Victor Davis Hanson: Why Leftist Feminists are Clinging to the Lindsay Clancy Case

Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words

In this episode, Jack Fowler interviews Victor Davis Hanson, beginning with a personal account of Hanson's recent life-threatening medical emergency

Key takeaways

• Victor Davis Hanson details his survival after losing 60% of his blood and undergoing multiple transfusions.
• Hanson refutes Tucker Carlson's claims about nuclear weapons, arguing that an invasion of Japan would have resulted in massive casualties.

Main topics

• Atomic bomb historical context
• Tucker Carlson's political rhetoric

Notable quotes

It was an evil weapon that good people, I think I said in the column, it was an evil, bad thing that good people use to prevent bad people from doing greater harm.

Conclusion

The episode offers a conservative historical perspective on modern cul

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Guess what happened was these very affluent upper middle class white women identified of course with Lindsay Clancy. You look at the the abortion rate and you look at the declining fertility rate I would almost say there's a almost a death cult among the left especially left-wing feminism. It's an anti-humanistic. And then to say that she suffered enough because she she doesn't have the people that she murdered. This is something out of the darkest mind of something out of the Third Reich or something. Speaker 2 (0:48) Well, hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hanson in his own words on the Daily Signal Network. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. Lucky man, I get to ask Victor the questions I believe you'd like him to answer. Get the analysis you want him to give. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Senior contributor of The Daily Signal, owner of the website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHansen.com. Do check it out. Do subscribe. $65 a year, but $6.50 a month if you want to just stick your toe in the water. And when you subscribe, you will be able to read the two weekly exclusive articles Victor does for The Blade and the one exclusive video he does. Plus, there's tons of free stuff there, including a link to a book. I want to say something, Victor. I'm happy you're alive because 10 months ago, all of us, we don't know if we're alive a minute from now, but things look dicey. But you are alive, and you are alive to enjoy the fact that your book is number one on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nun. fiction, and I'm very happy for you, and I think most of our viewers and listeners are too, for all those reasons. I Speaker 1 (2:10) didn't really sink into me until I think the second day when one of the physicians came in and said, you lost 60 % of your blood. You had five blood transfusions, a platelet transfusions. You have severe anemia, and you have AFib. And then I thought, Because when I woke up in the ICU, I thought I was over with it. Everybody said they were all smiling and got it. It took a little longer than usual, five hours. And then all bedlam broke loose. All of a sudden, I heard everybody yelling, get an operating room. And then, do you have a religious objection to transfusions? And I said, now why would? And that's all I remember. Now I would. And then I woke up and it was dark. I said. wow, this is a weird afternoon. So I thought it was all one operation for about a day. And then that night after the operation, you know, I got up. They get you up to get up. And the guy came in at, you know, I couldn't sleep, but I was laying there, and he said, it's time for you to get up. I said, well, that won't be a problem. And I got up, and I just totally collapsed. I just fell in his arms, and I couldn't move. And then the nurse came in and said, what are you doing to the guy? And he said, he belongs in the ICU. And I said, I do not want to go to the ICU. And she said, well, we're watching you because you came out of the ICU. And then the surgeon was wonderful, and he came in and explained everything, and I don't remember any of it. Nothing. Speaker 1 (3:49) I don't remember. I know he came in and my daughter was there and my wife was there, but I don't remember anything he said. So then I didn't Speaker 2 (3:57) know Speaker 1 (3:57) how to live to forget. Speaker 2 (3:59) Yeah. I just had this Speaker 1 (4:00) weird dream that I was flying like with my arms as wings and I couldn't land because it was all fogged in. And then all of a sudden the clouds parted and I landed on my balcony in my old farmhouse. And then I woke up. And that was it. And I said, I land it. And the anesthesiologist laughed. He said, yes, you did. You're back among the living. And we're going to make sure you stay here. Speaker 2 (4:25) Yeah. so that 10 months later you could enjoy this distinction. So that's, anyway, Victor, congratulations on that. I checked today, Amazon, I think you're number 14 bestseller in the nation. So folks, if you haven't gotten the book yet, The Counter-Revolution, The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement, do get it and you can get it off Victor's website. There's a link there. Speaker 2 (4:50) Victor, we are talking, recording on Saturday, September 19th, sunny day here in Milford, Connecticut. This episode will be up on Tuesday, the 22nd. We're going to talk about Tucker Carlson. We're going to talk about the economy, the holdout juror, and the Lindsay Clancy case, and a few other topics. And we'll do all that. when we come back from these Speaker 1 (5:20) initial important messages. Speaker 2 (5:21) Truth is under attack in our culture. People are embracing lies about gender. They're rejecting the sanctity of every human life. And the government is even punishing people for saying what's true and right. But the biblical principles on which our country was founded, they still matter and they must be defended. Alliance Defending Freedom is on the front lines of this fight. They're standing in courtrooms across the country, upholding truth. and your right to speak it. But they rely on help from friends like you to do this work. Your gift to ADF will be matched by a special grant while funds last. Visit joinadf.com slash Hanson or text Hanson to 83848 to make twice the impact. That's joinadf.com slash Hanson or text Hanson. to 83848. We are back with Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. Victor, I want you to note, and at the end of the show when we read some of the comments, I'll read one, but the last two nights, Thursday night and Friday night, I was one night at the Brownstone Institute. They actually meet in Connecticut, a monthly dinner. And a few people came up to me. They recognized me because they're fans of the podcast. And they're just so concerned about you, so thrilled to be watching, getting your wisdom. They watch every podcast. They evict you, David Sanson, in a few words. So lots of love. And then last night, I was at Hillsdale's Blake Center, Speaker 1 (7:00) which is up in northern Connecticut. I've never been there. I've always wanted to go there. Speaker 3 (7:05) Well, sure, they Speaker 2 (7:07) want you to go there, too. My gosh. The founder of the Northeast Subway, excuse me, not Subway, but Friendly's, a restaurant chain, and the founder of that built a replica of Monticello. And then when he died, he donated it to Hillsdale, which now uses that as a center for the Northeast. And they bring in speakers. And Hugh Hewitt was there last night and used this to Speaker 1 (7:30) bring Speaker 2 (7:30) this Speaker 1 (7:30) guy. I've known him a long time, and I like him a lot. he's aces, but so many people came up to him. How's Speaker 2 (7:37) Victor doing? Tell us, is he doing all right? So wherever I go, lots of Victor love. So I do want to mention quickly before we get on to Tucker Carlson that John Kyle, the former senator from Arizona, twice a senator, once elected, well, he was elected for two terms. He'd been a congressman from Arizona. And then he did not seek re-election. And then after John McCain died, Governor Doug Ducey appointed him to fill out the remainder of. of McCain's term. John Kyle came with us on National Review Cruise once. I thought he was a great guy, great senator. So the rest in peace, please. Now, Victor Tucker Carlson. Yeah, he represented Speaker 1 (8:22) the old Arizona, you know, the Goldwater-McCain era where it was pretty much a... A red state, that was before the influx of Californians and before the border was wide open. And those two forces, a lot of illegal immigrants that are poor and needed a vastly expanded social network, social welfare network, and then Californians who... left California not because of the ideology, but because the ideology didn't work. And they thought, well, if there's enough Republicans in Arizona that it's functional, we would like to be there. And it will take us 20 years to ruin it. So they're in the process of ruining it now. And now it's, I guess you'd call it a purple state. Speaker 2 (9:12) Well, they have two Democrat senators. And, you know, 10 years ago, they had two Republican senators. And even when they had another, Dennis DeConcini, who I think is still alive, by the way, was Democrat. But he was an okay Democrat, I guess, at the time. Yeah, he was the old-fashioned Democrat. Speaker 1 (9:30) He was a Bill Clinton Democrat. Yeah. The old Bill Clinton. Speaker 2 (9:34) Yeah. Well, Victor. You wrote and talked about Hiroshima and its, I don't want to say the virtues Speaker 1 (9:44) of it because that's what you're being accused of. No, I never said the virtues. Speaker 2 (9:48) No, I know. But why it made sense, why this was the right thing for America to do at the time. And now Tucker Carlson, it was a flippant line, but in one of his recent episodes, took you on a sort of. implying, amongst other comments, that you and others were genuflecting before nuclear bombing, and it was Christian, it was evil, etc. Please respond to that. If I wasn't a Speaker 1 (10:17) podcaster, I would have sued him for libel, but I don't believe in suing people for libel. But he said that, quote, Victor Hansen's talking about the glories of atomic, you know, nuclear weapons. I wish he would produce that quote. I dare him. I challenge you, Tucker. I want you to say Victor Hansen said that nuclear weapons are either glorious or there's glories, and I did not say that. I did two things. I wrote a column, and on a short podcast, Victor Hansen, for the Daily Signal, the shorter version in his own words, I made three arguments, and that was on the anniversary of the atomic bomb. the two atomic blasts. I said, number one, the left-wing criticism that we only did it to frighten the Russians is demonstrably false. And it didn't frighten the Russians because they were already working on the bomb and had numerous espionage agents in New Mexico, in the Manhattan Project, besides the Rosenbergs, well before them. And they would indeed detonate a bomb almost four years to the day of Hiroshima. Just four years and two or three, what, in August of... Speaker 1 (11:42) Second, I said, nor did we just drop it to say we have to justify the $2 to $3 billion expense of the Manhattan. That was the most expensive project, along with the B-29 project. We did not do that. It might have been a collateral advantage, but we did not do that to scare the Russians, as I said. We did not do it because we hated Japanese. They were yellow people. We wanted to kill as many of them. We did it for one primary reasons, Tucker, as I made clear. We had invaded Okinawa on April 1st, 1945. We thought that after Iwo Jima and Tarawa and Peleliu, that it would be easy. We had a crack six Marine division that was trained entirely for jungle, for island hopping warfare. And Okinawa turned out to be the worst. island campaign of the entire war. We lost 12,000 dead, 19 ships, 30-something damaged. Including my namesake was killed there, Victor Hansen, on Okinawa on May 19th on Sugarloaf Hill. And people looked at the size of the Okinawa force, Japanese and impressed Okinawans, and the 50,000 dead, wounded, and missing. and extrapolated those casualty figures for Japan where there was some 20 million civilians that could be armed, but at least 7 million people in the military. And there were 5,000 to 8,000 kamikaze planes, which were like a cruise missile. And the Navy couldn't stop it. And we had mined the harbors of Japan. And we had... bombed 50%. And by the way, Tucker, the incendiary raids killed far more people than did the two atomic blasts. So the decision was made once that the bomb was... viable to use it to shock the Japanese into surrender and therefore to avoid a 1946 and 19 November 45 and April 46, two different invasions of the two islands of Japan. It would have cost a million casualties. The second thing was Speaker 1 (14:13) The Japanese army was fighting nonstop in China and in occupied Asia. And if you do the math of how many people we think they killed, 16 million. They were killing about 15,000 people a day, and they would not stop. Of all the armies, Tucker, in World War II, for the losses that they suffered, And the number of people they killed, they were the most efficient killing machine. And they treated prisoners no different, much worse than even the Germans did. Not in terms of quantity, but they were barbaric in the treatment of prisoners. So the idea was you've got to stop this killing machine because the war has been over since May 9th and 10th in Europe. There was another consideration. We had about 10,000 idle B-24s, B-17s, B-26s, B-25s, and another two. 2,000 B-29 in the European theater and a couple of thousands heavy Lancaster. They were almost, they almost had the bomb load of a 20,000 pound B-29. Okay, so the idea under LeMay was to bring Lancasters and some heavy bombers from Europe, take the newly acquired on roughly June 18th declared secure Okinawa, it was only 900 miles from most of the targets, and cut down the travel time from the Marianas with it. The 2,000 B-29s and the Marianas would keep bombing, but he thought he could assemble 2,000 to 3,000 more bombers and would 5,000 bombers bomb every single day with DuPont napalm. And that would have made the atomic bombs look like. As far as the theory, well, we didn't get the Japanese didn't. They didn't. They tried to, after the first bomb, they tried to have a coup. The military government tried to stop the emperor from addressing the people, even after Nagasaki. And, well, why didn't we drop one in the Tokyo Bay? Because we only had one sure one that we could have before Christmas, and another one was in development. Well, why did we drop the uranium bomb? We didn't even know if the uranium bomb would work. It was very different. We never made another one like it. We made the parts for it, but we never dropped another one like little boy. It was so dangerous. And once you had to connect it in flight, and once you did, if that... And Gola Gay had, if it had crashed, the bomb would have gone off anywhere. It could have gone off on the runway, where a lot of B-29s didn't make it over the cliff, especially in Tinian. So all of the things he said were not true. What I said was, it was an evil weapon that good people, I think I said in the column, it was an evil, bad thing that good people use to prevent bad people from doing. greater harm. It stopped the use of World War... It stopped World War III in whatever we think about Armageddon, and it was a terrible thing with a sword of Damocles hanging over all our heads. Had we not done that, the Soviet Union would have had a monopoly on the bomb. And that government under Stalin had killed 20 million people of its own through the great famines, the trials, all of it. In addition, China had gone communist in the early, had gone nuclear. So then you had the two greatest mass murders really in history, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong with nuclear weapons. And if we didn't have them, I guarantee you they would have used them to leverage us and taken over Western Europe and most of Asia. Was it a good thing that... nuclear weapons were developed? No, Albert Einstein was a pacifist and he wrote a letter to Roosevelt and said, the Germans are working on this type of fission and it's very, very dangerous. And like it or not, it was very much like the AI argument. If we don't do it, China's going to do it. And we'd rather have the world in the hands of a consensual, transparent society than the communist Chinese. Then he said other things, though, and this is a larger commentary. You know, he said, and we mentioned it, he had a guest who was an artist, not a scientist, not a mathematician, not a physicist, a potter, but also a painter, I suppose. And they were talking. And Tucker and he said that algebra was worthless. And the potter at one point claiming that he could make kilns and all sorts of things without algebraic equations. Well, the science of... Yes, I just had an overhang in my house for my carport, and the people were brilliant, and they didn't make out algebraic equations. But I can tell you that the trusses that they used and the knowledge that they were taught was based on people who knew the stress loads of a 4x8 versus a 4x10 versus a 2x4, you name it. So originally, you have to have variables, and those variables were not... created solely by the Jews. They were created in the Arab world, who probably inherited from the Iranian Phoenicians, who probably had some input from Greeks, especially in Alexandria, and Greeks had it from Egypt. And more importantly, It is essential for modern physics and anybody who says that the goy, that was a term, it was used against the goy, is an anti-Semite. Because that is entirely preposterous. And when Tucker says that there was a satanic force that made the bombs, would he identify that? Does he think Albert Einstein was satanic? Does he think FDR was satanic? Does he think Harry Truman was satanic? I don't Speaker 2 (20:48) know. Einstein was Jewish. Maybe he does think that. Speaker 1