The Heroism of Churchill in 1940

Summary

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The Victor Davis Hanson Show

Episode: The Heroism of Churchill in 1940
Date: September 20, 2025
Hosts: Victor Davis Hanson, Jack Fowler

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Episode Overview

This episode of the Victor Davis Hanson Show delivers a sweeping discussion of current political issues before deep-diving into Winston Churchill’s leadership during Britain’s darkest year, 1940. Victor, a historian, explores widespread misunderstandings about Churchill’s choices, the realities of WWII strategy, and why Churchill’s refusal to seek terms with Hitler was not only courageous but pivotal to the outcome of the war. The conversation also touches on Antifa, the aftermath of high-profile assassinations, the upcoming election, and California politics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Current News: The Charlie Kirk Assassin Case

Timestamps: 04:58 – 13:42

• The media’s shifting narrative around the suspect, with Victor criticizing the left for cycling through explanations (mental illness, the gun, MAGA, a love story, indifference).
• Examination of the Gen Z demographic’s anger and alienation, citing Dr. Scott Atlas’ article about the psychological fallout from COVID-19 lockdowns.

  “A whole generation was warped by the lockdown and the shut-in.” – Victor (08:38)

• Discussion of cultural influences (video games, online subcultures) on youth behavior.

2. Violence and the Media Reaction

Timestamps: 09:02 – 13:42

• Analysis of the media’s allegedly tacit approval of violence against political opponents.
• The FCC’s role in regulating public airwaves compared to social media; public outrage at celebratory or misleading coverage following political violence.

  “The long and the short of it is we’re morally superior, we’re intellectually superior. We can do this to all of you. We can say this, but you can’t dare say this about us.” – Victor (12:44)

3. Trump, Antifa, and Political Violence

Timestamps: 15:43 – 22:49

• Trump's designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization, with discussion about the challenges in defining and prosecuting such loosely organized movements.
• Reference to Andy Ngo’s reporting on Antifa’s tactics and symbols, noting overlap in bullet engravings and symbolism.
• Victor links Antifa and similar groups to broader “market value” analogies—suggesting cultural and media personalities misunderstand their own impact and audience.

4. Trump’s State Visit to the UK and Views on the British Empire

Timestamps: 23:21 – 29:58

• Trump’s affinity for the UK, respect for the British monarchy, and defense of the British Empire as the “most enlightened” among historical empires.

  “When you compare the British Empire to the Spanish Empire or the Ottoman Empire ... it was about the most enlightened entity there was.” – Victor (24:14)

• Critical contrast with Obama’s “apology tour” and his perceived detachment from American and British institutions.

5. Deep Dive: The Heroism of Churchill in 1940

Timestamps: 30:44 – 52:18

Background and Historical Context

• Recent revisionist takes on WWII suggest Hitler was only interested in fighting Soviet communism and that Churchill’s resistance was misguided.
• Victor forcefully rebuts these views, laying out the events from the invasion of Poland, Denmark, Norway, and the fall of France.
• Churchill’s rise: After Chamberlain’s resignation on the eve of the German invasion of France, Churchill became Prime Minister at a moment of national crisis.

Churchill’s Unique Courage and Strategic Wisdom

• For over a year (May 1940 – June 1941), Britain stood alone against Nazi Germany; neither the US nor the USSR was yet involved.
• Churchill rejected offers (via Mussolini) to negotiate with Hitler, despite overwhelming pressure and the fall of most of Europe.

  “He said, whether we like it or not, we can defeat—at least they can’t beat us because we have the world’s largest navy.” – Victor (35:23)

• British strengths: The Royal Navy (invulnerable to Germany), ongoing air production, and worldwide Empire.

The Mediterranean and North Africa

• Churchill refused to cede the Mediterranean, defending Malta and Suez, and scored initial victories against Italian forces.
• Hitler's decision to invade the USSR, while entangled in Greece, Yugoslavia, and North Africa, critically overextended German resources.

The Battle of Britain

• Hitler’s sustained air assault (Battle of Britain) failed due to technical limitations and the resilience of the RAF.
• The inability of Germany to achieve air or naval supremacy allowed Britain to remain unconquered, setting the stage for both Soviet and American entry into the war.

Counterargument to Revisionist Claims

• Revisionists argue that had Churchill sued for peace, Europe would have been subjugated by Nazis (possibly as a bulwark against communism).
• Victor counters this as a “lunatic view ... morally bankrupt,” highlighting the genocidal intent and record of Nazi Germany.

  “He [Churchill] was the only person that kept the Allied... If he had folded, the war would have been over.” – Victor (38:28)

Soviet “Ally” and Betrayals

• The USSR only joined the Allies after being attacked. Before that, it kept its nonaggression pacts (with Germany and Japan), even while receiving Allied aid.
• The Soviets later betrayed Western promises in Eastern Europe post-war—a cautionary tale about alliances of convenience.

Was Victory Over the Soviet Union Possible for Germany?
(41:10 – 52:18)

• Strategic breakdown of why diverting resources to North Africa and the Balkans undermined Hitler’s eastern campaign.
• Victor argues that a different allocation of resources might have allowed the Axis to threaten Suez—and thus seriously injure Britain—but it’s unlikely the Nazi-Soviet war could have ended in German victory due to logistical and strategic overreach.

6. California Politics: Proposition 50 and Redistricting

Timestamps: 61:44 – 68:18

• Discussion of Governor Newsom’s effort to change redistricting to benefit Democrats, possibly flipping five Congressional seats.
• Criticism of partisan hypocrisy—Democrats previously praised “nonpartisan redistricting commissions,” but now aim for outright gerrymandering.

  “Are they going to be happy when Newsom comes along and says get rid of the veneer? We’re just hacks.” – Victor (64:02)

• Implications for national midterms and for Newsom’s own political future.

7. Reflections on Robert Redford

Timestamps: 68:31 – 71:51

• Redford’s passing noted; Victor respects his screen presence despite not rating him a “great actor.”
• Praises Redford’s choice to age naturally and his understated film charisma, likening him to Brad Pitt.

8. Letters from Listeners & Farming Life

Timestamps: 71:56 – END

• A heartfelt reflection on raisin farming and the challenges posed by unseasonal rain, with local listener correspondence from California’s Central Valley.
• Special mention of a 93-year-old listener whose family participated in Spitfire production and service during WWII—emphasizing the generation’s heroism.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “A whole generation was warped by the lockdown and the shut-in.” — Victor, on Gen Z and COVID-19 fallout (08:38)
• “The long and the short of it is we’re morally superior, we’re intellectually superior [...] They’re like little adolescents.” — Victor, on selective outrage in media (12:44)
• “If he had folded, the war would have been over.” — Victor, on Churchill’s resolve (38:28)
• “It’s really a lunatic view because it’s morally bankrupt.” — Victor, on WWII revisionism (41:11)
• “He was the only person that kept the Allied... If he had folded, the war would have been over.” (38:28)
• “When you compare the British Empire to the Spanish Empire or the Ottoman Empire ... it was about the most enlightened entity there was.” (24:14)

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Segment Timestamps

• 04:58 – 13:42: Charlie Kirk Assassination, Media Narratives, Gen Z
• 15:43 – 22:49: Trump & Antifa, Political Violence, Market Value in Media
• 23:21 – 29:58: Trump’s UK Visit & The British Empire
• 30:44 – 52:18: Churchill’s Leadership in 1940, WWII Strategy & Revisionism
• 61:44 – 68:18: Gavin Newsom, California Proposition 50, Gerrymandering
• 68:31 – 71:51: Robert Redford’s Legacy
• 71:56 – End: Listener Letters, Reflections on Agricultural Life

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Tone and Style

Throughout, Victor’s tone is scholarly, passionate, and at times caustically critical, particularly toward media, revisionist historians, and political opponents. The episode balances dense, thoughtful history with present-day political commentary, blending personal reminiscence (as regarding farming and WWII generations) with incisive analysis.

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Transcript

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[C]

Hello and welcome to the Victor Davis Hanson Show. This is our Saturday edition in which Victor does a historical topic in the middle of this segment and this today he is going to talk about Churchill in his worst year, 1940, or things related to 1940. We've got lots of people talking about that date, so we'll do that in the middle segment. Before that we'll go to some news and we have some updates on the Charlie Kirk assassin. And we'll start with that. So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com and the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus. There's lots of free stuff there. All of his articles and podcasts, links to his books are available at the website and you can enjoy those things. And then he has two articles a week and a podcast that he does or a video he does once a week for VDH Ultra subscribers. So please come join us as an ultra subscriber. For 650amonth or $65 a year. We'd love to have everybody. So, Victor, I know that the first thing we wanted to do was update the discussion of Charlie Kirk's assassin and the news around that assassin. I know you had some few things you wanted to say, so go ahead.

[D]

Well, as I said last time, we're in the seventh narrative and now the left is just sort of admitted that it wasn't the gun or it wasn't Trump or it wasn't a love story, et cetera. And they were kind of open about it. They're saying, well, you know, we don't really glorify in anybody dying, however. But of course, maybe sort of Kind of he's dead and we didn't agree with him and he was a bad guy and what are you going to do about it? That's their narrative today. A couple of just random thoughts we mentioned the other day, but they've been more clarified. The trans boyfriend, girlfriend. The timeline doesn't quite make sense as the overly cooperative witness because there's a gap between the shooting, his knowledge of the shooting and his volunteering to cooperate with the police. And that's post facto. And you could say pre facto, you. You might argue that when they mentioned the engraving of the bullets, the two of them, then he had knowledge of what he was going to do and he could have saved Charlie Kirk's life, in my opinion, had he just preempted and called the police immediately. So that's something that I think everybody should look at.

[C]

And then wasn't he influenced by a video game of Thrones? Furries and I don't know what it was, but furries and gays. I guess it was the video game.

[D]

We're not supposed to talk about this, but it was like a Generation Z thing where he was obsessed with furry gay video games. And if you do, you score certain points, then you get to look at pornography. And he said he wanted gay hot sex or whatever. I don't know what his main deal was, but he was seriously unstable. Not that he didn't have pure knowledge of what he was doing. Cognizance he did. But there's a great article by my colleague Scott Atlas in this week's Real Clear Politics about Generation Z. And he goes through the whole thing about how they poll that they want to people to be killed. He points out that Mr. Crooks who tried to kill Trump was a Z er, so was Luigi Mangione, so was Tyler Robinson. And that this generation spends. He cites data, how many hours of the day they spend on video games or on their telephones. They're divorced from reality. They're angry because they can't buy a car or they can't buy a home. And he traces all of this dysfunctional generation and anger back to that disastrous 2020-22 lockdown. And that this generation was in primary school five years ago or high school, and they were completely shut in their homes. They didn't interact with people and they turned to electronic devices for a fantasy world. And then they had everything catered to them. Their food, everything was delivered. They had had. There was no effort to go out and get a job. You couldn't. It was locked down. And he was trying to remind people, Scott was how deleterious that was. Fauci, it's very, I mean, he got, he paid a high price for telling us that at the time. And what he's trying to say now is it wasn't just the damage that people may have gotten from the vaccination or Long Covid or anything. It was, a whole generation was warped by the lockdown and the shut in. So it's a great article.

[C]

And now they're being inundated with this left wing assassination. And you can see it all in the paper. I just saw this morning they had a protest, I think it was in New York and, and they were dragging Trump on the ground and, you know, had various signs of protests around.

[D]

Yeah, they're gonna go, it's violence. You know, the left is just openly, as I said, they went through all of these narratives. They went through, you know, there's no motive, he's crazy. The gun did it. It's a love story. It's just a love story. MAGA did it. And now they've agreed that all of that didn't work, those trial balloons. But they, they're the most comfortable with the last narrative. It is essentially, well, maybe, sort of, kind of, maybe he shouldn't have, maybe not. But he's an awful guy and we are happy he's gone and what are you going to do about it? And now you can see them coming out of the woodwork and doubling down on that. That was sort of what Jimmy Kimmel is doing when he just basically said he lied and he said MAGA did it and now they're blaming other people. And then when they said, don't do that, he said, I'm going to come back on and explain and double down. And they said, no, you're not.

[C]

So, well, since you brought that up, there was one other thing this morning, and we've talked about the FCC out there trying to make sure people who have licenses to operate on the public airways are doing it in the public interest. And they don't find celebrating an assassination in the public interest. But MSNBC had this to say about it. They tried to argue that the censorship of social media or that it was this FCC licensing public interest discussion was like the censorship of social media and that the right didn't like it. So why did they like it?

[D]

That was the gist of their what's happened? Maybe it's not fair, maybe it's ossified or antiquated, but the TV airways are regulated like radio and everybody knows that Howard Stern fought them for years because he was completely crude, foul mouth, pornographic, potty mouth. Announcer and they said to him, do not use these particular words on the airwaves. And the idea is that they're accessible to everybody, incidentally. So you're driving your child to work and you're listening to something and you don't know what's going to come out. Yes, you're listening to Howard Stern maybe, but you don't know what he's going to say. And they went after Rush Limbaugh for politics. And the argument behind it is you don't have to use the airwaves, but if you do and it's in the air of the public, the atmosphere in which it travels the signal, then people have a minimum decorum. And one of the things that the FCC is saying is you don't go on the air right after a major political personality has been horrifically and graphically killed and then sort of make fun of it and say Trump reaction was like a little four year old who lost his goldfish. Or you don't lie to the public, and I mean lie and say that the MAGA people did it. But that's not what got him fired. He wasn't kicked off by the FCC and he wasn't really kicked off by Disney. He was kicked off by the local affiliates that bought that show and said as soon as the guy gets on everybody goes to sleep or turns a channel, he has like a million out of a 340 million nation. He's lucky to get a million people. Gutfield tapes it and has four times the audience and you have to pay for them. So we don't want to buy him anymore. And then they looked at his salary and his compensation and they said he's just like Steve Colbert. And then the left got really angry and said that it was like Hitler. It's like Nazi. They're censoring. But of course they were the ones that said kick. Obama called up Bob Iger reportedly and said, get Roseanne Barr off the air. And they did. And they went after when Tucker was relieved because they said, great, Jimmy. He celebrated. So the long and the short of it is we're morally superior, we're intellectually superior. We can do this to all of you. We can say this, but you can't dare say this about us. They're like little adolescents. They are.

[C]

And the FCC is not like social media. Social medias are privately owned and they don't have that kind of law that.

[D]

Well, I go on a lot. I won't mention the podcaster's name, but I go on a lot of interviews with them and I hear the F word and the S all the time and that would not be allowed. They know that if they were on television, everybody knows that. Or they were on radio.

[C]

Victor, I'd like to take a moment for our sponsor Home Title Lock. When's the last time you checked your home title? If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now. That's why I've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out to today if you've already been a victim. Go to hometitlelock.com Victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million dollar triple lock protection. That's 247 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it. And we'd like to thank Home Title Lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson Show. All right, Victor, so let's turn to Trump. Trump's decided to make Antifa a terrorist organization. And we had some interesting things that came out on that and one of them that I thought was really interesting that people should go watch on the Free Beacon. I think I found this Andy Ngo, the young reporter who happens to be gay actually. But anyways, the young reporter that was beaten up by Antifa and so they said, wow, the left is saying that Antifa is an idea that the organization doesn't exist. And he said, well, all of those people that beat me up with, I think he said they had fiberglass in their gloves. They just about killed him. And anybody who watches the video can see that they just about silicon. He said, who? Those people don't exist.

[D]

They put silicone, fiberglass, I think fiberglass.

[C]

I know that's very hard.

[D]

Well, for the whole George Floyd period and the aftermath for five months, we saw every single night what I had called spaghetti arm. Not little but adults dressed from head to toe in black with a black mask, with little black backpacks with their little weaponry of stones or whatever. Some of them had masks, some of them were outfitted de rigueur with, you know, like special masks that somebody had given them. And then they would swarm on people, they would kick people. We had all of the Internet had a mini industry of scenes where a carload of Antifa would pull into a neighborhood but it was the wrong neighborhood and there were somebody there that didn't like them and then they chased them and they weren't Known to be very what heroic. They were always people who kick people on the ground or piled on with BLM what they're trying to. And then they said they were anti fascist, anti fa. But Trump is not saying that somewhere in a little hideout is a guy named grand wizard of Antifa with little a computer and he sends out talking points. It's not like the DNC who sends out talking points and then everybody in the media nods and repeats them. He's just saying that people have adopted a similar practice and there are local chapters that add they use social to show up and commit violence. And he's just saying that people who identify with that will be considered terrorists, which they are. The problem will be is I want to be very careful. But on my campus where I work, Stanford, there was a professor who organized co organized an anti fascist league. Right. And then people said you are the sponsor of Stanford and tifa. And he said no, he didn't use those terms. I'm anti fascist. And there were demonstrations and things like that. So it's very hard to say does anybody use. When he says he's going to declare it a terrorist organization. There will be. Antifa will just say, well, we're just anti fascist. We don't use that acronym antifa. So it's going to be kind of hard to know how you enforce it.

[C]

The other thing Andy Ngo said was that the symbols that were on the bullets were the symbols that this group that almost beat him to death used as well. So he does, you know there is.

[D]

Yeah, the arrows that point a certain way. Yeah, everybody knew that. I mean all of the messaging when Jimmy Kimmel lied about that and when the I think narrative number two or number three was either there was no motive or Trump did it or MAGA did it. There was the text messages between Robinson and his boy girlfriend and they were very explicit about politics. There was his mother who was worried. He went left. There was a dinner conversation where people in the family heard him. There were. There's a chap. And then he had, you know, not just take this on his, catch this on his. He had trans logos, he had antifa symbols, he had anti fascist. So it was a. So what I'm getting at, it was not even ambiguous. So when Jimmy Kimmel went on there, he knew exactly that he was lying and he was lying, lying, lying, lying to the American people. And he knew it. And he was going to go back on there again when they asked him to give an apology and he was going to lie, lie, lie because he knows he's down to 800,000 or 900,000. Die Hard hardcore leftists that are entertained. And Disney said, finally, I don't want to subsidize you anymore. There's not enough leftists that are going to buy our movies or go to Disney Park. You're just a loser. You're like Colbert, everybody loves you. But you get this huge salary and the thing to watch with all these people. It's something that I've always talked about in my business about speaking and writing. It's called market value. Capitalism does exist. So what was the market value of Colbert or Jimmy Fallon? That's adjudicated by how many major networks, podcasters are going to snap him up because he's now a free agent like Kohlberg and then pay him? And I don't think that his market value at Most is about $300,000 a year. And so when you take away the veneer of all these people, the legacy media, they're money losers. I had a person once say to me, how much do you get speaking? When I was speaking a lot and he was complaining that he doesn't get enough. And I said, you have to find your market value. If you ask X amount and it's too much, then you will get asked once every six months. If you ask this much, it's too little. You'll be asked every day. So you have to find out where your, where it's worth it to you in good compensation. And then the market has determined that you don't determine that. Same thing with our podcast. The degree to which ads you read, that's predicated on all of our people listening. And that can be calibrated. I can't make people buy ads that the people listening do. They're the ones that adjudicate everything the viewers do. And these people don't understand that market value. So they keep thinking, well, they hired me. It's just like authors and books. Some person will write a best seller book 30 years ago and then the next five books are bombs. And he keeps thinking he's going to get a million dollar advance. Or you'll have somebody call me up and he'll say, I want to help get published. I've got a great thesis and I am the Jim Smith professor of this and I do this and I'm a title and I teach here. But all that doesn't translate necessarily into a publisher taking a risk to publish a book. I've had people call me up and said, well, I took your advice and I called this thing. And I was really disappointed with the advance. Well, the advance is adjudicated on what your market value is at that moment. And you can, if you go down a little bit, maybe you'll surprise them. If you go up a little bit, you'll disappoint them. But that's something that all of these actors and writers and celebrities, they don't seem to understand that you have a market. Everybody in the world has a market value.

[C]

And at some point, supply and demand crossover. Well, Victor, we have a lot on KAMALA and on Governor Newsom's Proposition 50, but I'm going to hold that for the second segment. And I was just wondering very quickly before we go into the historical segment, any thoughts on Donald Trump's visit to the UK oh, and sorry for our listeners, I just want to note that the Netherlands also has designated Antifa as a terrorist group. Just to finish that up. But those two topics, what I like.

[D]

About Trump is he goes to these. It was a wonderful occasion. They pulled out all the stops. There were two subtexts of that. One is Trump likes the royal family in traditional England. He doesn't like Sturmer, who was kind of in Alaska on the table seating. And then two, when the reporters are there, they never really ask about the country that he's in, which is rude. They should say, well, what about England? Sometimes they do, but they ask about Antifa or something. And then he goes off on a rant in exactly the opposite political theme as his host, Stirmer. And then the guy just looks at him like, uh, huh, huh, huh. So it's pretty funny. But he really likes Britain. His mother was, I think, born in Scotland and we owe Britain a lot. Most of our languages and institutions come from Britain and we've been with them side by side in almost every war. So I think the only people who don't like Britain in the United States are mostly the left. And they're starting to like it more because they think it's getting more left and multiracial, multicultural. But they always talk about the British Empire and all the bad things it did. When you compare the British Empire to the Spanish Empire or the Ottoman Empire or the Caliphate or the Mongols or all these different peoples who enslaved or took over, it was about the most enlightened or killed. Yes, it was about the most enlightened entity there was.

[C]

Trump said that at his speech, I believe at the dinner. He said the good that the British and the Americans have done in this world.

[D]

He said the British Empire, too. I could not Believe that. I thought, wow, we have a president unlike Obama who was always trying to.

[C]

I don't know, both side sides things and trying to accuse America. Well, I mean what was his tour, his apology tour in the Middle East?

[D]

Yeah, his apology went over to Turkey and apologized about the Native Americans. His father was from Kenya. He wrote, you know, all this great things about being in Kenya. But where he wanted to be was here, his dad. And where Obama wanted to be was here. And where he made his money was here. And where he got famous was here. Because here were all of these free institutions and market capitalism and safety and prosperity which he made a career of deriding. And that was like a court jester for the left wing bicoastal elite. Well, Victor, very quickly he flew in, he flew in for narrative number five. He flew in, as I said, when Trump did it, narrative Pritzer started it. And I think Obama thought, oh he's, he can't upstage me that he's an Illinois governor, but I'm the guy from Illinois. So he flew in and we mentioned that in the other podcast and said that Trump did it and Trump did it and Trump did it and you know, we mentioned that take a gun for a knife fight and get in their face and typical white person. But the funny thing about it, he's kind of like the Wall Street Journal mansions, you know, they have this article about all these homes that nobody can ever buy and you, and you're supposed to read it, I read it. And then you can get ideas about your home, your little tiny old ancient home and maybe you can see it, a counter that you'd like to have. Well, he's kind of in that milieu. His Martha Vineyard 20 acre estate, his beach front Hawaii and acreage that somehow is exempt from global warming. Tidal waves that he warned us about would inundate everybody. And then the kalorama, the swamp. Remember Washington is a swine that he got right in the middle of Washington to monitor. Then he's got his I don't know, I don't want to be foul. So his sort of phallocentric like Monument Library in Chicago, that's really ugly. And then he's still got his Chicago mansion that remember Tony Rascal gave him the extra basically discounted yard for it. So he comes out, he emerges like Pastor Obama from one of these places. Sometimes it's to lecture black people, men during the campaign. You're a false consciousness. You don't know what's good for you. You got a vote for Harris don't get fooled. I have to enlighten you. That kind of stuff. And then he flies in and he gives a little sermon. And then Pastor Obama looks at his watch and he talks to his pilot and he says, is it Kalorama, is it Martha's Vineyard or is it back to Hawaii?

[C]

Did you see him get accosted or get shouted at by a detractor? I don't know exactly what the question he was asking, but Obama turned around and said, well, I'm not the president right now. And he had a long way of saying that, like, I can't.

[D]

He was the president about diplomacy. Yeah, he was the president for 12 years. He was a president officially twice for four. And then as he said, they asked him as his term ran out, would you like to have a third term? Well, only if I could stay in the basement and kind of not have to wear a tie and just kind of be lazy and call it in. And people would snapped to attention. And that's what his guys did. So he was approving every appointment. That was the presidency he always wanted. But he was too fearful that his legacy would be ruined, as Biden is now. His idea was, I'd like to cause a lot of harm to the United States and be a nihilist and be a left wing destructive force and get my agenda through, but my name would be on it. So I'm going to try to be a fake liberal. And then he went out and then Biden, who was more conservative than he was at least at one point, was, as I said, an effigy. So then Obama just snuck his guys in there and said, do your stuff. Ruin the border, ruin the inner city with crime. Get the Soros attorney, critical legal theory, critical race theory. Just get out of Afghanistan, distance from Israel, let Iran have the bomb, all this stuff, but his fingerprints aren't on it. But he was. That was what he wanted to do and he did it.

[C]

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back to talk a little bit about Winston Churchill. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back. This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor has social media outlets. His handle is Dhanson and his Facebook page is Hanson's Morning Cup. And so you can join him there if your social media is your place to go for news. So, Victor, you wanted to talk. There have been discussion and questions about Churchill and especially in 1940 when he was to become the prime minister and lead Britain.

[D]

Andrew Roberts this week was on a tikva radio show defending them. We mentioned that Daryl Cooper had been I think twice on Tucker's show, correct me if I'm wrong. And then I think his name was the chemistry professor David Cullum. And all of them had this idea that Hitler was a champion, basically kind of a brutal champion of Western civilization and his only aim in life was to destroy Marxist Bolshevism. But that got convoluted because he was isolated, alienated. Germany was persecuted by the Versailles Treaty and they manifested themselves in extremism. We should have contextualized. And then after the invasion of Poland and Norway, etc. Denmark we could have cut a deal and then we didn't do it. And then he was forced to redo World War I and he invaded the Low Countries, France, excuse me, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. On May 10th, 1940 there was a phony war. Before that he had invaded the prior 9-1-1939 successfully in Poland. And then in April there were the Norway and Denmark. But the anti Churchill people say the following. Well, when he invaded France, it didn't last long. By June 22 there was a general peace and Churchill Chamberlain was fatally ill. Liver cancer or colon or stomach cancer, I can't remember which type of cancer. So on May 10th when he invaded through the Ardennes, he resigned. And then it was should you give it to Halifax or Churchill? And people realized if you gave it to Halifax, he would cut a deal with Hitler or Mussolini. So they gave it to Churchill. My point is this. From May 10 to the next, July 22, 13 months, there was nobody else fighting Hitler until he invaded the Soviet Union. My point was that after and he had no ability or he had no responsibility or to do anything after May 10, they just stuck him in there or he would have had time to prepare. And then what followed was a complete collapse of the French and British armies and then Dunkirk. That was the first real thing that Churchill did. And even then he didn't take credit for it. He said, don't make any mistake about it, it was a wonderful evacuation. But it was a military defeat. It was not a victory. It saved the British army. But at the same time in this period people were pressuring. Mussolini was posing as if he might be an interlocutor. He wasn't. He declared, I think on June tent against Britain. So you had the British Empire all along. We weren't in it and we would not be in it until they declared war. They the act on us. Russia was a partner of Germany and feeding it a lot of supplies and so then Hitler said to Churchill, I'm going to take everything I got and I'll let you have the British Empire. But Churchill would have had to say then, all of Europe is now under Nazi control. And no one was going to do that. And you couldn't trust him anyway, because he had lied about the Anschluss, he had lied about the Sudetenland, he had lied about Poland, he lied about everything. And he would shortly lie about his partner, the Soviet Union. So Churchill then didn't know what to do. He had the Empire. But then, while everybody was in a panic, he started to talk and he started to think. And he said, whether we like it or not, we can defeat. At least they can't beat us because we have the world's largest navy, and they are. At that time, all of Europe was quiet. The war ended on June 22, 1940, when France surrendered. And then Yugoslavia had a coup and sort of rebelled. So Hitler went in there in this late summer and put it down. And then he went into Greece, because Mussolini invaded Greece, Albania, then Greece. Britain had one thing going on. There was only one, really land theater after the disaster. They weren't on the continent at all. They wanted to protect the Suez Canal because they were getting their oil from the Middle east through the Suez Canal. And that meant if they had the fleet, they could do two things. They could get oil and they could defend Malta, the island fortress, and that would adjudicate supplies into North Africa. So then they, in 1940, they routed the Italians and they took the only port in 400 miles, Chil, Tripoli, to Brook. And so Churchill said, we're not going to deal with Hitler and we're going to. He cannot get into Britain because he doesn't have the navy, and we'll blast him out of the water if he does. And he does not have. He might have air superiority, but he surely doesn't have air supremacy. So what happened in July, August, September, October was the Battle of Britain. And Hitler tried to bomb Britain into submission. It could not do that for two reasons. It never developed a heavy bomber like what would be the Lancaster, 15,000 pounds of load. Second, it had a wonderful fighter, the B.F. 109, but it was not. It was about the same as a Spitfire, Supermarine Spitfire. And when you put the bf 109 over British territory, meaning when you shot one down, the pilot survived. He was a captive. Spitfire pilots, we have stories of some of them fighting in two or three different planes a day after they were shot down. And he didn't destroy British air production. It was 450 planes a month. And then they had all of Canada, Australia, the lifelines of the. And so that went on and on and on. And he took Tobruk from the Italians in January 1941. Nobody else was in it, just Britain. How did he supply that when the Germans had no navy? And they, in a series of battles, they blasted the Italian navy, which was the fourth largest navy in the world, after the Americans and the Italian and the French 5th. And so at that point, they took Dubuque, they protected the Suez Canal. And then Hitler sent Rommel into an authentic military. And he would have taken. He did take the Brook, but not until 42. But he would have taken the Suez Canal immediately had Hitler supplied him. But Hitler was building up to go into Russia. That was his fatal mistake. So he squandered his resources trying to. Hitler did stabilize Yugoslavia, take over all of Greece, take Crete, which he did. But in that process, and in the Battle of Britain, he lost about 2,000 aircraft, logistics and warcraft. So when he went into the Soviet Union, had he had those resources, he would have been in much better shape. But at that point, everything changed. And so what I'm getting at is, until Russia decided, and Russia only joined because it was attacked. Remember one thing about our ally, the Soviet Union, it broke every single agreement with the people who saved it, the United States, Britain. It said that after the war it would allow free elections in occupied Eastern Europe. It did not. It said it would draw from areas in Asia, after, in the Pacific. It did not. But it kept its word with Hitler. It sure did. It did not break the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. Hitler did. It kept its word with the Japanese of April 1941 until the last two weeks of the war. So in other words, Soviet ships were coming into Seattle and Portland and Oakland and getting all sorts of munitions, Sherman tanks, Airacobra. P39 and then they were going out in the Pacific, and in 1941, they were waving 42, 43, waving at the Japanese that were killing us. And they did not touch them, and the Japanese did not touch the Russians. So they broke everyone with their friends and they kept their word with our enemies. And Churchill was the only person that kept the Allied. If he had folded, the war would have been over. So when Cooper or Column say that they have a point if they think that World War II was a mistake and a Hitler wasn't that bad, then they focus on Churchill because they said if he had just surrendered or if he hadn't fought or he was a terrorist, then their view of World War II is that all of Europe would have been under German control and the British Empire would have been a subsidiary kind of a lapdog to Hitler, but being responsible for navy and territories which would be gradually absorbed into Nazi ideology. And then they, those resources would destroy Soviet communism. And then they don't really tell us and then they have to downplay certain aspects of what Hitler did, of course. And it's really a lunatic view because it's morally bankrupt. And here's the one guy that said, I refute you. I refute everything you stand for. And if you really think you're going to go take Britain, you're not going to come by sea and you're not going to come by air. So maybe you're going to build a bridge to get to Britain, but you're not going to do it. And then he brought everybody in the cabinet and said, this man has no oil. We have access to oil. This man has no factories that we can't get to. We have factories in Canada that produce cars and vehicles. And this man has no other allies. The Japanese and the Italians are it. And we have a big ally called the United States and one called which will be this. So he was very far sighted and he basically kept Hitler at bay until greater forces with greater supplies could join him. And I don't know why they can't see that unless they think that was a big mistake, that if he had just collapsed and made a deal then the war would have been over and so everybody would have turned on the Soviet Union and we'd have kind of a Fourth Reich Germany today and it might have reformed it. There's no evidence that that was even possible. What he would have done had he won, he would have killed 12 million Jews. He would have killed every Jew in Europe and he would have wiped out everybody in the resistance. It would have been a nightmare. And I don't understand why.

[C]

And we have a lot of evidence for that.

[D]

We have evidence and everybody's, you know, everybody says, well, poor Hitler, he had a, when he went into the Soviet Union, he had a two front war. Well, he didn't really, that's why he went in. Because the battle of Britain was basically over and it was stabilized and Britain was all by itself and Rommel had kind of stabilized North Africa and he was all the way into Egypt and there was no real fighting. So their only front was the Soviet Union. And who would have the front, the two front, the United States Because Britain and the United States would have finished Hitler off a lot quicker if they were not fighting the Japanese. So we had a two front war from December 7th and 8th onward. And it just reminds me that people magnify the German military, but all of Germany was fighting all of the Soviet Union for all practical purposes. And we didn't even start bombing seriously or the British until April or May of 1942. The British had tried, but they weren't very successful. And we weren't successful really until late 43. And they had all of the NATO, EU countries to draw on and they siphoned and sucked out their economies, their trucks, their passengers playing everything, and they still couldn't win. But they had enormous advantages.

[C]

So from what you say, I was wondering if it's fair to come to the conclusion that it was Churchill's aggressiveness in the Mediterranean that caused the Nazis to direct resources in that direction which made it more difficult for them in their invasion of the Soviet Union. Is that correct?

[D]

They thought when the war broke out, the Italians outnumbered this little garrison in Egypt by about 40 to 1. And they had been very successful in Somalia, the Italians, and they had actually won one battle against the British. The British then defeated them. But the idea was they told Mussolini, don't go in no Greater Roman Empire, don't go into Albania, don't go into Greece, just go expand your colony in Libya and join the Vichy French. They own Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. And you have Libya. And with all of those resources we will supply you. And then the Italian fleet, all you have to do is keep to brook so we can supply you and then go into Egypt, take Cairo and shut down the Canal and the British Empire is done for. And he couldn't do that. He started to go into Greece and Albania and Hitler said, I'm going into Russia, what are you doing? And he said, you didn't tell me you're going to go into Russia. And he said, well, you, you didn't tell me you were going to get all these side trucks. North Africa is where we want to. So then he sent Rommel in February, but he only sent him with two divisions. He said, just keep a tab on it. Don't let the British take any of the Italian territory and don't let them get into the Vichy. And then once we knock off Russia, I will give you the resources to go to go to the Suez. And Rommel being Rommel, said, screw that, excuse my language, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go on the offensive. So he tried to take to Brook, he couldn't do it. So then he retreated. And then the war started coming on and he couldn't get any supplies for two reasons. They were bogged down in Russia, the Germans were, and they never destroyed the British fleet. And they thought when they got the Vichy French fleet and the Italian fleet they could. But the British had blown up the French, captured freight and they had sunk most of the Italian fleet. So they ran the entire Mediterranean and they starved Rommel out and he couldn't get any. And then he finally, in 42, he finally took Tobruk and he was on his way to the canal late. But by that time the Russian front was a mess for Hitler and he couldn't supply Rommel and it petered out.

[C]

So my question I guess is, was that the last straw to direct resources into North Africa, did that. Would they have been able to defeat Russia if they didn't have to direct resources?

[D]

No, it was very funny what they did at a very critical time right before they invaded Russia. And I'm talking about the period of January 1941, February to June of 40. Had they just kept a lid on Yugoslavia, not gone into Greece and all that, and just sent 10 divisions to Rommel, they would have taken, they could have wiped out the British and taken the Suez Canal. But in Hitler's way of thinking, I'm so powerful, I can do all these at once. So what he did was he siphoned up all the resources of occupied Europe and the German army, three and a half million people, he readied to attack along a thousand mile front that was March, April, May lead up. And then he went into Yugoslavia and then the Italians got him tied down in Greece. They couldn't win the war. So then he put two divisions, three divisions, and the British went into Greece too. And then after he took Greece and he stabilized Yugoslavia in May, he went in and took Crete. That was kind of really a tough campaign. The British could have won that had they had an inspired general. But my point is at that point, had all of those resources earlier gone to Rommel, he would have cut off the Suez. But again, the weird thing was, is after not giving anything, when he was really in trouble in 42 and early 43 in Russia and he had no supplies and the British fleet and the American fleet just ran the Mediterranean. The Americans in November of 42 invaded Morocco and Algeria and they were meeting Montgomery, who was coming westward from Egypt and Libya. At that point, Rommel had been sick and relieved. But then he started pouring resources into North Africa like tiger tanks and 10 divisions. And so when the Americans met the British, by early 43, the whole thing collapsed. And they, it was worse than Stalingrad. They lost about 250,000 people, just surrendered. And you think, wow, you have less resources now because you're bogged down even worse than you were in 41 in Russia. And now you've got the Americans and the British and now you're pouring people into this quagmire when you had a real chance and that was nobody could figure it out.

[C]

I agree with you that if the German army had kept it lean and directed to North Africa and the Suez, which was the prize of the Mediterranean for them, that would have been great. But they went into Russia. I think my question is, was there any chance at all ever that they could have defeated Russia if they had more focus?

[D]

Yes, they could have done one thing and Rommel said that and other generals said they had a 1100 man front. And they were. The point was army group north takes St. Petersburg Lenin Leningrad. Army Group center takes Moscow. Army Group south goes to Sebastopol and takes the oil field. And each of them had roughly a million people. But if you look at their forces arrays, the distance, there was no way they could done all three at once. Had they just taken Army Group north and made sort of a defensive line and take an army group center and south and had 2 million people and gone straight toward the Caspian Sea and Iran. And had they at the same time given Rommel in February of 41, 42, 10 or 20 divisions and supplies, then they could have met in the Middle east and they would have cut off the Suez Canal and they would have been in control of 50% of the world's oil and they could have cut off Britain from its oil. And the submarines were making a very U boat campaign very hard to get oil from Canada. So yeah, they had a strategy and people had talked about it, but luckily they didn't do that.

[C]

Okay, Victor, let me go ahead. And welcome back a sponsor, Quince. Quince is where I'm turning for fall staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots. The quality holds up and the price still blows me away. Quince has the kind of fall staples you'll wear non stop, like super soft 100 Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just $60. Their denim is durable and fits right. And their real leather jackets bring that clean, classic edge without the elevated price tag that makes Contact Quince different. They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen so that you get top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince. Go to quince.com Victor for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com Victor free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com Victor and we'd like to thank Quince for their continued sponsorship of the Victor Davis Hansen show. And I do love their clothes, which I do go for my fall, I will go for my fall dressing wardrobe. So Victor, let's turn then to Kamala Harris. And she has, of course there's been a lot out on her new book 107 Days. And neither of us have nor will read it but we see lots of information on it. And the recent thing is they've been talking about how she said that Pete Buttigieg, she would have rather have him as a vp, but it would have just been too much for the US population given that he was gay and she was a black woman. I was wondering your thoughts on that.

[D]

Well, the background was that she had a choice of all sorts of vice presidential candidates. He was one that was mentioned, but in the sense that he had never won anything. Maybe I think he won one primary. But he was the mayor of what, South Bend, Indiana. He was self referential, he was smug, he was sanctimonious. Every time he talked he came off like a phony and he was a disaster as the secretary of transportation. He was always talking about racist cloverleafs and racist. A lot of the damage of DEI we have in the air traffic came from. So he had no record. But the narrative was that he was very bright and articulate. And then there was Josh Shapiro who had actually run this major key swing state. And he was not, I think it was a lie that he was a Joe Manchin. He wasn't. He was a hardcore liberal but he was an executive and he was well liked and he pulled and he could win Pennsylvania. So she met these people and she picked a buffoon, a guy who can't tell the truth. He lied about his military record. He lied about his stay in China. He was frenetic and uncontrolled in public. He would go like this and remember that and he wore, he was a little bit pudgy and he wore this kind of weird costume of like a young Gen Xer with high water sleeves and high water legs. And then he would go out on the Stage and point to people. Hey. And just he couldn't calm down. And then when he started spouting things and then JD Vance, people forget that vice presidential debate, what it was really like. In the first 10 minutes he destroyed him. And then it was a question, are you going to mop him up on the floor? And he didn't. He said, and as you said, Tim, you yourself have done things. He was very magnanimous. But the result was after that he was a drag on the ticket. And she was getting a lot of flack that she was insecure and deliberately picked a mediocrity because she was afraid had she picked Josh Shapiro or someone like him, she would be shown up. That's true. And she might have. I don't. She lost by 1.5 points. And the argument is it was close enough that she could have won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania had she had Josh Shapiro. But she didn't pick Josh Shapiro because her base is anti Semitic, anti Jewish, anti Israel, and they wouldn't have come out in droves. That's the idea. So then she has to explain all of this. So she didn't explain why she didn't pick Josh Shapiro. So the only other person who was in the primaries that was somewhat viable, there were just three people, Spartacus, the Castro. Julian Castro imploded. Spartacus was a joke. There was Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and Josh, excuse me, and Pete Buttigieg. And so she was in that primary and she was the weakest of all. You can't do Bernie because they had a revolution. That's how Joe Biden got nominated. He got nominated because people were terrified of Bernie and they kind of eased him out, bought him off or whatever. So then you were Elizabeth Warren Buttigieg in that group or Joshua. Well, you can't have two women on the ticket. And Pocahontas was really off putting, as bad as Spartacus. Something about both of them just makes people feel nauseated, like they don't want to be lectured to and they're unstable and they scream and yell. So. So it was Mr. Sanctimonious or Mr. Buffoon. And she picked Mr. Buffoon because Mr. Sanctimonious was smarter than she was and probably would have shown her up, but he would have brought nothing to the ticket. Unless you think he was going to bring what state? Indiana or something. He was never going to win Indiana and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. But Josh Shapiro could have helped her. She's aging badly. I don't mean physically, but in the post election period, she's the butt of jokes about her drinking. She doesn't really want to leave her compound in Brentwood when she does. She's silly. Just sort of confirmation. If she had been president, I think this country would have never recovered the border. We would have had 20 million illegal aliens now. And I don't. Iran would have a bomb by now. There's no doubt in my mind that they would. And we'd have an even huge more. A bigger deficit and trade deficit and our cities would be just. We would have pro Palestinian crazy marches everywhere. They would take over every campus and they would be supported by her.

[C]

Yeah, I have a theory on the title of her book because she could have added a few hours and it would have been 108 days or taken off a few and it would have been 106. But she has 107, which is October 7th.

[D]

Oh, you're going to get in conspiracy territory.

[C]

Yes, I'm in conspiracy territory. But it seems to me this was her shot fired across the bow at the Biden administration.

[D]

As a general rule, you never want to make a conspiracy theory based on numbers numerology. You're saying that because 10, 7 would.

[C]

Have what she wanted to mimic what the Palestinians did to Israel by she herself doing it to the Biden administration because she was so angry.

[D]

I doubt that very seriously. Okay, I know your listeners right now. Go. So Sammy, please don't do that. Oh my God, we lost Sammy to the conspiracy.

[C]

An interesting conspiracy. I probably don't believe it myself, but let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about California Gavin Newsome and the Democratic National Convention. Stay with us and we'll be right back. Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show and these podcasts which you can find on YouTube, Rumble and on Spotify and if any of those are your outlets and you like video version instead, please come join us there. So, Victor, the DNC is pouring money into the Proposition 50 initiative of Gavin Newsom and they hope which will allow him to redistrict and redistrict so that he can bring in five more districts for the Democratic vote. And so they're really interested in this and I was wondering what you.

[D]

I think they're interested, yeah. In winning the midterms and they'll get, if they win the midterms, if it's redistrict, depending on the time and everything. They think it's in their long term earnings, but basically it's trying to save Gavin Newsom. He put his Head in a noose. Because when he gets to that podium and he starts wiggling his shoulders and all that stuff and he starts, he's just inane. So he thought that Texas was doing this and he was going to do this the two big states and then he was going to set off. But what he didn't realize when he did this was that of all the red states and all the blue states, the red states are about 20. If you adopt that logic that congressional districts which represent about 750,000 people per district, that if you look at the national vote and you can calibrate that either by the presidential vote or all of the representative votes and all the Senate votes put together, the Republicans are about 20 seats down all over the nation. In other words, the Democrats have redistrict these districts that don't reflect the percentage of Republican votes. So Massachusetts I think has none And Illinois has three. So generally the Republicans have, should have had 48 to 49% of all the congressional districts. They don't, they're way down 20. So Trump said we've got to fix this. Well, to fix it you need a red state that has a majority legislature and Texas did. So Texas was already overrepresented with Republicans so it went even higher, I don't know, 57%. But it still didn't get up to California. California right now only it varies each election between 12 and 7 or it's 12 and 9 out of 52 seats. So it only had about 40. It had about 40% of the vote of the Republicans are about 40% but it only had about half that, you know what I mean? So they were way down. So what he wants to do is take a very beneficial system for Democrats and get it really out of whack. So it's basically going to be 90% Democratic representation, even 10% Republican, even though they get 40% of the vote. So it's going to be egregious. Number two, every little Democrat politician for the last 10 years has bragged about the non partisan redistricting committee. Every follows carefully the census. And it was Schwarzenegger's little idea. He was very naive, should have stayed with bodybuilding. But you were gonna get intellectuals and professors and activists and they were gonna form a committee and they weren't gonna be partisan and they were going to create districts based on geography and proximity and natural, you know, there's our mountain here, there's a river there and we won't really know who's gonn. Well the fact of it was they were all left wing and they picked a bunch of rhinos and they warped the system. But Democrats liked the idea that it was clever that they had this veneer, that they were nonpartisan. So are they going to be happy when Newsom comes along and says get rid of the veneer? We're just hacks. And I don't think they are because now just to get the extra five seats and what we're talking about is you go into a Republican area and you a district, two districts and you just carve it to death and you take out all of the left wing people and make new districts and then you leave, you put all the red into one district and then you have two representatives fight each other to the death. Republicans to kill each other off. So that's what they're. The plan is. And I don't think, I mean Schwarzenegger is popular with some people, but there's a lot of money among Charlie Munger Jr. And some others that are going to oppose it. And it's running neck and neck. So the DNC wants to come in and pour a lot of money, not just for the seeds, but they're basically saying to Gavin, you really put your head on the guillotine because you're our main guy to be president of the nominee. And if this and you put your personal credibility on this and if you lose this in your own blue state where you've got a 20% plurality majority, you're going to be inert. So now it's a fireman last ditch effort to save Gavin before November.

[C]

And just to remind our listeners who are Californians, yes on the proposition will allow them to redistrict. And no on Proposition 50, everybody should vote no. And.

[D]

I don't know why Gavin is doing this because every red legislator, every red legislature that has both houses in a majority and can override a governor's veto or has a Republican vote, they will redistrict to try to get back some of the seats for equity. And the final thing is that the death of Charlie Kirk, it's hard to predict what will happen in 14 months, but I think it's changed a lot of things. I think a lot of people turned over the Democratic rock and what they saw was pretty bad on the bottom they came out and I don't think they're very popular. And I think people think these people cannot be entrusted with power. They're very dangerous people. You really don't want an open border again and you don't want defund the police and you don't want Soros, prosecutors and you don't want anything more like Afghanistan and you don't want free Palestine or you want. You don't want the mayor of Dearborn telling an American citizen who happens to be Christian that you don't belong here and get out. So identity politics, you really don't want to go down that pathway with the Democrats?

[C]

No, not at all. Well, last thing I know, you have some letters from your listeners that you wanted to read, but Robert Redford died on Tuesday. I was wondering if you had any words on him.

[D]

Yeah, he wasn't a great actor, but he had film presence. So it was an understated film presence. People who were classically not great actors like John Wayne and Gary Cooper knew how to use their terseness and dominate the screen by their size and their presence, their facial expressions. And that's. He didn't quite have that ability, but he had an ability to go onto a screen and get the attention of everybody, to watch him and see what he did and his gestures and that was innate. He wasn't a bad actor. I mean, he made some. He was. If you look at him in the Sting with Paul Newman, Paul Newman's a lot better actor. But he had a way of knowing what his role was and how to accentuate as a good looking, young, naive guy. And he did a good job on that. And then he got better. He was good in Butch Cassidy. The two movies they made together, I think were the best that he did.

[C]

The Sting was the other thing.

[D]

The Sting? Yeah, the Sting in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He was good in that. At the end he kind of made political movies and they weren't as successful as before. I wasn't a big fan of all the President's Men. It's just kind of, I guess, Robert. I mean, Dustin Hoffman was in that. I didn't think that was so good. Electric Horseman, Jane Fonda wasn't that. But he did make a couple really good movies. And I kind of admired him, even though I didn't agree with him politically because he stayed along. He didn't do a lot of facial work. He let himself age naturally, at least more than other people did. And until, I mean, he would voice some crazy political leftist positions. But he didn't do it in a mean way or anything. And he was, he reminds me a lot of Brad Pitt because they're both really good looking guys and they're not great actors, but they have a way, they have a one dimensional role. And when they find that one dimensional role, like Brad Pitt did in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He was really good. He knew exactly what he was supposed to do. And I thought that was his best role. And he was kind of good in Glorious Basterds too. Same thing. He kept that. And he was kind of good in Fury and he's getting better. And Robert Redford, I think one of the best. Was it Three Days of the Condor. He was really good in that. And so he knew he was not a Gary Oldman or, you know, or Denzel Washington, an actor of just enormous range and brilliance or Anthony Hopkins or something. Those people are rare. But he used his natural innate handsomeness, I guess, and gestures and presence on the screen. And when he had an understated role that was kind of ironic or something calm. He did a great job, though. He had a good life. I'm sorry to see him die.

[C]

Well, Victor, I know that you have some. You're the one that's going to take over with viewers.

[D]

I have letters. A lot of them are local and I have a whole pile. I confess I must have a hundred of them, but I just wanted to select some from many from this area. I just want to say very Today, Friday the 19th, it's very sad because we are here in the San Joaquin Valley. And although I'm not a raisin grower anymore, I have almonds which have been already harvested and safely carted out. There's a lot of my neighbors who have raisins on the ground. And I did that for most of my life growing up. And it was always the period from August 25th to October 1st. You had your fingers crossed because every once in a while a rare tropical storm would come in and destroy things. And we lost everything in the 76 rain, the 78 rain. And then my brothers and I, we saved a lot in the 1982 rain. But it's so sad to see all of these wonderful people work all year. And they cut their grapes, they put them on paper trays, they terrace the space between the vines and the rows, and they put them out there in late August or early September. And it usually takes about 20 days, depending on the humidity and the temperature. Temperature you can accelerate a little bit, but it's expensive to flip them over. They call turning trays. But you put them out there and they bake in the sun of 100 and 105. And the almanacs say that you're pretty much assured. 95 plus dry, no humidity weather from about August 23rd or 4th, all the way to September 20th or 25th, and then maybe 80% chance into October. But about every 10 years, something like is happening today happens when you get a collapse of high pressure. Low pressure comes in, kind of comes in from the south, meets sometimes storms from the north off the coast of Santa Barbara. And it swirls around. Then it comes up here. And we've had this yesterday. And trays that have grapes, depends on the level. We call frog bellies. When they turn purple, but they're not raisins, they're gone. And then raisins that are puffy, but they're more raisin than grape, they can take a quarter inch and they get something called embedded sand, where the sand on the tray gets in there. And then they have to be what we call reconditioned. They have to be taken to the processor and put in a bath of warm water to get the sand out. And then re dry it in a dehydrator. At a half inch, they get mold, and that's bad. So then you have to go in there and then the mold will show up in a warm bath. And you have to have them taken out. You can lose 50% of your. Over a half inch. I think we got over a half inch. They're gone. And we're going to have rain all day today as we did yesterday. So I feel. A lot of people feel really bad. They've lost their whole crop. And there's not very many of them anymore. There was at one point, 5,000 raisin growers. I think we're down to a thousand. Some of them are okay because they have the capital and they invested on dry on the vine where they have high terraces and the grapes hang there. You cut the canes and then they desiccate on the vine. So when it rains, the water just, you know, it's like spraying with a water bottle. They just. It falls off. So they're going to get air and the warm weather, they'll be fine. But when they're on the ground, it collects and pools on their paper tray. So anyway, I was thinking of that. There's some people. We had a letter from John and Carol Wilson. They're from Fresno. She was in Selma, actually. And they sent a Napoleon Dynamite video for me because Jack mentioned that I'd never seen that. And they wanted to instruct me. It was very nice gesture. I had another person. These are local people. He's a Navy veteran, Fresno State grad, Christian White. He wanted me to talk for 30 minutes. I wish I could right now, but I Have a bunch of, you know, I'm going into these schools, scans and meetings about what?

[C]

Talk about what?

[D]

Just about national and global affairs. I get about, oh, 10amonth or 12 where people say I have to have it, but I can't do them all. That's why I feel bad because I've got. When you're writing two columns a week and you're doing 11 podcasts, five for the Daily Signal and then R4 and then our Ultra and then I'm writing two Ultras a week and I'm working on the book and the edits are coming tomorrow. And then you've got a full time job 200 miles away. You have to drive. I just can't do it. But I found out with this sinus lung problem, 72 years old. Then we have somebody, John Harris. Not the John Harris and Carol that were close friends of Harris, but another John Harris and he wanted to. He's from Tehachapi and he. And we did answer that in a sense when you mentioned Prop 50 and he was trying to. He's very worried about it. He should be. And I mentioned that we had another local person and it was Woodward Peer P E O And he says that if there's anything that he could do to help the future of California, he's ready to help. I think he's retired and he's talking as if he knows a lot about agriculture. I had a. I should say one of these groups I don't want to embarrass gave me a very generous little card. Not little. And I appreciate that. I don't need any gifts. But when somebody. That I will help somebody with that. We have Pamela Hartman from. I guess she's from Fresno, I think she says she's 93 and her. This is very interesting. My dad flew Spitfires in World War II and then she was married. And then he's in the design section of a Spitfire. Her mother worked in the Spitfire factory and she was the only woman specializing in designing parts of the Spitfire. That's really amazing. They lived during the blitz. And she said. She talks about. Her husband was a Navy pilot during Vietnam and she. She flew as well. They had a private plane. She goes on and on. It's really interesting. 93 years old. I read it very carefully. Thank you. I don't think our generation has much contact, unfortunately with people who were so instrumental in winning World War II. I wish people knew more about that. That's one of the things we try to do here, is bring attention to all the People in Britain and the United States that won World War II.

[C]

And her family went on to be in the military. And so she had a son in.

[D]

Vietnam, a son that was in the military or three generations. So it's pretty amazing. There's a new fighter coming out to update the F22 called the F. I think it's 47 and I think that's deliberately picked. I have to check on that because In World War II they use the word P, you know, P51 for pursuit plane. I think that's where the picture came from, rather than the F. That was the old word. The pursuit plane was the old idea of a fighter. But There was the P47 Thunderbolt we talked about that was they called the Jug. It was huge fighter. It had enormous Pratt Whitney, somebody corrected. And it got up to, I think, 2,200 horsepower. It had a supercharger and it defied all of the Traditional World War II ideas of turning radius and sleekness and liquid cooled engines like the spitfire or the bf109. It was just like, we're going to make this big fighter and it's going to be heavier and bigger than anything and we're going to make a huge engine, but we're also going to protect the pilot with armor and plexiglass. It's bulletproof and we're going to put eight machine guns on it and it's going to be able to to outfly any German plane as far as diving or straight in power. And it can take more. Just don't get in a turning radius fight. And it was a wonderful plane. It was always underestimated because it was kind of ugly. But like the Hellcat or the Corsair or the P51, those four planes were that allowed America to have air supremacy over the Japanese and the Germans very quickly.

[C]

Well, that brought us to the end of our podcast today, Victor. This is the Victor Davis Hansen show you've been watching. Thank you for joining us and thank you, Victor, for all the wisdom and reflections on history.

[D]

Well, thank you everybody for listening and watching.

[C]

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