposed to reform. Okay, so Pete has got a normal world. Anybody can get ahead of 3 million people every day or every weekend and be calm and explain things. Right. He does that at Fox. Anybody who he has an Ivy League education as good as any and he was on Wall street and he not very many people on Wall street starting out their careers volunteer to go to Iraq or volunteer to go into units that they know are going to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. He did both and he was even stationed in Guantanamo. And so. And he's a writer. So his job is to do three things. One, stop the diversity, equity, inclusion, commissaire system and go back to meritocracy. So if you're a Navy captain and you want to go up to admiral, then you're going to be adjudicated on how well your planes land on the deck of a carrier and make it on the first try, not whether you have this many of this gender or this race or. And he's going to try to bring that back. He's going to try to look what happened to the billion dollar, near billion dollars. They can't find the audit and the waste and fraud and the whole procurement idea that you're going to invest in these very expensive platforms, you know, $150 million for an F22 when it could be sworn by 400 drones or something that would be, you know, I don't know, a million dollars worth of drones. So we need more stuff and fewer of these high priced platforms and where our inventories are, you know, and then I think he's going to take a good look at the four star, three star phenomenon General in a variety of contexts. He's going to say, you know what, there is something called the Uniform Code of Military Justice. You're not to be political people whose job is to get a corporate boardship or to go work for a corporate defense contractor or to go on CNN and make a lot of money and by trashing the commander in chief, which you sworn that you would not do under Uniform Code of military justice article 88. And I think he's going to stop that and I think he's going to pull the security clearances of those people. And so I think he's a very good appointment. But he doesn't have, you know, he's not like Lloyd Austin, he's not a four star general and he's not like the prior defense secretaries. And that's by intent because they feel those people will not make those changes. And if you look at Lori. So the other question is, okay Victor, you're wrong. We need somebody with four stars on their shoulder and we need somebody who's led men. And we'll look at Lloyd Austin and he's bequeathing some examples. One, if you get sick and you don't have to call in, you just stay, you just disappear. The world's most powerful military man just disappears for seven days and doesn't tell people where he is because he's afraid that if he announces his medical condition he might have to step down. And he's doing this in an administration where the President doesn't know where he is. And then he was the ultimate person responsible for the greatest military humiliation of the last century. For the US military, this is worse than the Kaiser Ring pass or Saigon 1975 or you know, Pearl Harbor. It's much worse. This humiliation in Kabul, it destroyed. It wasn't just the 50 to 60 billion dollars in munitions that are now on the terrorist global market. It's not just the billion dollar embassy that was abandoned. It's not just the $300 million refitted Baghdlam Air Force Base. He destroyed deterrence. And that is one reason why Vladimir Putin went into Ukraine and it's one reason why Hamas and Iran very quickly after this started planning to attack Israel because they thought the United States is just wasn't up to it. It couldn't help its friends, it couldn't punish its enemies. And then another, you mentioned the FBI. Yeah, well you start with the premise that all the FBI directors that came out of that ended up in the New York Washington nexus and all had the right credentials, either lied or deliberately misled the country under oath. We'll start with Robert Mueller. He came in out of the Mueller report, ex FBI chief. And what did he say when he was directly asked under oath, would you explain the Steele dossier? Fusion gps. Those were the catalysts that prompted his appointment. He said something to the effect I don't know, I don't know. He knew that he was lying under oath because if he had told the truth, he would have had to say that I was a on faulty, faulty made up information by a British spy who had no business being hired by the FBI. And if he had said Fusion gps, he would have said Glenn Simpson is a political opportunist who was getting money from the DNC via the paywall of Perkins Coy. So he lied. And then his successor, James Comey, he lied to Donald Trump when he told the President of the United States, you are not the subject of an FBI investigation. He was the one that basically told Hillary Clinton, we're not going to prosecute you. And he had no business to make that decision. He is an investigative administrator. That was the DOJ Attorney General Loretta Lynch. But nevertheless, he basically said to Hillary Clinton, you can destroy 30,000 emails and the devices upon which they were transmitted and there's no consequences. And then he went before the House Select Intelligence committee on 245 occasions. He said, I don't know. Do you want to talk about Steele? You want to talk about, did you pay? Did you guys pay? Were you working with people in social media? I don't know. I can't remember. That's not relevant. 245 times. And then he had a replacement, Andrew McCabe, an interim FBI. He lied to federal investigators three or four times and admitted that he lied. And then Bill Barr said, what good would it do to prosecute Andrew? Well, it would set the example to all FBI and all administrators and all heads of agencies. You don't lie to federal investigators because we don't allow anybody else. If an IRS investigator knocks on my door and says, hey, Victor, I see that you've got $20,000 in income you didn't report. And I said, I can't remember. It doesn't slip my mind. They're going to prosecute me. So why is Andrew McCabe more important than me or any one of our listeners? And then what did he do? He went right. As soon as they gave him that exemption, he went right on to the MSNBC and then Nexus and he started spouting the anti Trump stuff. And then he was cooked up with Rod Rosenstein. Remember they were talking about wearing a wire and entrapping the President of the United States to see if he was crazy. Andrew McCabe, if you believe the President, Donald Trump was crazy and you were willing to wear a wire and report in a cabal with the acting Attorney General. What did you think about Joe Biden? Did you ever say that he was mentally incompetent because he was just wandering the other day off into the jungle? He's been doing crazy things from the moment he set foot. But you didn't because you don't really believe Donald Trump was crazy. It was a political move. And then we Come to Christopher Wray, the fourth in this line of succession. Remember when he was supposedly testifying before Senate and they asked him, I gotta go, I have an appointment. He got into the FBI jet and flew to his Ariane Dock vacation home and just cut off all questions. He was the FBI director that ordered the raid on Mar A Lago. And they went in, you know, and then they arranged things on the floor to make it look like it was really sloppy. And they took pictures and that was not the way that they found it. He was the one that went after Roger Stone and they tipped off the CNN to show up. He was the one that went after James O'Keefe. As I said on an earlier podcast, if you were a Biden and you lost your diary or your gun or your laptop, the FBI was there to retrieve it without any publicity. And he was a terrible director. He had unions. Write Merrick Garland, remember, hey, we don't like these parents at the school board. They're getting out of hand. Well, I'll send, I'll call Christopher Wray and we'll get the FBI and go monitor them. And then remember anti abortion demonstrations, they went and raided people's homes. So that's who we're talking about. And so you need somebody to stop.

[Sammy Wink]

That who hasn't lied to the United States.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

They all lied. And Mike Rogers is a good guy. He's an ex congressman. He almost was elected senator. Two more weeks in that campaign, he would have. I have nothing but the highest regard, but at this late date, at this 11th hour, I would like somebody to either take the FBI and outsource its divisions, the counterfeit division go with the Secret Service. The terrorists go to Homeland Security, the immigration go to home. You know, just break it up. Or if you want to keep it intact, then get it out of Washington, put it in Kansas City. It's the center of the country. It's more centrally located. There's more crimes outside of Washington than there is inside. And then you wouldn't have FBI agent Andrew McCabe investigating Hillary Clinton and supposedly a what, Disinterested investigator. Why his wife next door is running for office in Virginia. Getting money from who? A Terry McAuliffe 401. You know what I mean? A PAC. So basically you have the FBI ordering an investigation of the Clintons while his wife is running for office with getting Clinton related money. And that is just so. And they're all intermarried and you look at Lisa Page and Peter Strzok and all just get rid of it. And I think that's why Cache Patel is lightning rod. I know they think he's a loose cannon, but he was one of the chief investigators for Devin Nunes that broke wide open what everybody said was impossible. Remember Devin said that Christopher Steele was a British subject that was circulating a false dossier with the intent to alter the election by demonizing, weaponizing Donald Trump and the people who they had accused were innocent and he was more importantly a paid FBI informant. And that was. No, that can't be. Well, Cash Patel helped find that and then they went after Cash Patel. So he's mentioned. I haven't. No, he was on our mention. He was on our podcast for his book and I think he would be a long shot appointment, but he would be superior to any of the others. This is not to speak ill of Mike Rogers. He'd be good too. But I don't think he has the adversarial attitude to break up that.

[Sammy Wink]

Is Mike Rogers the one Donald Trump is thinking about?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Yes. I think he's thinking of both of them.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh, okay.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

It's the same thing that's happening. The sober and judicious sort of Karl Rove wing of the MAGA group is saying, get a Marco Rubio. I really like Marco Rubio. So that's a bad example. But get a somebody doesn't. It's not going to make people go crazy. But the Matt Gaetz, the Pete Hexa, the Cache Patel group say, done there, been there, done that. We did that in 2017. And what happened? So that's the big fight.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

And then we had Sean Duffy. I mentioned him before.

[Sammy Wink]

We already talked about.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Yeah, I have the highest regard for him.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. And did you have any ideas of who you might think would be good for the Department of Agriculture?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I hear a lot of people, but. Well, the best one would be Devin Nunes, but I don't think. I mean, he runs too social, but there's no better advocate for agriculture. Nobody's more knowledgeable about issues of farming. He's a dairy farmer from a family, he lives in Tulare. He'd be wonderful. But I don't think it would be in his interest to do that because I think he's doing a good job at Truth Social. Did you see the Truth Social stock is. I think it's up to nearly 30 now. Everybody was saying that it was all over with and that was doomed and it's not. So he's doing an irreplaceable job, I think. And then they're mentioning Kevin McCarthy. I don't know if he wants to do that. I think people who've been in Congress a long time, Kevin McCarthy was honest. So he probably does not have a lot of money. So he's probably making a lot of money speaking and consulting. I don't know if he wants to go back and be. But he's somebody who knows a lot about agriculture. He's from Bakersfield. That's one of the central requisites of being a representative in Bakersfield.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, so last one is the Department of Education and he has appointed or. Or nominated Linda McMahon. I know that you're a good friend of Larry Arndt, who I would think would be excellent for that. But what do you think about that?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I think Larry, Betsy DeVos did a very good job, I thought. But Larry Arndt, I think had been mentioned for that. But I don't think he was in a position at a critical time in Hillsdale because they were engaged in some massive construction. They built the largest church in five years in the United States. It's beautiful. I think it was almost. I don't know what it was 40 or $50 million had raised. He wanted to get the endowment. I think the Hillsdale endowment is up to over a billion dollars. And they get no federal funds, no state funds, no local funds. So he's been. They have a PhD program, a Washington office. So he was too busy to do it. He'd be wonderful to do it. But I think you want somebody to question the need for it because it's not producing civic education. It's not producing increased test scores. It's not doing any of that. It's producing a commissar like monitoring of all of these social, the trans issue, radical feminism, dei. And monitoring. Monitoring the education schools, the teachers unions. That's who its constituents are.

[Sammy Wink]

I think their strategy is to go after the accreditation committees in order to change these schools. I think that's about the only way to address it.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

What we need right now is we need more emphasis on technical and training schools for vast shortages among plumbers, electricians, drywall people, welders. We don't have enough people who are trained. We have a declining birth rate and we're short workers that have skills. We need to emphasize that we need to get out of the student loan business. There's no reason that $1.6 trillion of outstanding 25% of them are non performing with the universities. As soon as the government got in, started jacking up their tuition above the rate of inflation. Every time I bought a car, I fill out 20 pages in California. And if you finance it, it's all about your income. And are you able to do this? Are you knowing, do you know what the interest per year is yet? You can be 18 years old and sign away your life for a $200,000 loan. And they let that go. And the university is complicit in it. So she's pretty good because she ran that big with her husband, the World Wrestling Federation, and then she was on the Connecticut Board of Education. So she's a businesswoman. She's coming in and she's probably going to see, you know, I don't know what the budget is, 50 billion or something. We don't need this, this, this, this, this, this. Bang, bang. This isn't efficient. Here's the money. Where's the production? Where's the results? That's. Nobody's ever done that before. They don't think that way.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, Victor. So let's turn to pollsters. Alan Lichtman was predicting that both Harris and Biden would beat Donald Trump before the election. And he seems to be very wrong, but he wants to explain his wrongness away. And I was wondering your ideas about that.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Well, it's funny, after the election was over, we had all these people on the left that were humiliated and they all had various versions of mea culpa or defiance. Remember Ann Seltzer, the Des Moines Register pollster that said that 13 points wrong. Yeah. She said that Kamala Harris was going to win by three points. She lost by what, 12 was it. It was almost 15 points off. And that poll was designed to gin up momentum and donations at the last moment. There's no way a serious pollster could be that far off. So they were. She came and then she said she resigned. Remember when she was humiliated and she said, I had planned to do that anyway? And then we had the Scarboroughs, we talked about. They made their trek to, to the Hitler bunker, the Eagle's Nest in Mar a Lago, and saw Hitler and said, mein Fuhrer. We called you Mein Fuhrer. But are we safe here because you're Hitler? Because we want to talk to you about our relationship and we want to start over with Hitler. That's basically what they had wanted us to believe. And Alan admit was not a pollster, he's a professor. And he has had these things. He hasn't written a lot, but he has this theory that he borrowed from some people that predict things. More data, driven, scientific. And he said there were 15 keys. And you looked at these keys throughout American history. What Would the economy at that point, were they incumbent? Were they all this? And then you could. If they hit the right combination, then he could predict who was going to be president. He's been off a couple of times, but he's kind of contextualized that. So he came out very loudly and said, Joe Biden was going to win based on this. And then when Joe Biden was deposed, he was kind of upset about it, as I remember. And then he said Kamala Harris was going to win. So naturally, when that didn't happen, a lot of people got angry at him and he was humiliated. If you watched him on campaign night, he was still clinging to the impossible pathway for Harris to win. And then he kind of looked deer in the headlights and said, she can't win. So then what do you do? Because he was a professor whose scholarship or writing or commentary would not be in the public sphere except for I got my dogs barking, but I'll continue. They would not be in the public sphere except for the fact that he was predicting. So every election cycle, they ask Alan Lichtman, and he did not. Like, he predicted Trump was going to win in 16, but I did, too. So that doesn't make me a guru. But my point is this, that he was wrong. And at first he said he was wrong, and then he thought about it and thought, wow, I'm getting ridiculed. I better change the narrative. So he came back about 24 hours later and said, I wasn't really wrong. There was misinformation and there was racism. And I thought, when I heard that, I thought, well, how about your keys? They're supposed to accommodate everything. And then he said there was Elon Musk and he was a billionaire and he was putting money in, and that warped my data. And I thought, well, in 2020, Mark, you said that Elon put 300 million in. He didn't get as much as mark Zuckerberg at 419. So how did you predict that Joe Biden was going to be president when Mark Zuckerberg, according to your theory of billionaires, warping the process to the point you can't get accurate results. Why didn't you say that? I don't know that you couldn't either determine the winner or Joe Biden was going to lose in 2020 because Mark Zuckerberg did. Exactly. Only more so than what you said warped your results with Elon Musk. And then if he says, well, I was talking about disinformation, and I thought, okay, the combined audience of Fox News because he Mentioned Fox news is about 3 to 4 million per night. Maybe on election night, it got up to eight or nine and maybe when Tucker was in his prime, maybe five. But you count up the combined audience of PBS, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN and MSNBC, and it's over about 22 million. So 3 million to 20. It's got seven times the reach. And if you look at the coverage by various media groups left and right, about 90% of their coverage was negative to Trump. So you had a huge advantage. And if you're saying, well, I'm talking about podcasts, Joe Rogan, but you look at news podcast and you look at politics podcast. And I do, because sometimes, as you know, in the Apple ratings, we're seven or eight in the country. And I think as I'm looking at it right now, on the Amazon Audible ratings, we were number seven in the nation. And guess what? We are behind Dateline, NPC and CBS and npr. We're right near. We were ahead of Tucker today. And my point is there's no data to support that. The right wing message drowns out the left wing message. None at all. And so when I look at all these excuses, oh, it was Elon Musk. Oh, it was systemic racism. Oh, it was a right wing. No, it wasn't. Your data was wrong and your data is subject to interpretation. And I was just looking at this, what he was saying. So I was reading, he's a alumnus, a BA From Brandeis. So he gave, I remember he gave this interview and he was saying that you can't trust the polls. You got to look at my keys. And he said this, this time they could be underestimating Democratic voting. Str. We just don't know. Some people don't really talk to pollster. They just lie. He was thinking that Democrats did it. That was not only wrong, it was absolutely wrong in the opposite direction. It was the Trump people that everybody knew were undercounted because they felt there were repercussions. In other words, if you got out on the street in a major city and said, I'm for Kamala Harris, there was no downside at your firm, at your job, if you said, I'm for MAGA and Donald Trump, there was. So you kept your mouth shut. And that's why traditionally Trump, every serious pundit knew that he was one to two points underneath in polls and surveys of what he really had. So that was. And then he said this. Lichtman argued, and this is a description, he says that Trump lacked broad charisma. Right Now Trump is 54% positive and he has done what no one else has done. He has united people from across the political spectrum and got a higher minority vote than almost anybody. But he said, Lichtman says that Harris would be the first female president as well as the first Asian and as a trifecta and a black woman. Black, female, Asian. And that embodies historic change, he says. And women are now the majority of the electorate and America is becoming a majority minority nation. Professor Lichtman, Kamala Harris lost the female vote. Donald Trump got more females in the United States than did Kamala Harris. That's just a fact. He got record numbers of minorities. So. And why did he do that? Because although you said that she has a unique electoral position in charismatic, she was the most uncharismatic candidate in history. She had canned down. I'm from a middle class. What was your position on the hyperinflation of the first two years? I'm from a middle class. I really am. What is your position on the borders? Borders. I'm from the middle class. Like we had lawns and everything. That didn't work. That did not work. And then he said elections are about Governor, they're just not campaigning. It's not the day to day events of the campaign that matter. It's a long term performance and the strength of. That's exactly right, Mr. Lichtman. And that's why they voted against the person you predicted was going to win. And one of your keys, because that party in power, she could not disown it and separate herself from it because she was within it and part of it. And she Co owned 12 million illegal aliens. No border, Afghanistan disaster, hyperinflation that gave staple prices 30% higher. And then he said, of course, no election has been more venomous. He said, more backlash. He was attacked. Well, you get attacked, but you don't ever say that these attacks are the most venomous. I mean, everybody gets attacked. He was on Piers Morgan. Cink Junger, Is that his name? The Young Turk guy. They just went at it. I could not believe it. And he basically, this guy's on the left. And he said, you know, Professor Lichtman, you're completely wrong. Everything you said was wrong. And they started yelling. And then he said, this is blasphemous. He said, who are you? And the point is. And he said, this is personal. This is personal. You're angry. So I thought he's an academic. And I've been, I'm 71 years old. I was in graduate school. At 20. So for 51 years, I've heard academics yell and scream. You know, I've gone to thousands of meetings when somebody says, I want the floor now, I really resent that implication that my travel money is not warranted. I want to remind everybody that at the 1984 Modern Language Association, I gave a seminal paper and it was very highly regarded in the sub panel group and it wasn't published. But a lot of the argumentation I used was considered doctrinaire by within. That's what they do. Or I've been to the other arguments where somebody said, well, you went to Southwest Ohio State. What was it like? You know, when I was at Harvard, that's what they do. So what did he do when he was attacked? I've been a professor for 50 years and I have written books. And you haven't done anything. And you haven't. I thought when you have to quote your own resume, done, you lost, party's over. So he was just a repertoire. I'm not trying to pick on him. I'm just trying to say that he and the Scarboroughs and Sonny Hostin, we talked about reading Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa. It all has something in common. They all basically told untruth to us. He said, I'm a scientific, data driven historian and I can guarantee you it didn't just say Joe Biden was going to win. And then later, Harris, there's no they will be the next president. And Sunny Halston didn't just say that Matthew Gates was under suspicion. She said he is a sexual predator. And she had to three minutes later read out a panicky disclaimer. And Scarborough didn't just say that Donald Trump was mean. They said that he was a fascist Hitlerian figure. And so the 50, 50.4% of the population said, no, he's not. I voted for him. So you're basically saying that these people are stupid or fascist and then you want public opinion to watch the View or the Scarboroughs or you're Lichtman and you want to be seen as credible when you. It doesn't work. No, it's completely discredited, all of them. I think what will be happening, I think the View will be disbanded or they'll fire that cast. I think Comcast will drop its subscription of msnbc. I think the Scarboroughs will continue to decline. I think Mr. Lichtman, next time he comes the next and he says, I got 15 or 10 new, that will. I think, you know what you're going to be Emphatic. And you're probably 50 years. You may be right, but then a person who flips a coin may be right. You got a 50% chance. But we know one thing, that when you're wrong and you told us for sure, no ambiguity. No ambiguity at all. You weren't ambiguous at all. You said emphatically. And then after you were completely wrong there and you said it was because they did it to me. They tricked me with a racist. So all these people, I'm just giving everybody an example of why couldn't people just say this election was about people lecturing and telling people they're stupid and they got to get on the train of trans and open borders and hyperinflation and leaving Afghanistan and all the stuff you saw. That's not true. Afghanistan was a very successful retreat, strategic. And Joe Biden, you think he's demented, you're demented. He is not demented. I just saw him. He's at top of his game, sharp as attack. And you know what? The crime has gone down. You think it's gone up, it has gone down. Trust me. And most of these people who came in at leave, they're fine, upstanding people. And nobody, they just said, you know what? I'm not going to believe anymore. And I'm not stupid. I'm not crazy for knowing what's true. And all you people, I don't care if you're a professor, Mr. Lichtman, I do not care, Sonny Hostin, if you're an attractive, well spoken, view person of color. I don't care anymore. The Scarboroughs are married and they're, they opine on everything and I don't care anymore. You're all wrong and you're all insulting and you don't call people fascist and Hitler and all sorts of names or you don't tell the American people that you have a secret little plan or you've figured out a database or 15, 10 keys that is sure this person is going to be president or you're not going. I don't care if you're the head of the Des Moines Register poll. Remember on msnbc, Rachel Maddow was saying right before the election, Han Seltzer at the Des Moines Register, she's the gold standard of pollsters and she's got a three. And if Iowa's going three, and that's a radical shift from red to blue. So this is a done deal and Harris is probably going to win in a landslide. No, the woman is lying to you or she's deliberately misinterpreting her own data in order to gin up things and she's totally discredited and she resigned in disgrace and she's probably a nice person, but I don't believe her when she said she had already told or decided or transmitted or communicated she was going to quit. Trust me. If she hadn't had a poll from Iowa and it's said that Donald Trump was going to win by 12 points, two things would have happened. Number one, everybody on the left was, how dare you do that. All you're doing is creating momentum. You could have said he's only going to win by four and then after the election she would have been right on the money and she would have been on all the shows saying, hi, I'm a woman on the left and Des Moines Register is left wing. But I am absolutely in intellectually honest and I predicted to the percentage point that Donald Trump was going to win and I'll do even better next time. Yeah, sorry, that's the way it is.

[Sammy Wink]

That's how she should be. But we know how these pollsters are and I think we're all convinced too, Victor, that we better be very careful next time in what pollsters we listen to. So stay with us and we'll be right back from messages to talk a little bit about battles in World War II. We'll be back.

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[Sammy Wink]

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[Victor Davis Hansen]

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[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back. So this segment, Victor likes to talk a little bit about history. And we are on World War II, and he, he wants to look at a couple of battles in the Philippines. And I know we have lots of Filipino citizens. And so I think we're all looking forward to hearing a little bit more about what happens to the Philippines when the Japanese turn around after Pearl harbor to finish up what they were doing on that archipelago. But go ahead, Victor.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Well, remember we were talking about the Eastern Front, and we're in the year 43, going into 44, and there's a lot of things happening, as I talked about, in the European theater. One of the things is after the disastrous B24 and B17 losses over the Romanian oil refineries in Schweinfurt, the 8th Air Force got its act together. I shouldn't say that it was a very costly act. 25,000 B17 crews, B24 are going to die, and another 20,000 were wounded, lost, missing, taking prisoner. But they got it right and they're starting to do a lot of damage and the whole war is changing. So at that critical point in mid-1942, where we said the Army Group south was on its way to the Caspian Sea to cut the Russian oil and expropriate it, and the Japanese looked like they were going to cut the supply lines to Australia, and they had been unstoppable for much of 1942. Things happened. The Battle of Midway, Coral Sea and Midway stopped the Japanese advancement. We went into Guadalcanal at the end of 42. We stopped the Japanese inroads to continue that effort against Australia. And that was the start of this new strategy in the Pacific of Douglas MacArthur insisted that under Operation Cartwheel, he would go through New guinea and make a big pivot, ending up at the crown Jew of the Philippines. Much discussion, controversy because. And he had at his disposal. Halsey and Nimitz had split the Pacific Fleet, but the Marine Corps. This was largely an army and Navy operation under MacArthur. But the Marine Corps had said, and along with Admiral Nimitz, that is the wrong strategy. I know that we had pledged to reclaim the Philippines. And Douglas MacArthur said, I shall return. He was a brilliant commander, but it's the wrong direction. We want to go leapfrog and get closer and closer and closer to Japan and start bombing it and then prepare for an invasion. And that means we've got to take the Mariana Islands and then we're going to try to get into Okinawa. And so the mission runs will be much shorter. So that was the split in strategy. What happened in 43. Then MacArthur is making progress, on his way near to Rabaul truck, and he's trying to get close to the Philippines. And at the same time, Nimitz is trying to take the Saipan, Tinian, Guam air bases so he can stage a massive attack. So the first battle in this strategy, and by the way, as I said, this was the turning point because Rommel has been stopped at El Alamein in September of 1942. We have landed in November in North Africa. We talked about the peripheral campaign. So in 44, we're just about ready to. We're bogged down, but we're engaged in Italy. We are going to land on January 6, 1944, in the Normandy beaches. We're going to get to that next time and go physically yank Hitler out, we think, out of his bunker, and we're bombing successfully. But the whole tide of the war, after Stalingrad, after El Alamein, after the surrender of all German forces in June, July in North Africa, after the invasion of Italy, the war is now changing from are we going to win or not? To. It's one thing to defeat Germany and Italy and Japan. It's another thing to force unconditional surrender on them and forcibly eject those governments, take over their countries, reboot them. That's going to be. And that's what 44 and 45 are going to be like in the Pacific. As I said, after six months of nothing but defeat, Philippines, Singapore, Wake island lost 5,000 sailors, basically, the destruction of the Dutch fleet, the Australians retreat, bombing of Darwin, landing on Guadalcanal. 6. We had the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway victories. They were not the beginning of the end, they were the end of the beginning, the beginning to start to fight back. And they were going to be followed by these terrible five battles off the coast of, in the straits around Guadalcanal, and then the victory in Guadalcanal. And then, as I said, there was going to be a sharp difference in strategies, how to defeat Japan. By the way, the British are only going to offer 10% of the total Anglo American forces. And they have different agendas. They're not necessarily antithetical to ours, but they want to protect the crown jewel of the British Empire in India. And we have. And Burma. And they are fighting horrific battles in Burma to protect India, but more importantly, to reestablish the Burma Road and supply the Nationalists under Chiang Kai Shek and this tenuous alliance he has with Mao Zedong. To stop the Japanese in China. So in 1944 there's and we're now we've had the Essex carriers, 25 of these huge carriers are coming online. We've got the new class of battleships, NC class, we've got all of these submarines, destroyers, cruisers, heavy and light. And the Pacific fleet now is huge just in two years. At the same time the Japanese have not recovered from losing four carriers at Midway. But more importantly their generation of the late 1930s, expert pilots and more importantly some of their aircraft. Even their premier so called Mitsubishi Zero fighter which had a longer range, more maneuverable, had advantage in speed over our F4 Wildcats. The Pacific fighter Grumman Wildcat that is over now we have a new generation of F6 hellcats which in every category is better than up modeled Zeros and new Japanese fighters that are coming online. The old tried and true Dauntless dive bomber has been replaced by a superior, even though everybody loved that plane. The Avenger is faster, large, larger, greater range, greater capacity. And we have, I don't know, the Devastator torpedo carrier bomber was the death trap. And we talked at Midway. It led to, I think 39 of the 40 pilots were wiped out in the torpedoes torpedo squadron. But they have a new Helldiver and it's bigger, it's faster of course, but it's a problematic plane. But nevertheless, at the battle of the Philippine Sea off the coast of the Mariana Islands we have a huge fleet now and it's brand new. I think it's got seven carriers. These are all Essex carriers, you know, 20, 30,000 tons displacement, eight light carriers, seven or eight battleships that are new. We have some of the old ones have been resurrected but we have a new class of fast battleship all with 16 inch guns. And we still haven't got quite online the best battleship of World War II, the Iowa class, Missouri Iowa. We got heavy cruisers, I think there's 70 destroyers. It's a huge 900 plane force and it's going to go in there and attack the airfields on the Marian Islands and then destroy any Japanese fleet. And the Japanese are saying well we're losing the war now because we can't get to the Dutch East Indies and get oil. This new American fleet is huge. We lost the battle of Midway. The illusions campaign has not worked out. After the five battles off Guadalcanal we've lost that, we've lost more carriers, more battleships, but we still have this huge pre war fleet. And so their idea is we're going to bring three of our Biggest carriers, five battleships, we're almost going to have parity. And when you add in the land aircraft on Guam, Tinian, et cetera, and our fleet, we can almost match the Americans. And so they have this tremendous fight off the Mariana Islands called the Battle of the Philippine Sea. And when it's over, the Americans dub it the Great Marianas Turkey Chute, because they absolutely destroy the Japanese naval force. They shoot down 450 planes, they destroy the land based aircraft. When it's all over, they have wiped out the entire generation of pilots. They're all gone now that were so deadly at Pearl harbor, had fought well at Coral Sea, that basically ran wild in China. They're dead now and the carriers are empty vessels. And we did sink two fleet carriers at Philippine Sea, Marianas and one light one. But the main thing is, as I said, was almost 800, 850 planes had been wiped out. And that was why, because these pilots, these American pilots have now been training for two years and they've got plenty of gasoline. So their training hours are not like Japanese young kids, 18, you know, 30, 40 hours. And that's about as all, as much gas as they can afford in training. They put them out with what in planes that were the best in the world in 1939, 40, 41. But you put them against a Hell Cat or a land based Corsair. British use, of course, they're actually on carriers as well and they are 30 to 40 miles slower. They don't have self sealing gas tanks, so they blow up. They don't have an armor seat to protect the pilot. They don't have rates of climbing or diving anywhere near. And when you put a young American, 21 years old with two years of hundreds of hours, it's a slaughter. And when it's all over, they have destroyed Japanese air power. They haven't sunk all the 15 or so fleet carriers, but by August 1944, the Americans have complete control of the Pacific, almost, I would call it naval superiority verging on supremacy. And what do they have to do now to win the war? They've got to find a way to get to the Philippines, because MacArthur is prompt. Take this huge force that's the largest overseas deployment of Japanese outside of China. Destroy the Japanese army in the Philippines and draw the rest of the Japanese fleet out and destroy it. So when they approach, when Nimitz and the Marines get closer and closer, then MacArthur will send his forces over and they will prepare to invade Japan and there will be no Japanese fleet. One of the great result of this is not just the destruction of all naval forces, but there's two things that happened out of this battle. Number one, before the Japanese fleet is defeated and even before the Marines have taken the Marianas, they have had the Seabees in there and they are building 7,500 foot runways on Tinyon, on Guam and on Saipan. And they are eventually going to get 2,500 of these huge B29s. They're the biggest plane that's ever been, biggest warplane that's ever been built and they have a range of 1600 miles one way. And they're going to load them up with 20,000, 15 to 20,000 pounds of incendiaries. And they think they can put these 1122 year old kids, put them on these B29s from the Marianas, they're going to fly over water for eight to nine hours, they're going to get over the jet stream and they're going to drop their load and get back to the Marianas. And they won't have to be based in India or China. And that was why the campaign. The second thing is the Americans didn't lose any major ship at this battle and they only lost 100 dead and they killed over 3,000. And as I said, 900 planes were destroyed and we don't really know the full number of Japanese dead. And as I said, they sunk two carriers, a light carrier, they sank their oil, their tanker fleet. It was a disaster. But one thing that was clear, they showed up with a kamikaze and people kamikaze attacks. And Americans had never seen that. They thought they're not going to do this, they're not going to take pilots and put them on one way missions. And they hit some American planes and then they started to think about it. After the battle was over, the only thing that was successful was the this rare appearance. And is this going to happen? And as we're going to see the next battle at Leyte Gulf, they appear in number and the Americans are completely freaked out because they think we've got air superiority. Any Japanese fighter or torpedo plane or dive bomber that comes from a carrier is going to be dead. And there's not many left. The carriers are empty shells and any land base, whether it's American land based Corsair or it's a Hellcat or even a P30, they're going to be shot down. We have the best planes and we have air and naval supremacy. And what happens is they start to see at the next battle at Leyte, Golf and this is in preparation for Douglas MacArthur's invasion of the Philippines. They start to get a little panicky. And why do they get panicky? Because they don't know how you can stop them. What do I mean by that? How can you stop these people? Because it just turns over the entire calculus of range, speed, pilot experience on its head. The kamikazes are not fighter pilots, they're not bomber pilots, they're cruise missiles. The human brain is acting in a way that modern computers do, only much more successfully. So they're getting 18 or 19 year old kids that are completely incompetent as far as going up against an experienced American pilot in a sophisticated fighter plane. And they're saying, you know what, you don't have to. If your range is maybe 400 miles and you have to get back at 800, now all of a sudden you can go a thousand miles because you don't have to come back. So the new plane with a bomb on it, and you can use a fighter plane and strap on a 250 pound bomb, or you can use. And they can protect, on the way out, they can protect the dive bomber and torpedo bombers and all these planes that are suddenly ossified and out of date and canistic, they can't match the American air fleet. They don't have to. They're going often at night or dawn, at dusk, they're going below the radar screens, very low, while some are way high. And the pilot, all he has to, he doesn't have to hit the target, he doesn't have to shoot anything, all he has to do is aim his plane and take out an American, American carrier with a cruise missile. And at the Battle of Leyte, Gaul, that just happens about four months later in late October. This is the biggest naval battle in the history of naval warfare. Bigger than the Battle of Salamis, bigger than Trafalgar, even bigger than Jutland in World War I. And it's got every, you know, American, it's got Admiral Kinkade and Admiral Halsey, and it's got, all of the Yamamoto's been killed, but they've got Carida and they've got Ozawa, they've got all of the luminaries of the Japanese combined fleets, and we've got the third and seventh fleet combined. And the Americans have 300 ships, they've got eight fleet carriers, nine light carriers, 18 escort carriers, 12 battleships. Think of it. And they're not the World War I classes that were 14 inch guns, very slow, limited range, that were blown up or disabled. At Pearl harbor, they're state of the art, over 100 destroyers. They've got 1500 planes on these carriers. And they're against what is left of now this huge Japanese fleet. It was the largest fleet in the Pacific. It was the third largest fleet in the world before the war. It had all up to date planes, it was formidable. But it's lost, as I said earlier at the battle of the Philippine Sea, the Mariana Turkey chute, it lost its carriers. So what they're going to do is they're going to use their carriers as bait and then they're going to think Halsey will go after them. And as he goes after them, then they'll send their battleships. And the Yamato is here, the biggest 18.1 inch guns, large battleship with its sister, the Mushasi. It's there. And they are going to destroy the landing craft that are landing at Leyte. And that's the plan. Sacrifice the carriers, draw out Halsey. It almost works. Admiral Halsey. I mean, people were criticizing Admiral Spruance because they said, well, if the Mariana took her chute, it got dark and you didn't pursue them, you could have stayed around the next day. They didn't have any aircraft, you could have destroyed the whole fleet. Spruance said, I didn't want to chance it. And the fleet's worthless anyway because there's no planes on it. And so the idea was you have to be aggressive. I think the criticism was maybe unfair of Spruance at the Mariana took a chute. But nevertheless, Halsey is saying, I am not that kind of admiral. And when I get out there, I'm going to go full blast with the largest carrier fleet in the world and my new battleships, and I'm going to blow up the Japanese fleet as it's composed of its carriers. So he takes off, but he leaves the strait where the landings are open, and for a brief moment, these huge Japanese battleships, there's nobody protecting the landing craft. There's thousands of American soldiers that are ready to land. And this huge American fleet is dispersed and all that's there are these little tiny escort carriers, about 7,000 tons, no armor, some destroyers. And instead of just fleeing because they will be blown up, they have 4 inches guns, 5 inch guns. You're talking about 18 inch and 16 inch guns. The only thing that saves them is they have no armor. So these shells the size of a Volkswagen go right through them without blowing up. But they sacrifice themselves and they slow down, they let smoke, they send torpedoes, they go full blast and lo and behold, they scare this huge Japanese battleship fleet and it turns around just before it's going to destroy the landing craft. And they take a terrible loss. 3,000 of them are killed. Americans, 250 planes lost. But they give the Americans time to land safely. And then Halsey comes back, the fleet recombodulates and they go to town and destroy. I think they sunk over 25 ships. Fleet carriers, light carrier. They sink three battleships, they shoot down another 300 planes. And when it's all over, there is no Japanese fleet left in the Pacific. Now it's October 1944, the end. We're coming into November. What is happening? The B29s are already starting to take off because of the capture of the Marianas. There's nothing to worry about in the ocean. They're not going to fly over hostile ships. They're not going to be their supplies. We're sending all the supplies from Pearl harbor and all the way actually from San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, San Diego. They're not going to be attacked in the Pacific. Why they supply these distant bases. And we're going to talk about next time. It's not working. The multibillion $2 billion plan, more expensive than the Manhattan atomic bomb project, is an utter failure. This very sophisticated plane is going up 30,000ft. It's dropping bombs that hit the jet stream, go off course. They're burning up the engines with the weight. It's too far to fly, they think. And the idea that you can bomb Japan into submission almost the way you did Germany doesn't look very good. And it looks pretty bleak by the beginning of the year that the Philippines is pretty. It's a horrific battle. February 1945. They have to take Iwo Jima, halfway between the Marianas and Japan for a safety spot, a rescue place, a place to base fighters to protect from mainland aircraft. That's going to be very. 7,000 dead Marines, terrible battle. And then they're going to have to go to Okinawa to get closer. And it doesn't look like it's going to work. So next time we're going to look at what happened because it did work, because they get a. Just like the Americans always do when they get in trouble. Civil war. They go through Pope, they go through Burnside, they go through McClellan, they go through Hooker. And where is the genius, he's manic depressant called William Tecumseh Sherman and somebody who's accused of being an alcoholic, Ulysses S. Grant. And they win the war. World War II. You've got just a, you know, General Lucas or General McNair or a lot of people from the pre war army that are not up to it. And all of a sudden, just when you need somebody, you get George S. Patton in the North Africa campaign, the Sicily campaign, and we appear. Same thing with the air. Or you get a Jimmy Doolittle that restores confidence in the American Air Force, redefines fighter tactics. And just when you think the B29 is a colossal failure, you get a guy who has Bell's palsy with a big cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth, who himself as A colonel flew B17 missions, some of the worst. And they put him in charge of the B29 program and all hell breaks loose. They think he's going to get everybody killed and he ends up winning the war. And we'll get to that next time.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. All right. Thank you, Victor. Well, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and continue on the news. Stay with us and we'll be back.

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[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show. You can find Victor at his handle is Ed Hansen and you can find him on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So come join us there as well. So Victor, there's been lots of cases and I was wondering maybe a little update on the Daniel Penney case. A defense pathologist has questioned the cause of death that the coroner came down with, which was a chokehold and has said that he was high on a drug called K2, which is a synthetic drug, but it's intended to mimic HTC and he was having a psychotic episode as well and that he doesn't think that the choke hold cause of death is accurate. And I was wondering your thoughts on Daniel Penny is this.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Go ahead. This all has to be put in the context of Alvin Bragg. So contemporaneous with this trial. We just had a felon that was let out by the criminal justice system, which he's a part of, that stabbed killed two people and injured a woman and went on a rampage a known violent felon who'd done something like this before. And we're talking about on the other end of the spectrum, the same prosecutor is wasting millions of dollars to go after Donald Trump. And what did we learn at the same time that Daniel Penney's on trial, that he's gone before this biased judge Mershon, whose daughter's made, as I said last Ponca, quite a profit in weaponizing her father's role as the bias judge adjudicating the Trump case. And there's nothing there. They've got a jury verdict that says, well, stormy and he had a sexual relationship and he had a non disclosure and that was a campaign violation. And the federal government, I didn't want to prosecute it, but I'm a local prosecutor, so I took it upon myself because I'm campaigning to run for reelection and I'm going to show everybody I can get Trump because I'm going to get a biased New York jury. And so he did, and he got a guilty verdict and he was going to sentence him to jail. And then everybody. There was an outcry. He tried to do this before the election, but there was such an outcry that they postponed it to after the election. And then he's basically said, wait a minute, how can I put him, how can I sentence him? Or how can I go through the sentencing part of the trial when he's the President of the United States and it's not a contested election. He won 312 electoral votes and he's the first Republican since 2004 who won the public. He won the popular vote. He won the public over. So I'm going to be the bad guy and I'm up for reelection even though 70% of my constituency are left wing. This doesn't look good. And General Mershon's thinking this doesn't look good. But we got to get Trump. I know what we'll do. We will put a sword of Damocles over his head. We will say we will suspect until you leave office, but we will make you think every moment when you're president, when you're meeting with Putin, when you're trying to deal with Xi, when you're trying to deal with Iranians, that you could go to jail the moment you come out of office.

[Sammy Wink]

Isn't that illegal? Don't you?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Seems like it should be to delay a sentencing for four years. I think the Supreme Court, because it's already ruled about immunity and it said that a president has immunity for things he's done in connection with his job. And I don't know whether they're going to argue that the presidential candidate who is part of covered with that ruling or that he did these things with Stormy Prior. Well, this was like 10 years, no more than that ago. More than 10 years ago. So basically he's saying once upon a time Donald Trump allegedly had sex with a woman and he was embarrassed about his family. So he had a non disclosure form and agreement. And by the way, she violated that agreement. She violated that agreement and she never paid him half a million bucks. But I guess that doesn't matter. So he's dredged up an old idea and then he said it's a campaign contribution because he wasn't worried about embarrassing Melania, he was worried about getting elected. If that was true, I don't. That means that everybody who has sexual relations who is a candidate, which is a lot of people don't worry about the embarrassment to their family. They only worry about their career. I don't think that's true. But nevertheless, that's where we are right now. And why am I mentioning this? Because why this is going on. They're going after Daniel Penney, who had a career felon, homeless person who was high on drugs, who did his usual shtick and threatened people with violence and made most of the people run away and were terrified of him. And he put him in a hold. He didn't mean to kill him, but he was a fix. He was killed in some manner or died in some manner. It was very analogous to George Floyd, the same controversy. And his defense attorney, as you point out, makes the argument that had he been not on drugs, he would not have died. So it's kind of, well, if you hadn't have choked him, he wouldn't have died. But if he hadn't been on drugs, the choke wouldn't have hurt him. Same thing with George Floyd.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Do you think, how do you see this panning out? Do you think that Daniel Penney.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I think they're going to convict him.

[Sammy Wink]

Oh my God. Really?

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I don't think they'll find one jury. They've racialized it. They've done everything that he's a big, strong Marine white guy, he's probably a maga, they've said. And he just picked on this poor little guy. And I think they're going to convict him. But he's completely, I think in the of most Americans of all different backgrounds, he's innocent. He's not only innocent, he's a heroic figure. But one thing that I'm not sure of. I don't know. I mentioned those two variables because the jury must be aware, even though they may be sequestered, they must be aware of this maniac that just stabbed two people that had been let out, a felon. And they might say to themselves, that's what this was capable of doing had Penny not intervened. And we're sick and tired of felons being let loose regardless of their politics. And then more importantly, why are we doing this and why are we trying to prosecute people like Donald Trump, the President of the United States and Daniel Penny? And we're letting felons and we're worried more about people who hurt people than people who protect them. So it's kind of a wild card, but I'm not optimistic about it.

[Sammy Wink]

So another case that just came out was the Jesse Smollett case. And apparently the Supreme Court of Illinois reversed the conviction of lying to police officers of Jesse Smollett. So that's another grim case here.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I don't think it reverses the facts of the case that he is guilty of lying to police officers and causing them needless money, capital labor to investigate something that he knew was a lie, a fraud. But it was the manner in which they continued the prosecution. And it's from a very liberal left wing Illinois Supreme Court. If you look at the justices record, I think they have elections, they have to stand for election. They're all left wings, as is Illinois in general. But the point, again, remember everybody, we've talked about this. I don't want to make light of it, but Jussie Smollett came before the United States popular culture and he won the approval of Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden. They all said he was a victim of racism. Now this is not new. This was after the Duke lacrosse, the Tawana Brawley charade, the Al Sharpton annex. So people, people should have known that there had been a pattern of people claiming racism and victimization when it was not true to help their careers. So Juicy Smollett was a minor actor in this largely black cast of Empire. I've never seen it, so I'm not an authority and I'm probably going to misspeak. Some of you watched it. But he was going nowhere and he wanted to gain attention for his role and for the program in general. So he cooked up this idea that he would be attacked by white racist MAGA so he could. And he thought that of course everybody hated Donald Trump. It's 2019, the election's coming Up. Covid is there. So he's going to cook up. So he has two African American or African residents from Africa who help him work out. One of whom said he's had a physical relationship. And he writes checks to them and they go in and buy rope and bleach and hats, that's a matter of fact. And then he uses those and drives around, according to their testimony that he cooks up a scheme that seems just so pathetic. But the scheme is that he's going to walk in his neighborhood down to get a sandwich in the wee hours of the morning on a frigid, arctic night in Chicago, and there's going to be two white men who have MAGA hats on and they just happen to be equipped with bleach and rope. I mean, if you don't like Juicy and you're a racist, you'd kind of say, I'm going to go into a mixed racial neighborhood, probably a left wing neighborhood. And I'll just before I go out the door, I'll pick up my noose and I'll pick up my Clorox and I'm out. Oh, I got to wear my MAGA hat. There's got to be two. And they bump into Jussie Smollett on his way to get us on the way home from his sandwich. And then what happens? Well, we know that Jussie is a heroic, tragic figure. So he fights them and he kicks them and they do some damage. They put the noose around his neck and they fight him. But he says he whooped their rear end. And more importantly, why he was whooping two large white racist MAGA people who were always around roaming in Chicago. They throw bleach on him and it defies the laws of chemistry because the temperature at the time is below the freezing point of bleach. So he throws the bleach. They throw the bleach, Juicy. And miraculously for them, they're effective. Because it doesn't freeze. It gets Juicy. He's attacked with bleach. I guess the point is to make him white because he's only half white. And this is what racist people do. They run around Chicago in the middle of the night in mixed racial neighborhoods with bleach to turn black people white, white. And more importantly, we all know that MAGA people who wear hats, who are white, who venture into liberal mixed racial neighborhoods are big fans of Empire. And they watch every episode and they know who Juicy is. So they yell, hey, F Empire, F you. Yeah, Juicy, you're so well known. And this black episodic role that you and this drama is one of the big hits in places like Utah, Wyoming, West Virginia. We all, we all yokels. We all hoedown. We're all flunky white Neanderthals. And one thing we don't ever miss is Empire. And you. And you make us so mad that we got in our pickup truck and we drove to Chicago and we looked around and thought, we're going to get. We didn't know we were going to bump into you, but we got our bleach and we got our noose and we got our MAGA house and we just roamed around at two in the morning looking for people when it was, I don't know, windchill, 20 below. And we found you, just what we thought. And we said, that's Empire. One of our actors we watch every week. And so we. And then guess what happened. Jesse told us that even though there was two of them and he's a diminutive character, very small, petite, he happens to be gay. So they call him a gay epithet, of course, as long as the racial epithet. And a get two for. And he fought them. Yes, he did. Now, they did do some damage. The frozen. The beach. The bleach didn't freeze. God said, you know what? There's no laws of chemistry. The breach will not freeze because they're racist. That I should say. Satan did that. And the bleach did hit him and they did get that noose around him. But he fought them off. He fought them off, he kicked them, he drove them away, he whopped them. And he did it with one hand on his sandwich and the other on his cell phone so he was able to come back and he could film the whole thing. Now it happened that the people's. The description of the people just happened to be the same size as his two black trainers. And they just happened to have a check, a personal check for him to buy. And they peered up, as I said, on video cameras, buying what? Bleach and a rope. And they happened to have red hats. And they happened to confess that he hired them and. And they happened to confess that one of them was sexually involved with him. And they happened to say that he drove around and scouted out where they should appear. Presto, out of nowhere. And we were all to believe that if we were Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris, that was a modern lynching. So that's where we were. And then now the Supreme Court says, yeah, well, I don't want to get into whether that's true or not. But you guys were in a prosecutorial because you got a special prosecutor to go after Jesse and all he did was just kind of fudge the truth. So that's where we are. Meanwhile, they're going after Donald trump for a 10 year old non disclosure form that didn't violate any federal law in the eyes of federal prosecutors. But this demagogue Alvin Bragg cooked up.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, causes us to lose confidence in our justice system.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I mentioned that earlier in the podcast that I think there is, it's not the majority view yet, but I think the black community is getting very tired of this. They're getting tired of Al Sharpton, they're getting tired of Oprah, they're getting tired of the Obamas lecturing them. They're also, I think everybody should realize that Latita James, the black prosecutor, that's Attorney General that went after Donald Trump, because think about it for a minute, that he took a loan out from the Deutsche bank and he used Mar A Lago and in her brilliant opinion, it was not worth I think 17 million when it's worth probably half a billion, 500 million. And he used that as collateral to get a loan from the Deutsche bank and they loaned him the money and he paid it back with interest to their profit and they were happy and they would loan him again. And she said that was fraud that had never been tried before. She campaigned on getting him as he was, as if he was a racist. And then there was another African American prosecutor in Georgia, Fannie Willis, who hired her boyfriend and said that when Donald Trump was on a phone, he said, I know there's votes there. Can you find them? To a registrar. That was an election interference, not like Senator Casey who is mathematically impossible to win his Senate race. Currently in Pennsylvania, it's impossible. There's not enough votes out there that would cut the margin of recorded and counted votes. But he thinks, he thinks that maybe some of the existing votes can be nullified. Even though the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania has said not once but twice, if there is a ballot and it has an incorrect information signature, it is a void, it's not valid. And the registrars knows that. And yet they are counting those. And yet even if they get all of those fraudulent ballots fraudulently accepted, it's still not going to be enough. And even though they are only picking fraudulent ballots in counties that have majority of blue state voters. Everybody understand what I just said? I mean that in Pennsylvania, the registrar, hand in glove with the Casey campaign, is saying that ballots, which by Statute and by court ruling cannot be accepted as valid votes. They are making valid and they are examining them in counties that were overwhelmingly Democrat but they do not want to go into red counties and go back and look at rejected ballots because if they were to do so they would either be 50, 50 or the rejected ballots would be in favor of McCormick. And so my point is we have all of this election denialism and nobody is going after Casey or the registrar who said openly. They're not going to follow all. But we have Fannie Willis and then we have Alvin Bragg who we thought the Deutsche Bank James was ridiculous. We thought the Fannie Willis find me that vote thing was ridiculous or paramore she was a beneficiary of her own office's money by secretly giving money to Nathan, I shouldn't say secretly hiring him openly and then secretly going with him on junkets using and we're told that only people who are familiar with African American culture can understand the primacy of cash because coincidentally, accidentally, just sort of they have no receipts for all the money they spent that came from the coffers of Georgia that case. And then we now have the trifecta with Alvin Bragg and he had a racial component basically is posing for reelection as someone who's going to put the racist Donald Trump and he's dreamed up a non disclosure form that no other the feds didn't want anything to do with it. They didn't think it had anything to do with campaign. But all three of these are put in racial terms and no other prosecutor would have ever charged anybody other than Donald Trump and they wouldn't have charged Donald Trump if he hadn't run free election and they think that represents people. Meanwhile, while this is going on Donald Trump is winning 20% of the African American vote which is unheard of given the propaganda and the money on the left and that's a prime constituency and given the endorsement of Barack Obama and Oprah and James Clyburn and may have got even a higher number of black males. So the prosecutors don't understand what's happening in the black community. Just like the Hispanics, just like the white elites. There's a middle class surge and they don't listen to elites. I'm saying this all because a lot of people Donald Trump said that these were racist prosecutors and I think in two instances I don't think that's the wrong thing to look at. They're out of touch people because what's happening is they are using a paradigm to go after somebody on racial Terms, that's a subtext because the suits, they're not inexplicable other ways. There's nothing to, you know, Jack Smith, at least it's a federal offense with archives. And even his is crazy. But my point is, they don't represent, I think, the black community. I think the black community looks at. At them and says, you don't care about me. You don't care about the crime in my neighborhood. You don't care about the illegal immigration that's destroyed my neighborhood. All you care about is some high celebrity, high profile, your own career, using race to further yourself. But you don't care about race. You don't care about me, and therefore I'm not going to care about your interpretation of race. I'm going to look at things from a class point of view. I'm going to look. If I'm a professional athlete in a ring, I'm going to go over and give my championship belt. If I'm a professional athlete and I make a touchdown, maybe I'll dance the way Trump is. I don't care what you say anymore because I know what you're doing. You're not representing anybody other than yourself. It's not a widespread doctrinaire movement, but it shows you that the Clyburns and the Clyburns and the, you know, the Alvin Braggs, the Letitia, they're not representative anymore of totality. They have no lock on the black boat. It's starting to go beyond them. They can't control it.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Well, Victor, it sounds like your dogs are letting us know that it's time to go. And the last thing, though, that.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Did you say one of them is dying? Poor little Sporty is dying of cancer. So maybe in anguish, he says, come and see me in my last moments in extremists. So I will go see him.

[Sammy Wink]

Poor little guy.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

I'm trying to be palliative. Yeah, it's very sad when a dog dies out here on the farm. I've been here, I guess I've been here 50 years living in this house. I think I buried, I don't know, 20 dogs on the farm. I always go down about 4ft, 5ft so that coyotes don't dig them up. And I'm very careful about the burial. And I had their names in concrete. I stopped after 15 of them, I think, wow. But anyway, he's about 12 years old and he's got stomach cancer. So I'm giving him painkillers, and I don't want to put him to sleep because he's not in pain, and he's very happy, and he just kind of lays there. And I try to people, you know, in the family give him broth and milk and ice cream, anything he can put keep down. But that's who's got maybe he's the one barking.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, good luck to Sporty. I mean, I'm sure he'll be missed terribly. So. Victor, Anyways, this is the end of our show, and we like to thank all of our listeners and thank you, too, especially for that discussion of the Philippines in World War II and the significance of that, those battles that were fought there. And those are things just like the others that we rarely hear about. So I very much appreciate that. Thank you.

[Victor Davis Hansen]

Thank you, everybody, for listening. Much appreciated.

[Sammy Wink]

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