Ep. 72 - CNN is Literally Hitler (ft. Victor Davis Hanson)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
169.54312
Summary
On the anniversary of Hitler's decision to challenge the red, white and blue, Michael Knowles takes a look at Hitler, literally Hitler. Plus, a CNN exclusive on a possible link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks.
Transcript
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Facts are under attack, and the barbarous tyranny of feelings is ascendant.
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We will analyze a wonderful covfefe weekend of some of the fakest news yet.
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Total self-humiliation by the mainstream media, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, oh my.
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Then, the great Victor Davis Hanson, VDH, helps us kick off our new segment, This Day in History,
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on the anniversary of Hitler's dumb decision to challenge the red, white, and blue.
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Don't be like Hitler. Stick around. These colors don't run.
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I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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You know, there's a meme going around. It's been going around for a while, which is literally Hitler.
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So you'd say, you know, Donald Trump cut taxes. He is literally Hitler.
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Donald Trump thinks that Supreme Court justices should respect the text of the Constitution.
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He's literally Hitler. You know, any trivial thing that you don't like becomes literally Hitler.
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Well, today is different. We are going to talk literally about Hitler.
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Today is the anniversary of Germany declaring war on the United States, one of the worst decisions of the war.
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Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin E. Lee Anderson fellow at the Hoover Institution,
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has a great new book that just came out about this, The Second World Wars.
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But before we get to Hitler, literally Hitler, we have got to talk about something slightly less awful, just slightly,
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which is the Democrat operatives who pretend to be journalists on television.
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A CNN exclusive in the Russia investigation, an electronic trail has emerged showing a possible attempt
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to share hacked WikiLeaks documents with the Trump campaign.
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Let's get right to CNN's Manu Raju with these breaking details. Manu, what have you learned?
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Well, John, Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump organization,
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they received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents.
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Now, this is according to a September 4th, 2016 email provided to congressional investigators by the Trump organization.
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Now, to put the time frame in context here, this email came months after the hacked emails of the DNC were made public
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and one month before WikiLeaks began leaking the contents of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's hacked emails.
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And shortly before, Trump Jr. began an exchange of direct messages on Twitter with WikiLeaks.
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Now, congressional investigators are trying to determine whether the individual who sent the September email is legitimate
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and whether it shows additional efforts by WikiLeaks to connect with Trump's son and others on the Trump campaign.
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You saw that. That looked like a news report. That sounded like a news report, right?
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It's got the guy in the suit. It's got the chyrons and the backdrop and everything.
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It looked like a news report. It reminds me of that stupid ad that CNN put out.
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It said, this is an Apple. It looks like an Apple. It is an Apple.
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That's like CNN. But that wasn't a news report.
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Do you know how much of that was true? How much of what they were saying?
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It's so soberly, straight-faced, very serious, breaking news, exclusive.
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Do you know how much of that was true? None of it. That wasn't true. That's fake news.
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CNN reported that Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were emailed a link from WikiLeaks or from someone connected to WikiLeaks
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days before WikiLeaks released the batch of emails to the public.
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So there it is. That's the collusion. We've been waiting for all.
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Forget Van Jones said Russia is a nothing burger.
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Forget James Comey under oath said that most of these stories are nonsense.
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So CNN's Manu Raju, Jeremy Herb, they report, we now have the first evidence that Trump's campaign was given
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advanced info on WikiLeaks' stolen documents from Democrats.
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And there's just one problem with that report, which is that there is no evidence that Trump received
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advanced information on stolen documents from Democrats.
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Other than that, other than the content of the report, that was totally right.
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Even if it was on television like the news is, the guys wore suits like the news do.
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Even the Washington Post, left-wing as can be, democracy dies in darkness or whatever,
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They were the first to call out CNN for this fake report.
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So CNN reported that the email, the awful email saying that WikiLeaks did all this,
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That was nine days before WikiLeaks released it.
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Turns out, though, the email was really sent on September 14th.
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Ten days later, that was after WikiLeaks had tweeted out the info.
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This was completely publicly available information.
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WikiLeaks, the tweet said, 678 megabytes of DNC documents from Guccifer.
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And here's the password. And here's how you unlock it.
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They gave everything that's in his email that WikiLeaks had tweeted out already.
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So the email came from this guy, Mike Erickson.
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So CNN's report insinuated that Mike Erickson might be a Russian agent.
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Turns out after I'm just getting it in my ear, they're doing five seconds of research.
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And yeah, turns out that guy is the president of an aviation management company.
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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.
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So instead, they have to suggest that Mike Erickson is a Russian agent and completely screw up the dates.
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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.
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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.
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So Donald Trump Jr.'s lawyer had a masterful response here, and this brings up some questions.
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He said, quote, the email was never read or responded to.
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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.
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So not only did they get it completely wrong, there isn't any evidence that they even saw this thing.
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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.
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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.
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But as The Daily Caller reported, how CNN got its report so wrong is unclear.
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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?
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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 humiliated when it came out that this wasn't true?
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We're posing two difficult interests against one another, Democrat incompetence and Republican strategy.
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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.
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Donald Trump was ready to go to slam these people.
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It looks like they may have gotten taken advantage of.
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You'll remember on my doppelganger Rachel Maddow's show, she was boasting, we have the Trump tax returns.
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And then when she read it on air, it proved that Trump had paid taxes.
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They got had because they didn't do their due diligence and Republicans planted information there.
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I'm not certain of that, 55, 45, 60, 40, but I wouldn't be surprised.
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Now, the fake news does not end there over the weekend.
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It's true they called out CNN for pushing fake news, but they don't get off the hook.
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The Washington Post's Dave Weigel posted a screenshot of an auditorium before a Trump speech.
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And he wrote on it sarcastically, packed to the rafters.
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That was the picture showed that it was completely empty.
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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.
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Demand apology and retraction from fake news WAPO.
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He responded, he said, sure thing, I apologize.
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I deleted the photo after David Martosco, 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.
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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.
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But, you know, he did apologize for posting it.
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So how did the Washington Post, which reported all of this, how did they respond?
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Quote, President Trump calls for Washington Post reporter who apologized for inaccurate tweet to be fired.
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The fake news isn't that the tweet is inaccurate.
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The fake news is that Dave Weigel is a journalist rather than an activist.
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The fake news is that the Washington Post is an objective news organization rather than an activist group for the left.
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Now, by the way, this is a pattern with Weigel.
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He, in recent years, he's tweeted out that any who oppose redefining marriage to include monogamous same-sex unions are bigots.
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He's regularly disparaged members of the conservative movement on Twitter like Matt Drudge.
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He violated Washington Post's guidelines asking journalists to refrain from posting anything that could show bias or favoritism.
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That hasn't stopped any of the rest of them, so I don't know why we should hold him to a particular account.
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And in Weigel's defense, his job is to mix opinion and journalism.
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But the reason that the Washington Post has moved in that direction is the reason all news outlets have moved in that direction.
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We like to see some opinion with our reporting.
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Some outlets, like the Daily Wire, not to navel gaze, but we're very straightforward with our point of view.
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And we just tell you this is the lens through which we're looking at the world and we're looking at the news.
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They have pompous, preening, moralizing slogans like democracy dies in darkness.
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CNN employs – Andrew Klavan calls him Fredo Cuomo.
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George Stephanopoulos, and they pretend to be news.
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If any Democrat tells you that fake news is just an empty slogan or it's just an attack by Donald Trump, that isn't the case.
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We're talking about the attitude of the outlets.
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Now, for straight-up false reporting, we would have to turn to Brian Ross at ABC News.
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Ross incorrectly reported on Friday, December 1st, that President Trump directed Michael Flynn to make contact with Russian officials before the election.
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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.
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This is a slight difference – before the election or once the country has voted him in as president.
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It isn't just that he misspoke or something, which I think some people tried to say.
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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.
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This was liked and shared tens of thousands of times before they had to delete it because it's utterly false.
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And ABC, for their part, refused to cop to the error.
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Initially, they said, well, we're going to offer a clarification.
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I reported that Donald Trump, as a candidate, told Michael Flynn to talk to the Ruskies.
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The one addition I'll make to that is that he didn't do that.
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Now, they were widely panned for offering this clarification.
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So the next day, they had to give out a full correction.
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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.
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There's another story in the New York Times just came out from Donald Trump.
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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.
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Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider fake news.
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I never watched Don Lemon, who I once called the dumbest man on television.
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As a side note, thank you to Twitter for the extra 140 characters.
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They're making these so much, they're doubling the covfefe of them.
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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.
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Yeah, the New York Times headline is this, quote, inside Trump's hour by hour battle for self-preservation.
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Now, I'm trying to think back on the last 11 months, but 11 months he's been in office since he was inaugurated.
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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.
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A net zero new regulations passed per year, despite an average 13,000 or so in previous administrations.
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If that's self-preservation, keep doing it, man.
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Now, the New York Times reporting is not credible because the premise is not credible.
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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.
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Under oath, James Comey admitted in the main that report was not true.
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The report today is that Donald Trump watches four to eight hours of television.
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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.
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So, I do know he watches these shows sometimes, and I'm very grateful that he does, and thank you again.
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I'm not convinced it's eight hours a day, but I certainly don't care.
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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.
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Here is former Republican, former Bush speechwriter David Frum, explaining what we should take away from all of this fake news.
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You asked the question, Brian, why should, given these mistakes, why should people trust the media?
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And I would say the mistakes are precisely the reason that people should trust the media.
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The press, the worst mistakes that, again, when we talk about the press, we exclude Fox.
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I mean, we talk about press organizations that have an interest in finding truth.
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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.
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You see, we have to trust the news media because they lie to us.
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You're probably one of those troglodyte Republicans who's still a Republican and didn't become woke.
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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.
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I think it was actually invented by Norm MacDonald.
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He used it when he was the SNL guy on Weekend Update.
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But it became popularized in the days after the 2016 election to make excuses for Hillary's loss.
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So there was an assistant professor of communications at Merrimack College in Massachusetts, Melissa Zimdars.
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And she sent around a Google document with all of the fake news websites because it couldn't be that Hillary lost.
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It couldn't be that America doesn't want her to take away our freedom and shriek for the next four to eight years.
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So she sent out this Google document and it had some websites that are pretty kooky.
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And then it also had regular old websites, so just right-wing websites.
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We have a point of view, but they're not artificial, you know.
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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.
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And then it all started to crack a little bit with the internet.
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It backfired on them because we can check facts.
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And we looked around and we saw, hmm, CNN ran a completely fake story.
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The New York Times ran a completely fake story.
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It stuck to the mainstream media because it's true.
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It stuck like any other of Donald Trump's nicknames that he gives to people.
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You know, he tried low stamina Hillary or this, that, or that.
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He kept repeating it because it stuck, because it was true.
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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.
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There is so much to talk about, but unfortunately, you cannot get that if you are not subscribed to The Daily Wire.
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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.
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So that will be tomorrow at 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific.
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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.
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If you want to ask a question, you have to be a subscriber.
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You go to the chat page at The Daily Wire, and you can ask him whatever you like.
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Everybody can watch, but few can ask questions.
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All are called, but many are called, but few are chosen.
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If you subscribe, it's $10 a month, $100 for an annual membership.
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You get me, The Andrew Klavan Show, The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Do not be left behind in this torrent of salty, tasty, delicious leftist tears.
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To fight the barbarous tyranny of feelings, let's get into our latest segment, This Day
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On this day in 1941, Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States, bringing the formerly
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Incredibly, Hitler had no advance warning of his Axis partner Japan's plan to attack the
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German Foreign Minister von Rippentrop believed a declaration of war on the U.S. would overwhelm
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Hitler thought war inevitable, so he declared it first.
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Bizarrely, blaming FDR for the war, Hitler proclaimed, quote, first he incites war, then
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falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly
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We are fortunate now to be joined by Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior
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Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution and the author of the
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Now, before we get into today's significance and some of the other excellent questions your
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Why title the book The Second World Wars rather than The Second World War?
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Well, for a lot of reasons, the war was fought from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara and from
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the English Channel to the Boulder River and then the Pacific all the way from the
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Indian Ocean to the Aleutians and Manchuria to Wake Island and Hawaii.
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So the vast canvas in which the combatants and all but 18 countries finally joined didn't
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really know at every moment who they were fighting or why.
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I mean, nobody in Manchuria, a Japanese soldier in Manchuria didn't have much in common with
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the Bulgarian on the Eastern Front fighting the Russians.
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But more importantly, until 1941 and the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Third Reich, people
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didn't call it World War II or in the Anglosphere Second World War.
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In other words, there were 10 separate wars conducted by Hitler and they were all except for the Blitz
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against Britain, successful between September 1st, 1939 and June 22nd, 1941.
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So that nearly two-year period, they were known as the fall of France or the Yugoslavian War,
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the Greek War, the Norwegian War, the Danish War.
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But they were all surprise attacks, all successful, all against supposedly weaker neighbors, all
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within close proximity to Germany and German logistical capability.
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When he went into the Soviet Union, that was quite a horse of a different color.
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He had no ability to get to Russian industry across the Urals.
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And then six months later, when Japan attacked us and the British at Singapore, us at Pearl
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Harbor, and then mysteriously four days later, Italy and Germany quite unexpectedly declared
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At that point, this huge canvas that I just mentioned really took shape.
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And there was no longer a Yugoslavian War or a Polish War.
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It all became lumped into the Second World War, singular.
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And World War I, appropriately, was now renamed from the Great War to World War I.
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You know, this is, as you point out, the 76th, I think, anniversary of that declaration of
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Hitler declaring war on the United States, you know, just shortly, four days after Pearl Harbor.
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Why on earth would Adolf Hitler, already in the midst of his wars that he's fighting,
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why would he declare war on the largest economy in the world?
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Well, it didn't make any sense, and it truly doesn't make any sense now.
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Most of the people at his general staff, his key military advisors, not only didn't know
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that he was going to do it, but objected vehemently when they found out about it.
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He was inordinately impressed by naval power because his fleet was a fraction of the size
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And he felt the Japanese fleet, which was the third largest in the world and comparable
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to the American Pacific fleet, would so tie down America that they would not really be
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He had controlled what is all, what we would call now the European Union.
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And he really only had one front, and that would be against Russia.
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And when he declared war on December 11th, he was at the first subway station outside of
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So, in his way of thinking, very shortly, Moscow, Leningrad are going to fall.
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The United States is going to have its hands full after it lost its fleet at Pearl Harbor.
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And my U-boats will be right off the coast of Miami.
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And for the first time in two years, they could really go after these fat targets that will
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And therefore, the war will be over six months.
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United States will come to terms with the Japanese in terms of, did he have any idea
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of the fleet that was being constructed in U.S. dockyards in 1941?
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Did he have any idea that in World War I, the United States had delivered two million men
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Did he have any idea that the United States would create 130 aircraft carriers or a bomber
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And as people tried to explain to him, even people like Goering, the marshal, the Luftwaffe,
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that if you're getting yourself into an existential war, it's quite different than border wars.
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And he said, mind sure, we have no ability to bomb Russia beyond the Urals.
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We were not able to shut down Manchester and Liverpool and London industry.
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And we surely don't have an ability to go to New York or Detroit or Oakland.
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And by an existential war, you mean a war that can't be solved with a little treaty and leaving
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You need to totally force the country into submission.
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And that hubris that you describe in Hitler is, I suppose, unsurprising.
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I was thinking to myself that the Axis powers not being able to collaborate or to coordinate
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Nazis and racialist totalitarians are not the easiest people to share and get along.
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But it's unbelievable that Hitler did not know that his partner in Japan was going to attack
00:29:21.560
To what degree does that inability to cooperate, did that affect the outcome of the war?
00:29:29.020
Well, it did a great deal because they all had shared fascist ideologies.
00:29:34.560
And you'd think they would have coordinated in a way that British imperialist, American
00:29:41.400
But all the major decisions on the Allied side, unconditional surrender, a second front
00:29:48.840
in Normandy, a strategic bombing campaign, Lend-Lease, were all mutually agreed upon.
00:29:57.180
And more importantly, the Allies shared expertise.
00:30:00.260
So if we had a P-39 Air Cobra that we didn't feel was very good, but although it was excellent
00:30:06.700
for anti-tank warfare, then we gave it to the Soviets who found it quite useful.
00:30:12.280
If we had a Sherman tank that really couldn't knock out a Panther, the British came in and
00:30:20.320
Or if we had a P-51 that was not flying as fast as a Falk Wolf, the British came in and
00:30:25.880
said, great airframe, long engine, we'll put a Merlin engine in.
00:30:30.680
There was no such sharing of information among the fascists.
00:30:36.820
In the case of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were very angry at the Russians because right when
00:30:44.180
they were fighting Stalin in 1939, in August, and part of the fascist war, global war, what
00:30:53.440
they felt against communism, Hitler cut a deal with Stalin, Molotov-Libbentov pact, and that
00:31:01.340
made, that freed up Russia's western flank worries about it.
00:31:11.540
On the eve, not too long, six weeks before Germany was going to go into Russia, they cut their own
00:31:21.280
And that freed about 25 divisions on the east shores of Russia and boundaries to be used against
00:31:29.120
So there was nothing but suspicion among all three of the Axis powers.
00:31:33.680
I suppose it's not a surprise if your partners are fascists that you might be a little suspicious,
00:31:39.260
though it is impressive that liberal democracy is able to work with, was able to work with
00:31:45.560
One of my favorite lines in your book is, you say, quote, we often forget that the Third
00:31:52.160
Reich was postmodern in creative genius, but pre-modern in actual implementation and operations.
00:31:58.880
And it reminds me of that scene in George Bernard Shaw's Back to Methuselah, where the serpent
00:32:04.680
says to Eve, this is frequently quoted by Democrat politicians like the Kennedys, but he says,
00:32:11.780
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.
00:32:14.660
To what extent was Germany and Adolf Hitler, were they the victim to their own fantasies and
00:32:20.520
Well, their entire Nazi ideology was built on sort of a hodgepodge of Nietzschean, Superman,
00:32:30.960
crackpot philosophy, Wagner's operas, and the drama that they had never been corrupted,
00:32:40.480
assimilated, intermarried, integrated with the Roman Empire, that they turned upside down
00:32:46.640
Roman history, that being on the wrong side of Danube and Rhine was the right side, and
00:32:51.520
that they were therefore evoked a term that meant not just you were German or you lived
00:32:56.940
in Germany or spoke German, but you looked this particular way.
00:33:00.800
And out of that sort of crackpot idea, they came up with the idea that one German was worth
00:33:05.500
three or four Russians or Americans or British, and that meant that they never really looked
00:33:11.140
in a very pregnant, not until Albert Speer, the brilliant engineer of Russian industry
00:33:18.800
and central planner, a German industry, came into power in 1942-1943, did they ever look
00:33:26.340
So where the Allies said, here's a B-17, here's a Lancaster bomber, here's a B-24, here's a B-29,
00:33:35.160
this is how much money it costs to deliver one pound of ordnance so many miles against the
00:33:41.580
They said, we're going to have a cruise missile, a V-1, or an intercontinental business, a V-2,
00:33:46.740
they're the latest technology, or we're going to have a measurement 262 jet.
00:33:51.520
And they just looked at performance, ability in isolation, or high-tech in isolation, or
00:34:00.840
They never asked, they said, well, it has an 88-millimeter barrel, it has six inches of
00:34:06.720
They never asked themselves, how many hours can that tank operate per hours of maintenance?
00:34:15.240
Sherman went out one hour of maintenance, 10 hours on the road.
00:34:18.800
B-29, 20,000 pounds, you can deliver much cheaper than a B-17.
00:34:22.760
And so, when we did things like the Manhattan Project or the B-29 Project, they were grounded
00:34:29.700
in common sense, pragmatism, maintenance, durability, and they lived in a world of fantasies
00:34:37.120
where there was huge rail guns like Gustav that took 7,000 Germans to shoot one projectile
00:34:45.680
every three minutes, and after 180, they wore out the barrels, had absolutely no effect
00:34:52.300
Or the Japanese building the Mushashi and the Yamato, the two largest battleships in the world,
00:34:58.360
but between them sank one light carrier when they could have used resources to build 50 of
00:35:06.780
They had a great destroyer, they just didn't have enough of them.
00:35:08.920
But they lived in an ideal fantasy that we're going to build things really big, and they're
00:35:13.960
going to be really high-tech, and our soldiers are so much better than everybody else.
00:35:20.240
Well, that old stereotype we have of the Germans is, you know, they're very efficient.
00:35:26.460
But the portrait that we get out of your book is of a passionate Hitler, a Hitler who is given
00:35:34.140
to his own ideological wackiness, given to the blunders that come out of his own ideology
00:35:42.940
And this brings up the question of what precisely was the main decider of the war?
00:35:53.020
You write, ideology for good or evil was a force multiplier of German, Japanese, and Soviet
00:36:01.040
So what was the relative importance of ideology, air, land, and sea, military superiority, and
00:36:07.440
economic output, finally, on the outcome of the war?
00:36:10.800
Once Hitler and the Japanese redefined the war as really the big six, Italy, Germany, and
00:36:18.660
Japan against the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain, they could not win that
00:36:23.500
war because they were outnumbered by almost 200 million people.
00:36:27.480
And the United States and the Soviet Union had a larger GDP, each of them, than the three
00:36:35.940
And the United States would soon have a GDP bigger than all of the combatants on both
00:36:41.740
And the Soviet Union and the United States would each field a military over 12 million.
00:36:47.540
So the question was, once they found themselves and they stumbled into an existential war, could
00:36:53.820
their greater experience, could the ferocity of the Japanese or German soldier, could the
00:36:58.620
head start that they had, could their utilization of what is now the entire EU under Third Reich
00:37:07.280
occupation and most, much larger area in the Pacific, from the shell oil fields in Indonesia
00:37:14.620
to the Malaysia to the Malaysian rubber plantations to the rice belt in Southeast Asia, could they
00:37:20.440
use all of that and defeat the Allies before they geared up?
00:37:27.360
If we were to ask this question in August of 1942, the Sixth Army was just about ready to
00:37:36.080
Guadalcanal had been occupied and was cutting off Australia from the Americans.
00:37:40.940
And Rommel had taken Tobruk and was on his way to the Suez, thinking he could link up with
00:37:49.200
And then suddenly that fantasy vanished with the 1st Marine Division just wiped out the
00:37:57.940
And when a series of five naval battles destroyed a great portion of the Japanese fleet, no need
00:38:05.800
They lost the entire Sixth Army of 300,000 veterans.
00:38:10.280
And then Rommel was stopped at El Alamein, had to flee all the way back into Libya and Algeria.
00:38:18.220
And then, of course, a quarter million people would surrender the next summer.
00:38:30.160
But do they want to have an armistice like World War I, or do they want to have an unconditional
00:38:37.200
They have to go to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo and destroy these people's political systems.
00:38:43.840
There's 15 million enemy soldiers in the field.
00:38:48.660
And that's mostly the war of 1943, 1944, and 1945.
00:38:52.340
And before that, the Axis powers were doing very well, but they had the advantage of constantly
00:39:01.060
There was a series of surprise attacks, sucker punches in the field of war.
00:39:05.780
And yet, then the mongrel Americans and the decadent British and all of these countries that
00:39:11.840
the Germans would have called decadent were able to rally a lot of economic and military
00:39:18.980
To what degree did the Axis powers rely entirely or majorly on surprise?
00:39:28.620
And how did decadent nations defeat the ideologically disciplined Axis?
00:39:35.980
Well, I think the answer is that they were ideologically, but they weren't disciplined.
00:39:40.060
So, if you look until 1944, per capita expenditures on military affairs, munitions, soldiers as a percentage
00:39:53.880
of GDP was much greater in places like Britain or the Soviet Union in the United States than it was not just in
00:40:02.760
So, you had Americans who were called decadent that were not having women wear nylons, where Germans were still
00:40:11.180
And we were having paper drives when people in Germany were not saving paper.
00:40:15.800
That changed by 1944 and 1945, but we really geared up.
00:40:19.880
People always look at Britain as sort of a weak link, but during the blitz of September of 1940,
00:40:30.080
They were producing more supermarine Spitfires per month than the Germans, with all of the
00:40:35.920
current, today, EU under the control, were producing VF-109 fighters.
00:40:44.200
And the Allies just made a lot more sacrifices.
00:40:47.500
They were a lot more practical and pragmatic in their approach to war, and they were not
00:40:55.240
And speaking of some of those sacrifices, now, particularly when we talk about the war in
00:41:00.060
the Pacific, when we talk about the war in the Pacific, there is a tone, it seems, of apology.
00:41:06.100
Barack Obama implicitly, if not explicitly, went to Hiroshima to apologize for the dropping
00:41:12.960
of the bomb, and yet, as you write, the Japanese were butchers during the war.
00:41:17.960
They killed many more than were killed themselves.
00:41:21.580
Why is it that when we discuss the war in the Pacific, there is such a feeling of sympathy
00:41:34.700
I think part of it was the Chinese theater was really unknown to the West, and some 15
00:41:41.240
to 17 million Chinese, the vast majority of them, civilians were butchered by the Japanese
00:41:47.240
who then killed another four to five million civilians in the South Pacific and other areas
00:41:54.380
And then they probably killed, either in camps, civilians, or in combat, another five to six
00:42:00.260
hundred thousand Australians, Americans, and British.
00:42:04.460
And I guess the idea was that because we dropped the bomb, and it was a nuclear bomb, on Hiroshima
00:42:12.400
And we forget sometimes that of the 65 million people who were killed in World War II, about
00:42:17.580
80 million, excuse me, 80 percent of them, about 50 million, and that would be the six million
00:42:24.120
who'd lost their lives in the Holocaust, so three or four million civilians in Yugoslavia and
00:42:29.800
Poland, the 27 million dead, of which probably somewhere around 16 million in Russia were
00:42:36.480
civilians, and I mentioned the other civilians in Asia, were all killed by Germans and Japanese
00:42:43.660
And World War II, we should remember, was one of the few wars in history where the losers
00:42:52.040
And basically, it was a story of German and Japanese soldiers killing people in Eastern Europe,
00:42:58.260
Russia and China, they didn't have any weapons, and were not in uniform.
00:43:02.160
And so when Obama said that, and this apology, you think, wow, what were the Japanese thinking
00:43:07.200
when they know in their own history that, in terms of how many they lost versus how many
00:43:12.040
they killed, they were the most murderous combatant in the entire war, and that all of these
00:43:18.680
dead people, 50 million dead people, were killed by these two countries.
00:43:22.680
And yet, we're showing deference to them because we ended the war and ended the misery in Hiroshima
00:43:30.440
And by the way, that was true, because it wasn't that we tried to stave off an invasion as largely
00:43:36.340
caricatured, but we had the entire bomber fleet that had been idle for three months in Europe.
00:43:42.880
So, 10,000 B-24s, B-17s, British Lancaster bombers, all were going to be, at least a large part,
00:43:52.180
transferred to Okinawa, which was not like the Marianas, 1,600 miles from Japan, but 380 miles.
00:43:59.100
And Curtis LeMay could envision dropping more napalm, which had already burned out 65% of the
00:44:06.380
urban core of Japan, but dropping more explosives and napalm about every two weeks than with the
00:44:16.020
And so that was all called off by the atomic bombs.
00:44:20.180
And LeMay sort of said, well, I don't know why we had to drop them.
00:44:22.780
I had a fleet in mind, an air fleet, that would have devastated Japan in ways that no atomic bomb
00:44:30.560
My grandfather was a navigator on a B-24 during the war over Belgium, I believe, in Germany.
00:44:39.820
Had those fleets gone over to the Pacific, had we not dropped the atomic bomb, I don't
00:44:44.640
know of anybody who suggests there wouldn't have been catastrophically more damage and bloodshed.
00:44:51.220
And this brings up a question with the Japanese and the kamikaze attacks specifically, because
00:44:58.040
you write that the kamikaze attacks were cheap and effective, it didn't cost very much to
00:45:03.440
do it from an economic level rather than a human cost level.
00:45:08.020
But paradoxically, they demonstrate desperation.
00:45:12.000
They demonstrate that the enemy is so desperate, they're willing to kill their own soldiers to
00:45:17.300
Are suicide attacks ever sustainably advantageous in war?
00:45:23.560
Well, they're usually taken, there's a paradox in their use that can be very effective and
00:45:29.500
a cost-benefit if you have no morality about the value of a life.
00:45:33.440
But usually people use them in an asymmetrical fashion, in other words, when they're losing
00:45:40.460
So had the Japanese launched 400 kamikazes in the Battle of Midway, they would have won the
00:45:49.120
They would have won that battle, and maybe they would have not won the war, but they
00:45:52.640
would have won, for two years they would have been unstoppable, because they sank 17 ships
00:45:58.400
at Okinawa and killed 5,000 American sailors, worst defeat in American history at the sea.
00:46:05.020
And they did so with obsolete zeros that increased their range by not having to have a round trip
00:46:11.200
back home, and by using substandard pilots that all they had to do was get in the plane
00:46:17.160
and dive down on American, you know, no dogfighting, no bombing, nothing.
00:46:21.880
Doesn't take a whole lot to learn how to take off, you know, doesn't, doesn't require as much
00:46:26.180
training if you're going to just run your plane into somebody's ship.
00:46:29.100
They used no fuel to train them, and the point was that this was a cruise missile whose human
00:46:34.760
brain was more accurate than anything known at the time in a V1.
00:46:40.580
But why Japan didn't use them earlier was they thought, we don't have to, we're winning.
00:46:46.520
And usually what happens in history, when you get that desperate tactic that is very successful
00:46:54.740
The irony is that it would have been very successful, but human nature being what it is,
00:46:59.100
you never resort to that when you feel that there's no need to.
00:47:02.580
The final question is, you say that World War II, which killed 60 million people, could
00:47:14.500
The Axis were the weaker powers by any standard of calibration.
00:47:18.540
So as Hitler known in 1939 in September that the Soviet Union was just, you know, was neutral
00:47:26.720
but not a partner or was opposed to Germany, they would have never declared war because
00:47:31.680
they would have had this army of 7 million people on their eastern flank and the indomitable
00:47:40.500
So collusion was one reason on the part of Russia.
00:47:44.660
And that was that not just materially, the French and British, when they saw Hitler finally
00:47:51.020
in 1938 for what he was, they desperately rearmed and they were very successful.
00:47:54.800
They were getting close to parity or maybe even superiority, but they didn't, they were
00:47:59.740
so traumatized by World War II that they didn't want to repeat Verdun and the Somme, whereas
00:48:04.340
the Germans, who should have been traumatized as the losers, very much wanted to repeat it.
00:48:11.420
So there was an appeasement going on that Hitler interpreted not as magnanimity to be reciprocated,
00:48:20.340
And finally, the third unfortunate leg in that equation was the United States was isolationist.
00:48:27.080
If we had said in 1939, say in January, we have an alliance with France and we're going
00:48:36.940
to station 100,000 American troops and we had mobilized, Hitler would have never gone in.
00:48:41.820
But it was a combination of British and French appeasement, American isolationism and Soviet
00:48:48.420
collusion that tricked Hitler into thinking that these countries were morally weak and did
00:48:54.920
And that deluded him to the fact they were actually very strong countries that already had parity
00:49:00.480
with him when he attacked them and would soon overwhelm him.
00:49:03.060
And as a result, we lost 2% of the world population, all because of isolation and appeasement and
00:49:13.040
Victor Davis Hanson, Professor Hanson, thank you for being here.
00:49:21.160
We've been talking about how nobody in America learns history anymore.
00:49:25.160
Facts have now been banned from college campuses and they're deemed hateful and bigoted.
00:49:31.000
So I recommend if you'd like to refute all of that craziness, go out there and read Victor
00:49:39.060
VDH, thank you very much and we'd love to have you back.
00:49:53.000
The Michael Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
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The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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