Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Dec. 11, 2017 - The Michael Knowles Show

49:42

Ep. 72 - CNN is Literally Hitler (ft. Victor Davis Hanson)

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

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Facts are under attack and the barbarous tyranny of feelings is ascendant.
	We will analyze a wonderful covfefe weekend of some of the fakest news yet.
	Total self-humiliation by the mainstream media, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, oh my.
	Then, the great Victor Davis Hanson, 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 Hanson, the Martin E. Lee 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. A 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 CNN's Manu Raju with these breaking details.
	Manu, 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 a September 4th, 2016 Now, to put the timeframe 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 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 chyrons 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 that wasn't a news report.
	Do you know how much of that was true?
	How much of what they were saying?
	It's so soberly, straight-faced, very serious, breaking news, exclusive.
	Do you know how much of that was true?
	None of it.
	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 directly.
	Days before, WikiLeaks released 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, except for the reporting.
	That was wrong.
	But it looked right.
	It looked like the news.
	Even if 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.
	Ten days later, that was after WikiLeaks had tweeted out the info.
	This was completely publicly available information.
	WikiLeaks, the tweet said, 678 megabytes of DNC documents from Guccifer, 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 Erickson 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 – 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 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.
	I 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 humiliated when it came out that this wasn't true?
	Hard to tell.
	were 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 Maddow's 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, 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 rafters.
	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.
	Packed house, many people unable to get in, demand apology and retraction from fake news WAPO.
	So in his defense, Weigel did apologize.
	He responded to He said, sure thing.
	I apologize.
	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.
	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 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...
	Packed to the rafters.
	Tee-hee-hee.
	Isn't that guy?
	What an idiot Donald Trump is.
	Tee-hee-hee.
	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.
	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 are 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 Weigel's 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 Navel 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 Klavan calls him Fredo Cuomo, 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 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, well, we're going to offer a clarification on 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.
	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 covfefe 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, I'm trying to think back on the last 11 months, 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.
	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.
	That 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 main 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 clip.
	You see, we have to trust the news media because they lie to us.
	Don't you understand?
	You're not woke like 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 MacDonald.
	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.
	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 stuck to the left wing.
	It 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.
	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.
	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 Klavan 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.
	CNN is in tears.
	David Frum 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 tumbler.
	Do not drown.
	Do not be left behind in this torrent of salty, tasty, delicious leftist tears.
	Go to dailywire.com right now.
	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 US 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 Rippentrop believed a declaration of war on the US 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 laids mankind to war.
	But obviously his was louder and in German.
	We are fortunate now to be joined by Victor Davis Hanson, the Martin and Illy 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?
	For a lot of reasons.
	The war was fought from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara and from the English Channel to the Boulder River and then the Pacific all the way from the Indian Ocean to the Aleutians and Manchuria to Wake Island in Hawaii.
	So the vast canvas in which the combatants in 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 the Russians.
	But more importantly, until 1941, And the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Third Reich, people didn't call it World War II or in the Anglosphere Second World War.
	In other words, there were ten separate wars conducted by Hitler and they were all except for the Blitz against Britain, successful between September 1st, 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 weak, supposedly weaker neighbors, all within close proximity to Germany and German logistical capability.
	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 The Russian industry across the Urals and then six months later when Japan attacked us 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 this huge canvas that I just mentioned really took shape and there was no longer a Yugoslavian war or a Polish war.
	It all became lumped into The Second World War, singular.
	And 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 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.
	Most of the people, his general staff, his Key military advisors 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 fraction of the size of the British fleet, and he felt the Japanese fleet, which was the third largest in the world and comparable to the American Pacific fleet, would so tie down America that they would not really To be able to fight a two-front war.
	And he felt that Britain was dormant.
	He had controlled what we would call now the European Union.
	And he really only had one front, and that would be against Russia.
	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 and 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 that will cut the lifeline off to Britain, and therefore the war will be over six months.
	British will starve, Russia will fall, the United States will come to terms 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 in World War I the United States had delivered 2 million men in less than 18 months?
	No.
	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.
	And as people tried to explain to him, even people like Göring, the marshal of the Luftwaffe, that if you're getting yourself into an existential war, it's quite different than border wars.
	And he said, Mein Feuer, we have no ability to bomb Russia beyond the Urals.
	We were not able to shut down Manchester and Liverpool and London industry, and we surely don't have an ability to go to New York or Detroit or Oakland.
	And yet that fell on deaf ears.
	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 powers 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...
	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 shared fascist ideologies, and you'd think they would have coordinated in a way that British imperialist American Democrats and Soviet communists would not.
	But all the major decisions on the Allied side Unconditional surrender, a second front in Normandy, a strategic bombing campaign, Lindley's were all mutually agreed upon, and they were coordinated.
	And more importantly, the Allies shared expertise.
	So if we had a P-39 Air Cobra that we didn't feel was very good, but although it was excellent for anti-tank warfare, then we gave it to the Soviets who found it 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 Falk Wolf, the British came in and said, great airframe, wrong engine, we'll put a Merlin engine in, made the best fire of the world.
	There was no such sharing of information among the fascists.
	And 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, in August, and part of the fascist war, global war, what they felt, against communism, Hitler cut a deal with Stalin.
	Molotov-Libbentov pact, and that made, that freed up Russia's western flank worries about it, and the Japanese just sued for peace.
	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-aggression pact with Stalin, and that freed about 25 divisions on the east shores of Russia in boundaries to be used against the Germans.
	So there was nothing but suspicion among all three of the Axis powers.
	I suppose it's not a surprise if your partners are fascists that you might be a little suspicious, though it is impressive that liberal democracy 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 premodern 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, 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?
	Well, their entire Nazi ideology was built on sort of a The hodgepodge of Nietzschean, Superman, crackpot philosophy, Wagner's operas, and the drama that they had never been corrupted,
	assimilated, intermarried, integrated with the Roman Empire, that they turned upside down Roman history, that being on the wrong side of Danube and Rhine was the right side, and that they were therefore evoke a term that meant Not just you were German or you lived in Germany or spoke German, but you looked this particular way.
	And out of that sort of crackpot idea, they came up with the idea that one German was worth three or four Russians or Americans or British.
	And that meant that they never really looked in a very...
	Not until Albert Speer, the brilliant engineer of Russian industry and central planner of German industry, came into power In 42, 43, did 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-24, here's a B-29, this is how much money it cost 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, a V-1, or an intercontinental business, a V-2, they're the latest technology, or we're going to have a Mission Met 262 jet, and they just looked at performance ability in isolation or high-tech in isolation, or they looked at a Tiger II tank.
	They never asked.
	They said, well, it has an 88-millimeter barrel.
	It has six inches of armor.
	It weighs 65 tons.
	They never asked themselves, how many hours can that tank operate per hours of maintenance?
	That's all we talked about.
	Sherman went out one hour of maintenance, 10 hours on the road.
	B-29, 20,000 pounds, you can deliver much cheaper than a B-17.
	And so when we did things like the Manhattan Project or the B-29 Project, they were grounded in common sense, pragmatism, maintenance, durability, and they lived in a world of fantasies where there was huge rail guns like Gustav that took 7,000 Germans To shoot one projectile every three minutes, and after 180, they wore out the barrels.
	It 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's best destroyers.
	They had a great destroyer, they just didn't have enough of them.
	They live in an ideal fantasy that we're going to build things really big and they're going to be really high-tech and our soldiers are so much better than everybody else.
	Well, that old stereotype we have of the Germans is 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, a Hitler who is given to his own ideological wackiness, given to the blunders that come out of his own ideology about his people.
	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 against the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain.
	They could not win that war because they were outnumbered by almost 200 million people.
	And the United States and the Soviet Union had a larger GDP, each of them, than the three Axis put together, and the United States would soon have a GDP bigger than all of the combatants on both sides.
	And the Soviet Union and the United States would each field a military over 12 million.
	So the question was, once they found themselves and they stumbled into an existential war, could their greater experience, could the ferocity of the Japanese or German soldier, could the head start that they had, could their utilization of what is now the entire EU under Third Reich occupation and most Much larger area in the Pacific,
	from the shell oil fields in Indonesia to the Malaysian rubber plantations to the rice belt in Southeast Asia.
	Could they use all of that and defeat the Allies before they geared up?
	And for a while, it looked like they could.
	If we were to ask this question in August of 1942, the 6th Army was just about ready to crush the Russians at Stalingrad.
	Guana Canal had been occupied and was cutting off Australia from the Americans.
	Rommel had taken Tobruk and was on his way to Suez, thinking he could link up with Army Group South in Russia.
	And then suddenly that fantasy vanished with the 1st Marine Division just wiped out the Japanese on Guana Canal.
	In a series of five naval battles, we destroyed a great portion of the Japanese fleet.
	No need to talk about Stalinry, They lost the entire Sixth Army of 300,000 veterans.
	And then Rommel was stopped at El Alamein, had to flee all the way back into Libya and Algeria, and then, of course, a quarter million people would surrender the next summer.
	So, at that point, it was just a question.
	What do the Allies want to do?
	They've defeated the Axis tactically.
	But do they want to have an armistice like World War I, or do they want to have an unconditional surrender?
	They have to have one unconditional surrender.
	They have to go to Rome, Berlin, and Tokyo and destroy these people's political system.
	There's 15 million enemy soldiers in the field.
	That was going to be very costly.
	That's mostly the war of 1943, 44, and 45.
	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...
	Well, I think the answer is that they were ideologically, but they weren't disciplined.
	So if you look until 1944, Per capita expenditures on military affairs, munitions, soldiers, as a percentage of GDP was much greater in places like Britain or the Soviet Union and the United States than it was, not just in Japan, but Germany as well.
	So you had Americans who were called decadent that were not having women wear nylons, where Germans were still wearing nylons.
	We were having paper drives when people in Germany were not saving paper.
	That changed by 1944 and 1945, but we really geared up.
	People always look at Britain as sort of a weak link, but during the Blitz of September of 1940, the British lost 50,000 dead.
	They were under attack.
	They were producing more Supermarine Spitfires per month than the Germans, with all of the current today EU under the control, were producing Bf 109 fighters.
	We kind of forget that.
	The Allies just made a lot more sacrifices.
	They were a lot more practical and pragmatic in their approach to war, and they were not blinded by ideological zealotry.
	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...
	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 the West.
	And some 15 to 17 million Chinese, the vast majority of them, civilians were butchered by the Japanese who then killed another four to five million civilians.
	In the South Pacific and other areas of Asia.
	And then they probably killed, either in camps, civilians, or in combat, another five to six hundred thousand Australians, Americans, and British.
	And I guess the idea was that because we dropped the bomb, and it was a nuclear bomb, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that just ended discussion.
	And we 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 6 million who'd lost their lives in the Holocaust, the 3 or 4 million civilians in Yugoslavia and Poland,
	the 27 million dead, of which probably somewhere around 16 million in Russia were civilians, and I mentioned the other civilians in Asia, were all killed by Germans and Japanese soldiers.
	And World War II, we should remember, was one of the few wars in history where the losers lost It was a story of German and Japanese soldiers killing people in Eastern Europe, Russia, and 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 in 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 by these two countries.
	And yet we're showing deference to them because we ended the war and ended the misery at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
	And by the way, that was true because it wasn't that we tried to stave off an invasion as largely caricatured, but we had the entire bomber fleet that had been idle for three months in Europe.
	10,000 B-24s, B-17s, British Lancaster bombers, all were going to be, at least a large part, transferred to Okinawa, which was not like the Marianas, 1,600 miles from Japan, but 380 miles.
	And Curtis LeMay could envision dropping more napalm, which had already burned out 65% of the urban core of Japan, but dropping more explosives than napalm, About every two weeks in 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're usually taken.
	There's a paradox in their use that can be very effective and a cost-benefit if you have no morality about the value of a life.
	But usually people use them in asymmetrical fashion.
	In other words, when they're losing and because they're in desperation.
	So had the Japanese launched 400 kamikazes, In the Battle of Midway, they would have won the war.
	They would have won that battle, and maybe they would have not won the war, but they would have won.
	For two years, they would have been unstoppable because they sank 17 ships at Okinawa and killed 5,000 American sailors.
	Worst defeat in American history at sea.
	And they did so with obsolete zeros that increased their range by not having to have a round trip back home.
	And by using substandard pilots that all they had to do was get in the plane and dive down on American.
	No dogfighting, no bombing, nothing.
	Doesn't take a whole lot to learn how to take off, does it?
	It doesn't require as much training if you're going to just run your plane into somebody's ship.
	They used no fuel to train them, and the point was that this was a cruise missile whose human brain was more accurate than anything known at the time in a V-1.
	So they were very effective.
	Why Japan didn't use them earlier was they thought, we don't have to, we're winning.
	And usually what happens in history, when you get that desperate tactic that is very successful is too little too late.
	The irony is that it would have been very successful, but human nature being what it is, you never resort to that when you feel that there's no need to.
	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 of calibration.
	So had 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 They 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 1938 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 Verdun and the Somme, 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, but with weakness to be treated with contempt.
	Finally, the third unfortunate leg in that equation was the United States was isolationist.
	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, and we had mobilized.
	Hitler would have never gone in.
	But it was a combination of British and French appeasement, American isolationism, and Soviet collusion that tricked Hitler into thinking that these countries were morally weak and did not want to go to war.
	And that deluded him to the fact they were actually very strong countries that already had parity with him when he attacked them and would soon overwhelm him.
	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 Hanson, Professor Hanson, 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 Thank you for having me.
	Alright, 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 Knowles Show is produced by Marshall Benson.
	Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
	Senior producer, Jonathan Hay.
	Supervising producer, Mathis Glover.
	Our technical producer is Austin Stevens.
	Edited by Alex Zingaro.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
	Hair and makeup is by Jesua Olvera.
	The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.

▲