The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 72 - CNN is Literally Hitler (ft. Victor Davis Hanson)

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

Facts are under attack, and the barbarous tyranny of feelings is ascendant. We will analyze a wonderful weekend of some of the fakest news yet, total self-humiliation by the mainstream media. Then, Victor Davis Hanson kicks off our new segment, “This Day In History” on the anniversary of Hitler’s dumb decision to challenge the Red, White, and Blue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Facts are under attack, and the barbarous tyranny of feelings is ascendant. We will analyze a wonderful Cofi Fefe weekend of some of the fakesst news yet. Total self-humiliation by the mainstream media. CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, oh my. Then the great Victor Davis Hansen, VDH, helps us kick off our new segment this day in history on the anniversary of Hitler's dumb decision to challenge the red, white, and blue. Don't be like Hitler. Stick around. These colors don't run. I'm Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles show. You know, there's a meme going around. It's been going around for a while, which is literally Hitler. So you'd say, you know, Donald Trump cut taxes. He is literally Hitler. Donald Trump thinks that Supreme Court justices should respect the text of the Constitution. He's literally Hitler. You know, any trivial thing that you don't like becomes literally Hitler. Well, today is different. We are going to talk literally about Hitler. Today is the anniversary of Germany declaring war on the United States.

one of the worst decisions of the war. Victor Davis Hansen, the Martin Ely Anderson fellow at the Hoover Institution, has a great new book that just came out about this, The Second World Wars. So we will talk to him. But before we get to Hitler, literally Hitler, we have got to talk about something slightly less awful,

just slightly, which is the Democrat operatives who pretend to be journalists on television. Let's begin with CNN. The CNN exclusive in the Russia investigation, an electronic trail has emerged showing a possible attempt to share hacked WikiLeaks documents with the Trump campaign. Let's get right to see it as Manu Raju with these breaking details. Mano, what have you learned?

Well, John, Donald Trump, his son, Donald Trump Jr., and others in the Trump Organization, they received an email in September 2016, offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents. Now, this is according to September 4th's 2016 email provided to congressional investigators by the Trump organization. Now, to put the time frame in context here, this email came months after the hacked emails of the DNC were made public, and one month before WikiLeaks began leaking the contents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked emails. And shortly before Trump Jr. began an exchange of direct messages on Twitter with WikiLeaks.

Now, congressional investigators are trying to determine whether the individual who sent the September email is legitimate and whether it shows additional efforts by WikiLeaks to connect with Trump's son and others on the Trump's. campaign. You saw that. That looked like a news report. That sounded like a news report, right? It's got the guy in the suit. It's got the kairons and the backdrop and everything. It looked like a news report. It reminds me of that stupid ad that CNN put out. It said, this is an apple. It looks like an apple. It is an apple. That's like CNN. But it is, that wasn't a news report. Do you know how much of that was true? How much of what they were saying it so soberly, straight-faced, very serious, breaking news, exclusive? Do you know how much of that was true? None of it. That wasn't.

That wasn't true. That's fake news. CNN reported that Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were emailed a link from WikiLeaks or from someone connected to WikiLeaks days before WikiLeaks were leached the batch of emails to the public. So there it is. That's the collusion. We've been waiting for all.

Here we finally got the smoking gun. Forget Van Jones said Russia is a nothing burger. Forget James Comey Under oath said that most of these stories are nonsense. We've got the smoking gun. So CNN's Manu Raju, Jeremy Herb, they report, we now have the first evidence that Trump's campaign was given advanced info on WikiLeaks stolen documents from Democrats. And there's just one problem with that report, which is that there is no evidence that Trump received advanced information on stolen documents from Democrats. Other than that, other than the content of the report, that was totally right, but except for the reporting. That was wrong.

But it looked right. It looked like the news. And even it was on television like the news is. the guys wore suits like the news do. Even the Washington Post, left-wing as can be, democracy dies in darkness or whatever. Even they pointed this out. They were the first to call out CNN for this fake report. So CNN reported that the email, the awful email saying that WikiLeaks did all this,

was sent on September 4th. That was nine days before WikiLeaks released it. Turns out, though, the email was really sent on September 14th. That one digit makes a big difference. 10 days later, that was actually. after WikiLeaks had tweeted out the info. This was completely publicly available information. WikiLeaks, the tweet said,

678 megabytes of DNC documents from Goosephir, and here's the password, and here's how you unlock it. They gave everything that's in his email that WikiLeaks had tweeted out already. So the email came from this guy, Mike Erickson. I've never heard of Mike Erickson before. So CNN's report insinuated that Mike Erison Erickson might be a Russian agent.

Now, I don't know. I didn't look into the guy, so let's do five seconds of research. Turns out he's not. Turns out after, I'm just getting it in my ear. They're doing five seconds of research. And yeah, turns out that guy is the president of an aviation management company. But I guess CNN doesn't have access to Google, you know, or doesn't, they don't have telephones where they can call people and check any of their facts.

So instead, they have to suggest that Mike Erickson is a Russian agent. and completely screw up the dates. So it goes from being, I guess, sort of a story, to being nothing, to being WikiLeaks sent out a tweet and a Trump supporter forwarded that tweet to them and said, hey, look at this. You know, like just friends do. It's like a chain email or something. But do not worry, it gets better. Not only were the email dates completely off, undermining the entire story, but as Trump Jr.'s

Lawyer explains, quote, the email was never read or responded to, which the House intelligence Committee knows. So Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer had a masterful response here, and this brings up some questions. He said, quote, the email was never read or responded to. The House Intel Committee knows this. It is profoundly, I've lost his line here. It is profoundly disappointing that members of the House Intelligence Committee would deliberately leak a document with the misleading suggestion that the information was not public when they know there was not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Trump Jr. read or responded to the email. So not only did they get it completely wrong, there isn't any evidence that they even saw this thing. Now, this raises a question, especially

for the political operative types who don't think that there are really any such thing as coincidences in politics. Who leaked it? Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer says it was a Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee who would have access to this testimony and this information. I suppose it could be that. But as the Daily Caller reported, how CNN got its report so wrong is unclear. So one has to wonder, was it a Democrat on the committee who saw the emails, who heard the testimony, and then that Democrat just got it completely wrong? Or was it a Republican? Was it someone around the Trump administration, the Trump apparatus who leaked it, knowing that CNN would never do its due diligence, would never check any of its facts, would breathlessly report this thing, and then look up

look, humiliated when it came out that this wasn't true. Hard to tell. We're posing two difficult interests against one another. Democrat incompetence and Republican strategy. I don't know. I don't know which one I believe. I guess they're not mutually exclusive. But if I had to gamble here, I would suggest this might have come from the Republicans because every effect of it was so beneficial. It totally knocked CNN for a loop. Donald Trump was ready to go to slam these people. The Trump lawyer was ready to go to slam them. So I don't know. It looks like they may have gotten taken advantage of.

The tactic has been used before. You'll remember on my doppelganger Rachel Maddaz show, she was boasting, we have the Trump tax returns. We have them. Someone gave us the envelope. And then when she read it on air, it proved that Trump had paid taxes. It completely destroyed their narrative. And they got got. They got had because they didn't do their due diligence and Republicans planted information there.

That might be the case here. I'm not certain of that, 55, 45, 65, 60, 40, but I wouldn't be surprised. Now, the fake news does not end there over the weekend. I don't know how we didn't work. We should have come in and done a show. Washington Post does not get off the hook. It's true. They called out CNN for pushing fake news, but they don't get off the hook.

The Washington Post's Dave Weigel posted a screenshot of an auditorium before a Trump speech. This was a tweet, and he wrote on it sarcastically, packed to the raft. Do you get it because it was empty? That was the picture showed that it was completely empty. So do you get it? It's really funny, isn't it? Except it turns out it wasn't so. Now, as Donald Trump responded, he said, Dave Weigel, Washington Post,

put out a phony photo of an empty arena hours before I arrived at the venue with thousands of people outside on their way in. Real photos now shown as I spoke. Pact House, many people unable to get in, demand apology and retraction from fake news, WAPO. So in his defense, Weigel did apologize. Weigel did apologize.

He responded and said, sure thing, I apologize. I deleted the photo after David Martasco, who's a conservative journalist, told me I'd gotten it wrong, was confused by the image of you walking in the bottom right corner. Now, what that really should read is, somebody called out my fake news, and now I've got to move on to the next dirty trick, so I'll admit that you got me on this one. But, you know, he did apologize for posting it. But his apology missed the whole point. So how did the Washington Post, which reported all of this, how did they respond? How did they cover this little dust up?

Here's the headline. Quote, President Trump calls for Washington Post reporter who apologized for inaccurate tweet to be fired. Completely misses the point. It is not just that it's an inaccurate tweet. Sure, it is inaccurate. He posted fake news. But it's the arrogance. It's how smug. It's how condescending. And it's inaccurate. That's on top of it. It's the pact to the rafters. Teahee-he-he isn't that guy. What an idiot Donald Trump is. T-he-he-he. But behind my, I'm a journalist. I'm from the coasts. I'm really cool. I'm on my computer. I'm so much smarter. That's the fake news. The fake news isn't that the tweet is inaccurate. The fake news is that Dave Weigel is a journalist rather than an activist. The fake news is that the Washington Post is an objective news organization rather than an activist group for the left. Now, by the way, this is a pattern with Weigel. In recent years, he's tweeted out that any who oppose redefining marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions or bigots. He's regularly disparaged members of the conservative movement on Twitter like Matt Drudge. He violated Washington Post's guidelines asking journalists to refrain from posting anything that could show bias or favoritism. That hasn't stopped any of the rest of them, so I don't know why we should hold him to particular account.

And in Wiggles' defense, his job is to mix opinion and journalism. That's in his contract. He has to provide analysis and some opinion. But the reason that the Washington Post has moved in that direction is the reason all news outlets have moved in that direction. It gets views. It's very popular. We like to see some opinion with our reporting.

Plain reporting is boring. But that means it's no longer news. It's fake news. Some outlets, like The Daily Wire, not to Naval Gaze, but we're very straightforward with our point of view. We have a point of view. We have certain political goals. Some are shared.

Some are different. And we just tell you, this is the lens through which we're looking at the world and we're looking at the news. Washington Post doesn't do that. They have pompous preening, moralizing slogans like democracy dies in darkness. Dave Weigel doesn't even tell you that. CNN doesn't tell you that. CNN employs, Andrew Claven calls him Fredo Cuomo, you know, like Chris Cuomo, these Democrat operative hacks, George Stephanopoulos, and they pretend to be news. That is it.

If any Democrat tells you that fake news, you know, you know, News is just an empty slogan or it's just an attack by Donald Trump. That isn't the case. We're not talking even about the stories. We're talking about the attitude of the outlets. Now, for straight up false reporting, we would have to turn to Brian Ross at ABC News. Ross incorrectly reported on Friday, December 1st that President Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election. Now, in reality, not in the ABC reporting, but in reality, Trump had actually asked Flynn to make contact with Russia after the election when he was president-elect. This is a slight difference before the election or once the country has voted him in as president.

And it's not just Ross. It isn't just that he misspoke or something, which I think some people tried to say. ABC also tweeted the nonsense. Just in, they tweet. Brian Ross on ABC News Special Report, Michael Flynn promised, quote, full cooperation to the Mueller team is prepared to testify that as a candidate, Donald Trump directed him to make contact with the Russians. This was liked and shared tens of thousands of times before they had to delete it because it's utterly false. And ABC, for their part, refused to cop to the error.

Initially, they said, we're going to offer a clarification. The thing we said isn't true. I just want to clarify. I reported that Donald Trump as a candidate told Michael Flynn to talk to the Ruskies. The one addition I'll make to that is that he didn't do that. That's the one clarification I'll make. But other than that, the story stands. Now, they were widely panned for offering this clarification.

So the next day, they had to give out a full correction. They admitted error. But only because we've been hammering the drums, only because Donald Trump himself has been going after these Democrat communications operatives who pretend to be journalists for so long. There's another story in the New York Times just came out. From Donald Trump, he responds, quote, another false story, this time in the failing New York Times, that I watch four to eight hours

of television a day. Wrong. Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider fake news. I never watched Don Lemon, who I once called the dumbest man on television, bad reporting. As a side note, thank you to Twitter for the extra 140 characters. They're making these so much, they're doubling the cofefe of them. So thank you for that. The New York Times ran a report today, saying that Trump watches a lot of television and he watches CNN and they're allegedly talking to all these people, yeah. The New York Times headline is this, quote, inside Trump's hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation. That's the hour by, now I'm trying to think back on the last 11 months, but 11 months he's been in office since he was inaugurated. He destroyed ISIS

within 11 months. He just militarily destroyed them. He got a major tax overhaul passed, repealed the Obamacare mandate, got an originalist on the court, packed the rest of the courts, the lower courts, with originalist judges, has the biggest deregulation program in modern history, a net zero new regulations passed per year, despite an average 13,000 or so in previous administrations. It looks pretty good to me. He's handled Syria well, dropped the Moab. He is handling North Korea pretty well, and it seems okay, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. What else do you want, people? if that's self-preservation, keep doing it, man. Now, the New York Times reporting is not credible because the premise is not credible. You know, by the way, the New York Times last February ran a piece

titled, quote, Trump campaign aides had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence, which even James Comey, James Comey, no fan of Donald Trump, you know, Democrat hack through and through. Under oath, James Comey admitted in the Maine that report was not true. So, I don't know. The report today is, that Donald Trump watches four to eight hours of television. I suppose there's no way to know this. There is a little coincidence here because one time President Trump saw me on television. When we were doing the blank book thing, I complimented him on Fox and Friends, and he tweeted a quote that I had said, and then he next endorsed the book.

So I do know he watches these shows sometimes, and I'm very grateful that he does, and thank you again. That was a nice early Christmas present. But I don't care how much TV he watches. I don't care. I'm not convinced it's eight hours a day. But I certainly don't care. If we get all of these good things, if we get the best conservative legislation in our lifetimes while he's watching a lot of TV, keep it up.

Tune in, man, sounds good. I'll make you the popcorn. Here is former Republican, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, explaining what we should take away from all of this fake news. You asked the question, Brian, why should given these mistakes? Why should people trust the media? And I would say the mistakes are precisely the reason that people should trust the media. The press, the worst mistakes that, again, when we talk about the press, we exclude Fox. I mean, we talk about press organizations that have an interest in finding truth, excluding Fox, the worst mistakes that press organizations have made in the coverage of Trump has precisely occurred in their effort, their overzealous effort to be unfair to the president.

I'm almost speechless watching that. You see, we have to trust the news media because they lie to us. That, don't you understand? You're not woke. David Frum. You're probably one of those troglodyte Republicans who's still a Republican and didn't become woke. But David Frum now realizes we have to love the news media and they have to have credibility because they don't have any credibility. And this is the irony of the fake news. That term, fake news, we use it all the time. I think it was actually invented by Norm McDonald.

He used it when he was the SNL guy on Weekend Update. But it became popularized in the days after the 2016 election to make excuses for Hillary's loss. So there was an assistant professor of communications at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, Melissa Zimdars. And she sent around a Google document with all of the fake news websites because it couldn't be that Hillary lost. It couldn't be that America doesn't want her to take away our freedom and shriek for the next four to eight years. It had to be that fake news stole all of it. So she sent out this Google document and it had some websites that are pretty kooky. And then it also had regular old websites.

So just right-wing websites. The Daily Wire was included on this. We don't run fake stories. We run real stories. We have a point of view, but they're not artificial, you know. They used this because they thought they could discredit the new media, the right-wing media that broke the monopoly of the mainstream media, which used to run the whole show until Fox News and then it all started to crack a little bit with the Internet. It backfired on them. It backfired on them because we can check facts.

We have the Internet. We have freedom to information. And we looked around and we saw, hmm, CNN ran a completely fake story. Washington Post ran a completely fake story. The New York Times ran a completely fake story. And another one, and another one, and another one. Who's the fake news here? And it's stuck to the left wing.

It's stuck to the mainstream media because it's true. It stuck like any other of Donald Trump's nicknames that he gives to people. He had tried out a few on Hillary. You know, he tried low stamina Hillary or this, that, or that. The one that worked was crooked Hillary. It stuck not because he kept repeating it. He kept repeating it because it stuck because it was true. It rang true.

This fake news rings true for CNN in a way that it just doesn't for alternative outlets that don't pretend to be something that we're not. Okay. Should we get into our new segment? We have to get into our new segment. We have to bring on the Nazis. There is so much to talk about. But unfortunately, you cannot get that if you are not subscribed to the Daily Wire. So if you are a subscriber, we appreciate it.

you help us keep the lights on over here. If not, you've got to go over there right now. What do you get? Well, the conversation is going to happen tomorrow starring the one and only the big boss himself, Fox News' power player of the week, Ben Shapiro. So that will be tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. If you want to ask questions of Ben,

he's going to sit there for an hour and just answer the questions as they come in. If you want to ask a question, you have to be a subscriber. You go to the chat page at the Daily Wire, and you can ask him whatever you like. Everybody can watch, but few can ask questions. All are called, but many are called, but few are chosen. So go over there right now.

If you subscribe, it's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership. What do you get? You get me, the Andrew Claven show, the Ben Shapiro show. You get to talk to us all in the conversation. Forget all of that. None of that matters now. None of that matters. The mainstream media has collapsed.

All CNN is in under in tears. David Fromm is in tears. He said they don't trust us. And you need this. You need this. It's not even a choice, guys, the Leftist Tears Tumblr. Do not drown. Do not be left behind in this torrent of salty, tasty, delicious leftist tears.

Go to DailyWire.com right now. We'll be right back. To fight the barbarous tyranny of feelings, let's get into our latest segment this day in history. This day in history. Let's begin with the Nazis. On this day in 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing the formerly neutral U.S. into the European conflict. Incredibly, Hitler had no advance warning of his Axis partner Japan's plan to attack the United States. German foreign minister von Rippantrop believed a declaration of war on the U.S. would overwhelm the German war effort.

Hitler thought war inevitable, so he declared it first. Bizarrely, blaming FDR for the war, Hitler proclaimed, quote, First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy, and slowly but surely lades mankind to war. But obviously his was louder and in German. We are fortunate now to be joined by Victor Davis Hansen, the Martin and Ili Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the author of the new book, The Second World Wars. Victor, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Now, before we get into today's significance and some of the other excellent questions your book brings up, why the S? Why title the book, The Second World Wars, rather than the Second World War?

A lot of reasons that the war was fought from the Arctic Circle. The English chambique all the way from Indian Ocean and Hawaii. So the vast canvas in which the combatants and all but 18 countries finally joined didn't really know at every moment, who they were fighting or why. I mean, nobody in Manchuria, a Japanese soldier in Manchuria didn't have much in common with the Bulgarian on the eastern front fighting of Russians. But more importantly, until 1941 and the invasion of the Soviet Union, people didn't call it World War. Ten separate wars conducted by Hitler, and they were all except for the Blitz against Britain, successful between September 1, 1939, and June 22nd, 1941. So that nearly two-year period, they were known as the fall of France or the Yugoslavian War, the Greek War, the Norwegian War, the Danish War, but they were all surprise attacks, all successful, all against supposedly weaker neighbors, all Germany. When he went into the Soviet Union, that was quite a horse of a different color.

It was a huge country. He had no ability to get to Russian industry across the Urals. And then six months later, when Japan attacked, and the British at Singapore, us at Pearl Harbor, and then mysteriously four days later, Italy and Germany, quite unexpectedly declared war in the United States. At that point, huge canvas that I just mentioned really took shape. Yugoslavian war all became lumped into the Second World War, singular. World War I appropriately was now renamed from the Great War to World War I.

You know, this is, as you point out, the 76th, I think, anniversary of that declaration of Hitler declaring war on the United States, you know, just shortly four days after Pearl Harbor. Why on earth would Adolf Hitler already in the midst of his wars that he's fighting? Why would he declare war on the largest economy in the world? Well, it didn't make any sense, and it truly doesn't make any sense now. and most of the not only didn't know that he was going to do it, but objected vehemently when they found out about it. So we have to put ourselves in his mindset. He was inordinately impressed by naval power

because his fleet was a fractal. The Japanese fleet, which was the third largest in the world, incomparable to the American so tied down America that they would not really be able to fight a two. Britain was dormant. He had controlled what is all, what we would call now that you're, European Union. And he really only had one front. And when he declared war on December 11th, he was

at the first subway station outside of Moscow. So in his way of thinking, very shortly, Moscow, Leningrad are going to fall. I'm going to finish the war. Britain will be isolated. The United States is going to have its hands full after it lost its fleet at Pearl Harbor. And my U-boats will be right off the coast of Miami, and for the first time in two years, they could really go after these fat targets. Life flying off to six months, British will starve, Russia will fall, the United States will come to terms with the Japanese in terms of, did he have any idea of the fleet that was being constructed in U.S. dockyards in 1941? No. Did he have any idea that the United

States had delivered two million men? Did he have any idea that the United States would create 130 aircraft carriers or a bomber an hour. He had no concept of that. People tried to explain to him, even people like Guring, the marshal, the Luftwaffe, that if you get yourself into an exit, it's quite different than border wars. And he said, mine, sure, we have no ability to bomb Russia beyond the Ural's. We were not able to shut down Manchester in London industry, and we surely don't have an ability. And by an existential war, you mean a war that can't be solved with a little treaty and leaving the government in place, you need to totally force the country into submission. Unconditional surrender.

And that hubris that you describe in Hitler is, I suppose, unsurprising. I was thinking to myself that the Axis power is not being able to collaborate or to coordinate with one another. Shouldn't be so surprising Nazis and racialist totalitarians are not the easiest people to share and get along. But it's unbelievable that Hitler did not know that his partner in Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor. Then the betrayal of the Soviet Union, there was no coordination with Mussolini. To what degree? Where it was? Yeah, to what degree does that inability to cooperate?

Did that affect the outcome of the war? Well, it did a great deal because they all had to share it. The communists would not. But all the major decisions on the Allied side, unconditional surrender, a second front in Normandy, a strategic bombing campaign, Linlease were all mutually agreed upon. And more importantly, the Allies shared expertise. So if we had a P39 error code that we didn't feel was very good, although it was excellent for anti-tank warfare, then we gave it to the soil quite useful. If we had a Sherman tank that really couldn't knock out a panther, the British came in and said, let's put our 17-pounder on that turret. Or if we had a P-51 that was not flying as fast as a fog.

Well, if the British came in and said, great airframe, long engine, we'll put a Merlin engine in and made the best fire of the world. There was no such sharing of information that really hurt them. In the case of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were very angry at the Russians because right when they were, fighting Stalin in 1939. Part of the fascist global war, what they felt against communism, Hitler cut a deal with Stalin,

Molotov-Libbentov. They paid the Germans back in April of 1941. On the eve, not too long, six weeks before Germany was going to go into Russia. They cut their own non-in-on the east. I suppose it's not a surprise

if your partners or fascists that you might be a little suspicious. Though it is impressive that liberal democracy is able to work with, was able to work with Stalin so well. One of my favorite lines in your book is you say, quote, we often forget that the Third Reich was postmodern in creative genius, but pre-modern in actual implementation and operations. And it reminds me of that scene in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, where the serpent says to Eve, this is frequently quoted by Democrat politicians like the Kennedys, but he says, as you see things that are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not. To what extent was Germany and Adolf Hitler?

Were they the victim to their own fantasies and delusions? Nazi ideology was built on sort of a hodgepodge of Nietzschean, Superman, crackpot philosophy, Wagner's operas, and the erupted, assimilated, intermarried, upside-down Roman history that being on the wrong side of Danube and Ryan was the right side, and that they were there for a voc, a term that meant not just you were German or you lived in Germany, you were spoken. And out of that sort of crackpot idea, they came up with the idea. One German was released, and that meant that they never really looked in a very pregnant,

not until Albert Speer, the engineer of Russian industry and central planner, a German industry, came into power. they ever look at a cost-benefit analysis. So where the Allies said, here's a B-17, here's a Lancaster bomber, here's a B-29, this is how much money it costs to deliver one pound of ordnance so many miles against the enemy. Now, what are the alternatives? They said, we're going to have a cruise missile with E-1 or an intercontinental business of V-2.

They're the latest technology. We're going to have a mission at 262 jet, and they just looked at performance ability in isolation. or they looked at a Tiger 2 tank. They never had it. They said, well, it has an 88 millimeter barrel. It has six inches of armor. It weights operate per hours of maintenance. Whereas

that's all we talked about. Hour of maintenance, 10 hours on the road. B29, 20,000 pounds, you can deliver much cheaper than a B-17. And so when we did things at the Manhattan project or the B-29 projects, they were grounded in common

sense, pragmatism, maintenance, durability, and they lived in the world of fantasies, whether it was huge rail guns like Gustav. It took 7,000 Germans to shoot one projectile every three minutes, and after 180 they wore out the barrels, had absolutely no effect on the war. The Japanese building the Mushashi and the Yamato, the two largest battleships in the world, between them sank one light carrier when they could have used resources to build 50 of the world. They had great destroy. They just didn't have enough of them. Well, that old stereotype we have of the Germans is, you know, they're very efficient. Those Germans are a very efficient people. But the portrait that we get out of your book is of

a passionate Hitler, you know, Hitler who is given to his own ideological whackiness, given to the blunders that come out of his own ideology about his people. And, And this brings up the question of what precisely was the main decider of the war? What was the biggest influence? You write, ideology for good or evil was a force multiplier of German, Japanese, and Soviet armies. But obviously, they lost. So what was the relative importance of ideology, air, land, and sea, military superiority, and economic output, finally, on the outcome of the war?

Once Hitler and the Japanese redefined the war as really the big six, Italy, Germany, and Japan, they could not win that war because they were outnumbered by almost 200 million people. And the United States, each of them, then the three axes, and all of the combatants. Soviet Union and the United States, so the question was, once they found themselves, their greater experience, could the ferocity of the Japanese or German soldier, or could the head start that they had their utilization of what is now the entire EU in the most much larger area in the Pacific from the shell oil fields in Indonesia to the plantations to the rice belt in southeast could they use all of that and defeat the for a while it looked like they could if we were to ask this question in August of 1942 the sixth army was just about ready to crush the Russians at Stalingrad Guadacanal had been occupied and was cutting off Australia from the Americans. Rommel had taken to Brook and was on his way to Sue.

Suddenly that fantasy vanished with years of five naval battles, the number of Japanese fleet. No need to talk about Stalin. They lost the entire 6th Army of 300. They stopped at El Alamein, had to flee all the way back into Libya and Algeria. And then, of course, quarter million people would surrender the next. summer. So at that point, it was just a question. What are the allies want to do? They've defeated the Axis tactically, but do they want to have an armistist like World War I, or do they want to have

an unconditional surrender? They have to have one on unconditional surrender. They have to go to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo. That's mostly the war. And before that, the Axis powers were doing very well, but they had the advantage of constantly surprising people. There was a series of surprise attacks. sucker punches in the field of war. And yet then the mongrel Americans and the decadent British and all of these countries that the Germans would have called decadent were able to rally a lot of economic and military output. How did, to what degree did the access powers rely entirely, you know, or majorly on surprise? And how did decadent nations defeat the ideological, disciplined access.

Is that they were ideologically, but they weren't disciplined. So if you look until 1944, per capita expenditures on affairs, the lineage of GDP was much greater in places like Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and it was not just in Japan. So you had Americans were called decadent that were not having women wear nylon, where Germans were still wearing nylon. And we were having paper drives when people in Germany were not saving paper. That changed by 44 and 45, but we really geared up. People always look at Britain as sort of a weak link, but during the Blitz of the British, they lost 50,000 dead, they were under attack.

They were producing more all of the current today EU under the control of the F109 fighters. So we kind of forget that. The Allies just made a lot more sacrifices. They were a lot more practical and pragmatic. and their approach to war, and they were not blinded by you. And speaking of some of those sacrifices, now, particularly when we talk about the war in the Pacific, when we talk about the war in the Pacific, there is a tone, it seems, of apology. Barack Obama implicitly, if not explicitly, went to Hiroshima to apologize for the dropping of the bomb.

And yet, as you write, the Japanese were butchers during the war. They killed many more than were killed themselves. Why is it that when we discuss the war in the Pacific, there is such a feeling of sympathy or apology toward the Japanese? It's hard to know. I think part of it was the Chinese theater was really unknown to 15 to 17 million Chinese. The vast civilians were butchered by the Japanese who then killed another four to five million civilians in the south of five to six hundred thousand Australia. I guess the idea was that because we dropped the bomb, and it was a nuclear bomb on her. Forget sometimes that of the 65 million people who were killed in World War II, about 80 million, excuse me, 80% of them, about 50 million, and that would be the 64 million civilians and the 27 million dead,

of which were all killed by Germans and Japanese soldiers. World War II, we should remember, was one of the few wars just far left and did the winners, and in China, they didn't have any weapons, and were not in uniform. And so when Obama said that, and this apology, you think, wow, what were the Japanese thinking when they know of their own history, that in terms of how many they lost versus how many they killed, they were the most murderous combatant in the entire war, and that all of these dead people, 50 million dead people, were killed,

and yet were showing deference to Nagasaki. And by the way, that was true because it wasn't that we tried to stay off and be an idle for $10,000, at least a large part, transferred to Okinawa, which was not like the Mariana's 1,380 miles. And Curtis Lama could envision dropping a more napalm, which had already burned out 65% of the urban core of Japan, but dropping more explosives and napalm about every two weeks than the power of one atomic bomb. And so that was all called off by the atomic bombs. And LeMay sort of said, well, I don't know why we had to drop them. I had a fleet in mind, an air fleet that would have devastated Japan in ways that no atomic bomb could do. And he was right. My grandfather was a navigator on a B-24 during the war over Belgium, I believe, in Germany.

And I've toured some of those planes. Had those fleets gone over to the Pacific, had we not dropped the atomic bomb? I don't know of anybody who suggests there wouldn't have been catastrophically more damage and bloodshed. And this brings up a question with the Japanese and the kamikaze attacks specifically, because you write that the kamikaze attacks were cheap and effective. It didn't cost very much to do it from an economic level rather than a human cost level. But paradoxically, they demonstrate desperation. They demonstrate that the enemy is so desperate they're willing to kill their own soldiers to sink your ship. Are suicide attacks ever sustainably advantageous in war?

Well, they use the paradox in their use. They can be very effective and a cost benefit if you have. But usually people use them in asymmetrical fashion. In other words, when they're losing, had the Japanese launched 400 kamikazis in the Battle of Midway, They would have won that battle and maybe they would. For two years, they would have been on. They sank 17 ships and they did so. And by using substance, it was getting the plane and dive down on American, you know, no dogfighting, no bombing, nothing.

Doesn't take a whole lot to learn how to take off. You know, doesn't require as much training to if you're going to just run your plane into somebody's ship. They used them earlier was they thought we don't have to. We're winning. And usually what happens in history, when you get that desperate, a tactic that is very successful, is just too little to let me resort to that one. The final question is you say that World War II, which killed 60 million people, could have been prevented. How is that? Why is it that wars such as this begin?

The axis were the weaker powers by any standard. Hitler known in 1939 in September that the Soviet Union was just, you know, was neutral, but not a partner or was opposed to Germany. They would have never declared war because they would have had this army of 7 million people on their eastern flank and the indomitable French army. But they made a non-aggression pact. So collusion was one reason on the part of Russia. The other was appeasement, and that was that not just materially, the French and British, when they saw Hitler finally in 38 for what he was, they desperately rearmed and they were very successful. They were getting close to parity, or maybe even superiority, but they didn't. They were so traumatized by World War II that they didn't want to repeat for done in the Psalm,

whereas the Germans who should have been traumatized as the losers very much wanted to repeat it. They wanted a second try. So there was an appeasement going on that Hitler interpreted not as magnanimity to be reciprocated. And finally, the third unfortunate leg in that equation was the United States was isolationists. If we had said in 1939, say in January, we have an alliance with France, and we're going to station 100,000 American troops, a combination of American isolationism. And Soviet collusion that tricked Hitler into thinking that he did not want to go to war.

They were actually very strong countries that already had parity with him when he attacked them. And as a result, we lost 2% of the world population, all because of isolation and appeasement and collusion. all very bad stuff. Victor Davis Hansen, Professor Hansen, thank you for being here. The book is excellent. The book is the Second World Wars.

I highly recommend it. We've been talking about how nobody in America learns history anymore. Facts have now been banned from college campuses and they're deemed hateful and bigoted. So I recommend, if you'd like to refute all of that craziness, go out there and read Victor Davis Hanson's

The Second World Wars. VDH, thank you very much. love to have you back. Thank you for having me. All right, that's our show. Go out there and get this book. It's really, really good. Until tomorrow, I am Michael Knowles. This is the Michael Knowles Show. Tune in tomorrow. We'll see you then. The Michael Noles show is produced by Marshall Benson. Executive producer Jeremy Boring. Senior producer Jonathan Haye. Supervising producer, Mathis Glover. Our technical producer is Austin Stevens. Edited by Alex Zingaro. Audio is mixed by Mike Coramina. Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera. The Michael Noles show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing

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