VDH: Iran Stalling Tactics, Reform Party Shock in Britain, Hephaestus & the Double Standard in U.S. Justice

Summary

Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words
Episode Title: Iran Stalling Tactics, Reform Party Shock in Britain, Hephaestus & the Double Standard in U.S. Justice
Date: May 9, 2026
Host: Victor Davis Hanson
Co-Host: Sammy Wink
Podcast by The Daily Signal

---

Episode Overview
This episode features Victor Davis Hanson's historical perspective on breaking news: the ongoing U.S.-Iranian negotiations and military tensions, the Reform Party’s electoral breakthrough in Britain, and the figure of Hephaestus in Greek mythology. Hanson also discusses the state of U.S. justice illustrated by the treatment of political and ideological violence. The episode is rich in political insight, classical allusion, and contemporary cultural analysis.

---

1. Iran Stalling Tactics and the Middle East [02:45–26:17]

Key Points

• Unsuccessful Negotiations: For 47 years, no administration—American or European—has negotiated successfully with Iranian theocracy, which excels in delay, deception, and stonewalling.

  “Their currency is delay, delay, dissimulation, lie, lie, lie.” – Victor Davis Hanson [02:53]

• War Dragging On: The war has shifted from being “kinetically over in 30 days” to a protracted, tense negotiation, now at 70 days, which Victor believes saps Donald Trump’s ability to effect broader economic reforms before the 2026 midterms.
• Iran’s Missile Arsenal Uncertainty: A crucial issue is the uncertainty around the number and capability of Iranian missiles and drones, which serves as a deterrent against U.S. direct action due to threats against Gulf oil infrastructure.
• Trump’s “Love Tap” Kinetic Responses: Trump’s measured military attacks are described as designed for domestic optics—“a love tap”—aimed at placating Republican and MAGA constituents hungry for closure and security.
• Israeli Concerns & U.S. Alignment: Israel’s security calculus, as a small and vulnerable state, differs from that of the distant and massive United States

  “Israel says, yeah, but you’re leaving us with a wounded bear in a cave.” [08:27]

• Rise of Anti-Israel Sentiment: Both left and right, influencers like Tucker Carlson are amplifying rhetoric that sees Israel as a nuisance or even a risk to the U.S.—rhetoric Victor sharply rebukes.

  “Tucker said that ... Israel poses a greater threat than either China or the Islamic world. That's just crazy.” [10:16]

• Failures of the Iranian Resistance: The Iranian domestic resistance hasn't materialized with strength or U.S. assistance as expected, leaving Trump at a deadlock.

Notable Quotes

• “The elements of a boom are there... it’s just two things holding it back, and that’s the price of gasoline and the pessimism about what’s going to happen with this war...” [03:46]
• “I've never seen anything like this at all.” (Referring to current anti-Israeli conspiracism in American political discourse) [21:58]

---

2. The Reform Party's Shock Election Win in Britain [27:57–32:08]

Key Points

• Nigel Farage’s Success: The Reform Party, previously considered fringe, has overtaken the mainstream conservative party in key seats.
• Voter Revolt: Voters frustrated by crime, uncontrolled immigration, and the failures of both Labour and Conservative parties have turned to the blunt, MAGA-style approach of the Reform Party.
• Disarmed National Defense: Hanson notes Britain’s military decline and inability to protect itself meaningfully.
• Analogy with U.S.: The British situation is compared to America’s current economic, security, and cultural malaise.

Notable Quotes

• “His strength was, he was blunt and he was honest and he didn’t care. He was kind of Trump in his mannerisms. And he won.” [31:07]

---

3. Urban Decline and the Los Angeles Mayoral Debate [32:08–39:20]

Key Points

• Spencer Pratt's Debate Performance: The blunt and direct manner of Spencer Pratt is overwhelmingly favored in polling against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
• Homelessness & Mental Health: Hanson argues California’s homeless crisis is fundamentally driven by drugs and policy failures, not simply a lack of housing, with the closure of mental institutions a root cause.
• Cynicism About Political Change: Despite voter anger, machine politics and union-backed ballot harvesting may prevent genuine reform.

Notable Quotes

• “We’ve taken the homeless issue... it’s drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs that people self-medicate. And in the old days... my family... they would say, my mom, my aunt, my cousin is up at Stockton or up at Napa... and in my family, they meant mental institutions.” [34:35]

---

4. Hephaestus: The Craftsman God in Greek Myth [39:59–51:49]

Key Points

• Myth and Archetype: Hephaestus represents the paradox of ugliness and beauty, craftsmanship and physical deficiency—often contrasted with his wife Aphrodite’s allure and the attractiveness of the wild.
• Archaeology and Cultural Survival: His presence on ancient tablets and major sanctuaries reflects the continuity of Greek culture.
• Popular Mythology: The famous myth of Hephaestus catching Aphrodite and Ares in a net is discussed as a metaphor for the union of contrasts—beauty and brawn, civilization and wildness.
• Craftsmen’s Plight: Hanson explores theories on why the smith god is lame, relating to industrial accidents, lead/arsenic poisoning, and the social role of disabled craftsmen in antiquity.

Notable Quotes

• “He is the God of the volcanoes, he’s the God of the smith, he’s Roman Vulcan, and he’s lame and that supposedly reflects... Did he drop a hammer on his foot? Did he inhale arsenic that they used to temper bronze?” [43:34]

---

5. Double Standard in U.S. Justice: From the White House Correspondents’ Dinner Shooter to Ilhan Omar [59:41–69:14]

Key Points

• Cole Allen Case: The alleged shooter at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, despite a premeditated, ideologically charged attack, is treated with unusual leniency and judicial empathy, in stark contrast to harsh treatment of non-violent January 6th trespassers.

  “A federal judge is now contextualizing him... he’s going to try to oversee a trial in which [Allen] is declared either medically mentally incompetent or... attempted manslaughter.” [61:27]

• Ilhan Omar’s Troubles: Ongoing fraud investigations and contradictions about her own finances and background undermine her credibility.
• Squad’s Intellectual Deficit: Hanson sharply criticizes the intellectual and historical confusion among “the Squad,” citing AOC’s misstatements about the origins of democracy.

  “AOC doesn’t know anything. She said recently that black women created democracy... That’s just bogus.” [66:51]

---

6. Cultural Commentary: The Left’s Rhetoric, Wealth, and Hypocrisy [70:34–74:17]

Key Points

• Wealth Shaming and Hyprocrisy: Critique of progressive politicians’ attacks on wealth, ignoring the means by which figures like Barack Obama, the Clintons, and Al Gore amassed millions after leaving office.
• Wealth Among Activist Podcasters: Hanson notes progressive pundits with high incomes (Hasan Piker, e.g.) are often insulated from the working-class struggles they claim to champion.
• Irony of the 'Colonizer' Narrative: Immigrant activists from wealthy backgrounds in Uganda or India play up anti-colonial rhetoric in the U.S., ignoring analogous situations in their own histories.

---

7. U.S. Justice, Anti-Semitism, and Political Polarization [74:58–79:22]

Key Points

• Eric Holder and the “Wingman” Attorney General: Former AG Holder’s own admission of loyalty to Obama is contrasted with claims of AG independence; alleged double standard.
• Graham Platner Controversy: Criticism of Democratic acceptance of a Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo who now lectures on xenophobia.

  “He deliberately put on a tattoo... thousands of people, that one of the last things they saw before they were incinerated were those tattoos on the arms or hands of SS soldiers that were conducting the Holocaust.” [78:23]

---

8. Listener Mail & Closing Reflections [81:23–84:22]

Heartfelt listener messages about Hanson's personal impact and their prayers, with Victor sharing his personal experiences with family illness and gratitude.

---

Memorable Moments & Quotes with Timestamps

• “Their currency is delay, delay, dissimulation, lie, lie, lie.” – Victor Davis Hanson [02:53]
• “We’ve done so much damage to Iran and the nuclear-industrial-military complex, it would take them years to recover.” – Fred Flights via Victor [06:51]
• “I've never seen anything like Nick Fuentes with a huge audience saying…the chief existential threat to the United States is…Jews.” [22:22]
• “His strength was, he was blunt and he was honest and he didn’t care. He was kind of Trump in his mannerisms. And he won.” [31:07]
• “It’s not what the left said. It’s not ‘there isn’t enough housing’… it’s drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs that people self-medicate.” [34:35]
• “Hephaestus is the God of the volcanoes, he’s the God of the smith, he’s Roman Vulcan, and he’s lame…” [43:34]
• “AOC doesn’t know anything. She said recently that black women created democracy... That’s just bogus.” [66:51]
• “He deliberately put on a [Totenkopf] tattoo… thousands of people, that one of the last things they saw before they were incinerated were those tattoos…” [78:23]

---

Important Timestamps

• 02:45 – Iran, U.S., Israel: Negotiation and military standoff
• 27:57 – Reform Party break-through in Britain
• 32:08 – L.A. Mayoral debate, urban policy, homelessness
• 39:59 – Segment on Hephaestus, craftsmanship, and myth
• 59:41 – U.S. Justice: Cole Allen, ideology, double standard
• 66:46 – Squad and Democratic Party critiques
• 74:58 – Eric Holder, Graham Platner, hypocrisy in politics
• 81:23 – Listener mail and personal notes

---

Tone & Style:
The episode is analytical, informed by classical allusions, passionate in critique, and unapologetically conservative in tone. Hanson's wit and breadth of knowledge are on display, giving listeners historical and philosophical context for current events, combined with direct challenges to prevailing narratives on both left and right.

---

For new listeners:
This summary distills Hanson's detailed commentary on geopolitics, culture, and the historical roots of today’s crises. The conversation moves fluidly among international strategy, the pitfalls of progressive governance, cultural mythology, and pressing issues of justice and political power in America and abroad.

Transcript

[Sammy Wink]

Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own Words. This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in the middle. Victor's been looking at ancient Greek gods and today he will take a look at Hephaestus, the God of craftsmen. So that look forward to that. Before that we'll look at the news. Victor has a lot he wants to talk about on Iran, so we'll start with that and then we'll look at the White House Correspondent's Dinner shooter and his treatment in court. And then finally also a big win for the Reform Party in England. So stay with us for those stories and we'll be right back.

[Bradley Devlin]

Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hansen, whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words or his short form content for the Daily Signal. Victor Davis Hanson. And in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands War.

[Bradley Devlin]

And in the age of clickbait and rage bait. That's a really good feeling right.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The media. Thank you. You can leave now.

[Bradley Devlin]

Well, if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals long form interview podcast called the Signal. Sit down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, D.C. as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever with the Trump administration back in office because in 2024 you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy. Victor Davis Hansen or there too. And drop me a follow on X radleydevlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal. Sit down.

[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Please come join him at his website, victorhanson.com the name of the website is the Blade of Perseus and we'd love to have everybody there. Well, Victor, I know you have a lot to more to say on Iran. We did talk about it yesterday, but in the meantime, Israel has voiced its dislike of Donald Trump making a deal with Iran or the current deal. And then also Iran has been attacking vessels around the Straits of Hormuz in the Gulf, Persian Gulf. And I was wondering what your thoughts are on those.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, you have to deal with the reality first. In 47 years, no one has been able, not even Obama, not Biden, not the Europeans, to negotiate successfully with Iranian theocracy. Their currency is delay, delay, dissimulation, lie, lie, lie. So here, tragically, the war was kinetically over in 30 days. Now we're into the high 60s, right? We had all of March and April, 60. Now we're into, well, it's going to be 70 days. And most of that has been this negotiation. And what has it got us? We haven't got anything from them. It's always, let's go to Pakistan, let's do this. And this is what they want. So they have closed the window, the original window from eight months to the midterms to six and counting. And now we're right at six months. And so the time is running out for Donald Trump to have enough, a big enough window to flip over the economy, get gas prices down. Because today the jobs report was 115,000 new jobs. It was more than twice what the dismal economist said it would be. They're always downplaying what can happen. So the elements of a boom are there from the other data, you know, the stock market, these people know what they're doing. Supposedly they're very confident and all it's, there's just two things holding it back and that's the price of gasoline and the pessimism about what's going to happen with this war which is augmented or accentuated by this drawn out negotiation. So at some point, Donald and why is it drawn out? Because we don't know. There's really only one reason. If you reduce it down, we don't know how many rockets they have. That's it. By that I mean we have 800 Apaches and Warthogs that can be in the skies over the Gulf. They can destroy all the pto, they can destroy all the port facilities in a few hours. They can stop, in other words, the Iran ability to harass shipping. But they don't know how many missiles or drones they have. And if they are being replenished through the Caspian Sea route or rail or along the smuggled in along the border, I doubt very many are getting through. But that means that as long as, you know, you read, maybe they have a thousand. So they are sending messages to our negotiators that saying we have the ability, if you take us down, to destroy the Gulf Oil industries, their desalinization plants, their distillery, all that. And that's holding us back. And they just draw it out and draw it out at some point. And then Donald Trump replies on their recent attacks, you mentioned on the tankers, he then uses kinetic and he attacks certain facilities in Iran and he attacks tankers that try to break through. And then he says it's a love tap because he's under a deadline. And he's got all of the Republican congressmen, the Republican Senate, the MAGA people, they're all saying, we were doing so well. And then the war came. And if you can finish it, there's a good article. I think it's In American Greatness Day by Fred Flights. He's a very smart guy and he argues that we've done so much damage to Iran and the nuclear industrial military complex, it would take them years to recover. And at any time that we surveilled these mountain hideouts of the enriched uranium they were to be redeveloped, we could just do what we did last June and hit them. But more importantly, we could leave some residual forces that had that ability or the bases in the Gulf and then go home. And then that's his argument. But I don't know the effect of that on the Iranians. The Iranian resistance movement people are very disappointed because the Iranian resistance has not come up again. And if they were to rise up, you get the impression that all bets would be off the table that US Air cover would start to help them if they're able to send drones into Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps roadblocks and checkpoints. And they are, you can imagine if there was, they were unleashed, they could do a lot of damage and help the resistance. So I think Trump thought the resistance would be more active at this point and they need to be armed. So he's in a deadlock. And Israel, as to your question, Israel is right next to Iran and it's vulnerable. It's only got 10 and a half million people. United States is 340 million people and it's far away. So we have different geopolitical assessments of its risk. And it's also got to be very, very careful because in the United States, one of the reasons that has driven down Israeli popularity is this left wing mem and then amplified by Tucker Carlson and the rest, that Netanyahu dragged Trump into the war. So if Trump starts to say our interests are not exactly alike and we've done so much damage together, they won't come back. And Israel says, yeah, but you're leaving us with a wounded bear in a cave. And the first thing he does is going to come out at us or the Gulf. But he has to avoid Netanyahu, has to avoid the idea that he was trying to pull Trump back in. So they have to be. And this is all coming from, I must note from the Israeli press, it's not coming from Netanyahu. So we'll see what happens. But the problem would be not if a JD Vance necessarily or Marco Rubio were president, next president. That would be six years of vigilance and they would act. I think even Vance would. But if you get an AOC or a Pete Buttigieg or Newsom, they wouldn't. They will all dismissed Israel. I've never seen, just as an excursionist, I've never seen anything like this. My friend Megan Kelly the other day in a passionate interview which went viral because the people were juxtaposing it. When I was on her program last summer, she was very adamant about the necessity of the bombing to take away the nuclear threat. And then she made some really good points about Islam. And I mean, going back through five or six administration. Who are the people who blew up our Tanzania, our Kenya embassies, our Beirut embassies, our Marine barracks? Who were the ones that's sending shaped charge to blow up Americans? Who was the panty bomber, whatever we call the underwear bomber? Who killed people at Fort Hood? Who killed people at San Bernardino? Who killed people in a nightclub? Who did 9, 11, who are those?

[Sammy Wink]

Right.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The whole USS Cole, we know who. It's not Jewish terrorists, it's Islam. And so this idea that you have to rethink it because maybe the real enemy or maybe the real danger, Tucker said that, you know, Israel poses a greater threat than either China or the Islamic world. That's just crazy.

[Sammy Wink]

Megan said that she was manipulated by the pro Israel voice in the United States. I just thought that was. She was manipulated. It's a pathetic thing to say.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She's very bright. How could she be manipulated? The evidence is all out there. Her first excursus on it was very empirical. She said it right last summer. She said, I'm wondering now if I was misled. But she wasn't. She was confident when she said that because she was looking at the evidence. And I had, as I said earlier, a strong exchange with Piers Morgan, who is in that camp, and a professor from the uae. And they kind of, I thought, I didn't know. I haven't been feeling too well. So I went on it with the flu. And then both of them. It was kind of an ambush. But it was amazing what they were saying. There was no distinction, no appreciation that Israel is a constitutional, consensual society with elections and freedom of speech and even being a Jewish state, religious tolerance. And then they. And they were. I just asked them to compare places around the middle. The 500 million person Arab, Islamic. Can they think of anything comparable? They look at the UAE and they think it's got so much oil money and it's so western and it is more liberal in some sense. But as I asked my interlocutor, you're speaking from the UAE and you're criticizing democratic Israel, and if you were to put anybody on your podcast who disagreed with your government and the people who pay you, you would be fired. He denied that. And I said, then do it. And then secondly, I said, if you're a Christian or a Muslim in Israel, you have the ability to have a mosque or a church. If you're in the UAE or any of those countries, you have to be in an enclave. And I said, why don't you put somebody. I addressed it really to both of them. Why don't you put on apostate, have your podcast? When Piers said to me, well, I go all over the Middle east and I'm treated wonderfully and I can say what I want, I just politely said, but you're an international celebrity and you're treated very well because they think that you tilt on their side so they give you a platform. But I suggest to you that you might either get a Muslim apostate on your show or a critic of the regime in which you're broadcasting from, and then what would happen? Don't you think they'd shut you down? And he agreed?

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Oh, did he? I was going to say he probably didn't say anything to them.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

No, he. He was intellectually honest. He. He said, well, you might have a point there. But what I'm getting at, if you look at the Democratic Party, just to take the Democrats and you look at a Patrick Moynihan or you look at even the Clintons, you know what I mean? What are the Clintons saying about all this, you know, in the Democratic Party, that a guy with a Nazi T for 18 years is going to be the Democratic nominee for the Senate, and he's been on numerous anti semitic, anti crazy neo Nazi pods and associations. What would they say about this? And when Tucker says that all over the Middle East Islamic cities are much better than the west, what he's really saying is, I go To Qatar or I've been to Dubai or abba Abu Dhabi.

[Sammy Wink]

Abu Dhabi, Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah. And I've been to Kuwait. Citibank or Riyadh. And they're so nice compared to inner city Detroit. Well, yeah. I mean, they have the highest per capita in the world. Not because of their ingenious industrial capacity or technological astuteness. It's because they've got all this oil. But what the real thing is, why doesn't he do what I have done and go to old Cairo and then fly from old Cairo to Tripoli to Libya, and then I suggest he go to some cities outside Damascus and then let's see what he finds out. That would be like me saying, well, the Muslim world is a mess. Because if you look at Tripoli and then you look at Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Hillsboro, it's just a different world. But the fair comparison, if you're intellectually honest, is in American and Western cities, you have freedom. You don't have any freedom in those cities, and you have freedom of religious expression. So Muslims, it's very ironic, they don't point this out. Muslims that come over here not only have far more freedom than Christians or Jews and Islamic countries, but they have more freedom of expression here than they do in their own country. And so what I'm getting at is that is an empirical argument. It's there. All of the evidence is there. All the history of Islamic terrorism is there. So why did they do this? Why? Why? Why all of a sudden, in the year of our Lord 20, 26, are people on the right accusing Israel and the Jews basically of the people? They don't say the Jews, but they say the people who support Israel or something like that. Why are they pushing us, pushing us, pushing us as if we're toadies. And I think it is that when things. The left has made this such a currency of the Democratic Party that you can blame Israel. And because Israel didn't die after the 648 and 56, 67 and 73 wars, when it was an existential war, and it didn't die during all of the first and second intifada. I was there during the 2006, 2007 intifada, or maybe it was 2005. It was terrible. I saw a pizza place. We heard it blow up. And then three days later I went there and they were rebuilding it. But the point I'm making is that through all of this period, what brought it now, and the only thing, as I said to you the other day, the only thing I can think of is that Israel refused to die and then it thrived and unleashed its economy and its talent and it's booming and it's powerful. And then they said on this Piers Morgan this to be unnamed person, I don't want to give him any publicity. He said, well, they want to have a greater, they want to take over the whole Middle East. And that's resonating Tucker too. 12 million people, 10 and a half million people want to take over the whole Middle East. And he listed Gaza. I said the Arabs didn't want Gaza, nobody wanted Gaza. And the Israel pulled out of Gaza and they left a multi million dollar industry. So there are no Israelis in Gaza. So when they went on October 7th to butcher 1200 civilians and rape them and behead them and mutilate them, there wasn't a Jew in Gaza. That was an expansionary idea. As far as the west bank, they didn't have the West Bank. They have the west bank because in 67, five Arab nations in the west bank. In Jordan, which wasn't even the west bank, there was no interim Palestinians, it was Jordanian. They attacked Israel and in the same time they had the Syrian, the Golan Heights. If they just had said in 1965, well, tiny little Israel, we're going to be friends with it and we'll describe, we have plenty of land. There would have never been an occupation of the Sinai. There would never have been an occupation of Gaza or the west bank or Transjord. There would have never been an occupation of the Golan Heights. There would never been. And this person said today they're rocketing Hezbollah. Well yeah, if Hezbollah just said tomorrow this is the boundary between us and Israel and if Israel doesn't set foot in it, we promise we won't rocket their civil. It would be peaceful. And when they're now they're on the bomb, they kept saying, Piers Morgan kept saying they won't tell us how many bombs they have.

[Sammy Wink]

You mean nuclear bombs?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yes. I said they have about 175. And he said how do you know that? And I said, because I'm not stupid. I can go on any grok or chat and I can get pretty much a rough estimation because it's known, it's transparent. And he said, well, they don't admit it. And I said, you think the US says right now how many ready to go bombs we have? Do they even tell us we have about 50 big cold ware bombs in Turkey at Isilaq Air Force Base? How do I know that? Because in the popular news and you can research it does the USA appear, said, well, the US Told us how many bombs exactly it had in Turkey. No, it didn't. Russia doesn't tell us how many bombs they have. Nobody does. And they say, well what? And then I saw on CNN, Van Jones, to his credit, challenged the left wing consensus. They're all now in, well, Israel's got to tell us what its policy is. Well, right now I can tell you Israel has the ability to destroy all of its neighbors. And I can tell you they're not going to preempt any of them. If they would just not attack Israel. If they attack Israel and they're at the point of destroying the Jewish state, they've said, and again and again, there will be no second holocaust. And that's a policy. All they said is we have nuclear weapons informally and if you try to destroy the Jewish state at that critical juncture, we're not going to have a second holocaust. And you conjecture what that means.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, they have always been, we've got nuclear weapons, so just leave us alone. Not we're going to try to expand things for us.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And can they say that about Iran? Can Tucker say that about Iran? He said the other day that it would be pretty good if Iran had nuclear weapons. It's a little different, Tucker, because Rafanjani said that the nice thing about Israel was that half the Jews were there and it's a one bomb state. Reportedly he said that he tried to deny it later, but there's people Ahmadinejad threaten to destroy Israel. They always say they're going to destroy. When I walked from my apartment last year to my office and I saw these well dressed bejeweled women and men from the Middle east camping out with signs don't disturb protesters asleep in their brand new tents. I talked to some of them. It was all river to the sea. And while the Stanford kids, educated as they professed to be, didn't really know what river or what sea they were talking about from my talking with them, they did. They said, oh yeah, we're going to push all the Jews in the sea, kill them all. So this is all forgotten because right now they think there's an audience for this. And I've never seen anything like it. I'm 72 years old. I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen anything like this at all.

[Sammy Wink]

No. Israel's never given any indication that it's extreme.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

No. But I've never seen anything like Nick Fuentes with a huge audience saying that the chief existential threat to the United States is not China or not the Muslims, it's Jews. He didn't say Israel Israel. He said international Jewey. That came right out of Mein Kampf.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

International Jewey is a word that's translated directly from the German and Mein Kampf.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. And he. In fact, since you're there, we do have a little bit on Nick Fuentes. He apparently has decided he's a moderate Democrat and that he would like Trump to be impeached and the GOP destroyed are his recent things as well as the anti Israel.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

This is going to be very interesting because when I knew Tucker and I was on his show, he haphazardly, nonchalantly often made critical references to Bill Crystal and the neocon. Well, the neocons agree with him. Now a David Frum or Bill Kristol, they're all bulwark people or Max Boot or the rest of them. And you read the bulwark and they're for Graham Platinum. So is Tucker. He wants them on his show. So what I'm saying, they are going in the same direction as the Never Trumpers now. And it's going to be very interesting what the original and now vestigial Never Trumpers say, because these people are doing it because Donald Trump is too close to Jews and to Israel. And yet this is. The neocons were generically libeled as predominantly Jewish and now they're left wing. And now their critics are left wing, but they had almost the same positions. That's what's so weird.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, it is really strange. It's an interesting new age in American politics. But let's welcome back a sponsor, Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels or reduce swelling in your legs and feet, this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America, America healthy again. And two of its best selling health supplements are leading the way. First is Liver health formula. Over 100 million Americans have a sluggish liver riddled with fatty deposits. This can kill your metabolism, pile up on the pounds and make you feel tired. Liver Health Formula takes care of all that. It supports thriving liver health with special nutrients like artichoke extract and milk thistle. This is one of the easiest ways to slim down and revitalize your energy levels. Never. Oh, sorry. Next is lymph system support. If you struggle with fluid buildup or swelling in your legs, ankles or feet, this is for you. The natural ingredients in lymph system support help gently flush extra fluid and toxins out of your body. And right now, for a limited time, you can get 35% off liver health formula and live system support plus all the 50 plus health supplements pure Health Research has to offer. Head over to PureHealthResearch.com that's PureHealthResearch.com and use coupon code Victor at the checkout. That's PureHealthResearch.com with coupon code Victor to save 35% on your order today. And we'd like to thank Pure Health Research for continuing to sponsor the Victor Davis Hanson show. So, Victor, let's turn very quick. Oh, I just wanted to add one thing to the arsenal that Iran has and that is it could care less about its own people. So it's perfectly willing to get them all blown up in various capacities to defend themselves. So I think that's.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

You could go further than that, Sami. You could say that they have the fourth largest oil and gas reserves in the world. And for the last five or six years, the people have been destitute. And it's not just Joe Biden lifted sanctions and gave them 100 to 200 billion windfall, but when you are creating the largest military, the largest ballistic missile, the largest drone force, the largest navy, the largest nuclear program in the entire Middle east, they're spending, I don't know what the percentage was, but I would bet you that they are spending 20% GDP minimum on defense. And I would bet you another 10 to 15% of GDP is going right into their own coffers and it's invested overseas. And so it'll be very interesting when this is all over one way or the other and people go into that country from the west if they're allowed in. And all the left has been saying and mess to the right, well, we didn't do anything. You'll get a picture of what their status of their military is, which will beg the question, do you want to spend a half a trillion dollars and rebuild all that nuclear facility underground? Do you want to go back and get your tunnels, all of your factories for missiles and drones and you want to give all your billions of dollars over the years to Hezbollah, the Houthis and Hamas? Because if you do and your rial is what, a million to the dollar, what are you going to tell your people that all these things are more important than than they are 93 million people.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, Victor, let's turn to Britain then. And the Reform Party election results came in yesterday and it was a big win for Niall Farage's Reform Party. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on that. That's amazing.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah. Everybody thought that the Labor Party originally would be okay because Niall Farage, they said, was of fringe candidate. Eccentric loudmouth, they called him. And that Conservatives then, they were kind of like the Bob Dolekin Republican Party then. They were ossified, calcified. And that the laborer, New Labor. New labor was kind of like Neil Kinnock. But they had a twist to it. It wasn't just socialists, quasi communists now, although it was. But they had the DEI and the open border and the Green. They had all the winning issues. And so they thought that their future was going to be assured because. And they were right about the Conservative Party. Boris Johnson was a terrible prime minister and he wrote an article the other day that below replacement fertility is fine. It's just fine. I know. Elderly. An elderly population that gets ill is going to be fine. Disappeared by a shrinking youthful population. And history says the opposite. And giving a lot of examples about decreased fertility ruining a country. So that was a whole. The Conservatives were just. They didn't believe in anything. Truss did a little bit. She did, but she was not an adept politician so far. What they didn't realize is that that population was kind of where MAGA was and they were in the majority. In other words, every single day they saw crime on their streets, just like we do from illegal immigrants. And then when they look to labor politicians and the Green Party and the leftists, they were telling them that they were racist to be pointing that out, and they were not going to protect them. So here was the party of feminism and a woman's right to choose. And there was systematic rape and grooming by the Pakistani immigrant community of young underage English girls. And the left was trying to hide it. Stormer himself, apparently, allegedly. So they were right on the immigration. They warned also that closing down the offshore oil fields de facto and not trying to explore for new oil and gas and not building nuclear plants, but going solar in Britain. I think I've been to Britain 10 times and I don't think I saw the sun more than four days. And it's not even that windy sometimes. So they ruined their competitiveness with that. They socialized the economy, they had unrestricted illegal immigration, they disarmed. And you know, even a middle class person that wants a living wage takes pride in the idea that the Royal Navy is at one time the greatest navy in the world and can protect Britain. It can't. Now, if a Soviet submarine or a flotilla would go into the English Channel, they would have to call either the United States or France and they wouldn't be much help. So all of that is the same thing that's happening here. And he took advantage of that. And his strength was he was blunt and he was honest and he didn't care. He was kind of Trump in his mannerisms. And he won. He got more votes than the conservatives in these seats put together. We don't know the whole tally, but it's. And Stormer, if he should just resign, he should just say, I led the Labour Party into oblivion and we need to have an election. Or if he's not going to have an election, then let's appoint somebody else. It might help. Have better luck.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Speaking of being blunt, did you see, or I've only seen excerpts of the California, I'm sorry, the Los Angeles mayoral debate with Spencer Pratt in it. And he, I think, well, I don't think, I know. They did a poll and 89% of the people that were polled said he won the debate. And I think it is that pleasure in his very blunt, straightforward talking with the two bureaucrats sort of mealy mouthing around about things. I'm not sure. Did you have any reflections on that?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

We told the truth and Karen Bass had a choice. She could either lie and say she wasn't in Uganda and the reservoirs were full and the hydrants worked and she didn't oversee prohibitions on gleaning the hills and her. The vice mayor was not a bomb throwing felon and the head of the water and power was not a PGE functionary they hired at 700,000 that didn't do a blank, blank thing to fix the water crisis. And the head of the fire department was more interested in DEI and trans issues than they were protecting him. That's what he basically said. And he said, you spent $400,000 per person on home and just go there, they'll stab you. And he made a good point. I mean, we've taken the homeless issue and we were so afraid that society, because of the depression area terms like hobo and bum. I remember when I asked my grandfather, how many people did you have here in the depression? And he said, I had 24 relatives. I said, well, where'd they come from? He said they would telegraph me and I'd go to the Selma train station and I'd have to, to pick my way through the bums hobos and then I would get them and bring them back. And I was kind of shocked at that. But what he meant was people that weren't, you know, weren't and this was during the Depression when there was an excuse for it. They couldn't get a job. The unemployment rate was 25%. It's now 4.3%. And so it's mostly, let's face it, it's not what the left said. It's not. There's not enough housing. They spend a fortune on hotels and everything. It's drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs that people self medicate. And in the old days, everybody in California, to take that one example, I can tell you that in my family, my extended family and friends, family, they would say, my mom, my aunt, my cousin is up at Stockton or up at Napa. And what they meant was we had mental institutions. I'm not saying they were so great. You know what the culprit was for all of this. I know this sounds conspiratorial, but it was One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. And that portrayal of the Palo Alto psych ward as a monstrous place. I know people. My former wife worked there. She was a wonderful person. She is a wonderful person. And heroically, her job was to help organize forays for the mentally ill patients to go out on excursions to lakes and things. And it was a very humane place. She really loved the doctors there. They were compassionate. But that had been just portrayed as a nightmary stalag. And then that swept. And then all of these state officials thought, well, if the left says that these are concentration camps and we're shocking people into death, then why not just put them on the street? That way we save money. And that's what they did. And they shut these mental hospitals down and we need to reopen them, you know, and instead what we're doing, instead of reopening hospitals and having civil service people accountable to the people, we're outsourcing all this money to the people in Somalis in Minnesota and all these different groups in LA that are hospice, mental health facility, and they're just ripping us off, but it's drugs and you know, and everybody gets mad at Donald Trump for blowing up these cargo ship boats coming in with drugs on the Caribbean or interfering in Mexico's internal affairs. These countries are making a fortune off the people in the street and we can cut it off.

[Sammy Wink]

The interesting thing in that debate was that Spencer Pratt said downtown is Zombieland, basically, and you've destroyed it. And Mayor Bass said, well, we are trying to solve the problem of downtown and we're turning buildings that have been emptied of businesses because nobody can do business down there into homeless shelters.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah, what will that do to them?

[Sammy Wink]

Nothing, Absolutely nothing. What a bad idea. She should be ashamed of herself.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She is. What she's basically lying about is. Here's what she's trying to convey. Well, we're going to get all these homeless people. We're going to have have showers and mental health care. They're all going to put on work clothes and take paint and paint all that graffiti. They're going to get pride of. They're not. They're going to light fires in their room and they're going to destroy it like they've done it everywhere else and everybody knows it. I think I mentioned to the audience right after 9, 11 and during book tours I spoke at the California Club, Capitol Club and the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles maybe three or four times and you can walk from one to the other. And I used to go to the LA Book Fair and I always thought around the millennium it was called the LA Renaissance. All of a sudden these beautiful high rises and they kind of shut down the old slur that there's no downtown in LA like San Francisco. It was, it was a big high rise, law, medical, ucla. It was booming. And I can remember as late as maybe 2010, my late daughter, I dropped her off there at a bunch of people that she knew from Pepperdine had a party there and she said, could you take me into downtown la? I thought, oh my God. And it was just bumper to bumper. And when I spoke at those clubs, it was bumper to bumper. There were celebrities you'd see on the street downtown. And so the last time I was asked to go there, I thought, well, well, I haven't been there in a few years. I hear it's a little rowdy, but I better be careful. I don't want to go in there at rush hour. At 2:30 there was nobody there and there was no. I tried to walk on the side. You couldn't walk on the sidewalk. There were all these canteens and homeless people and it was just, it was a dystopian nightmare.

[Sammy Wink]

Yes, Zombieland, definitely.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

You know, I can't say the word medieval because there were places in medieval Europe that were nicer than lost downtown LA or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, that's true. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Hephaistus. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

[Bradley Devlin]

If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show. The Tony Kennett cast the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7pm Eastern and unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American sarcasm. Thom Tillis I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kenneth cast on YouTube, X radio TV or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can catch Victor on X at VD Hansen and on Facebook at Hansen's Morning Cup. So if social media is your news place, please follow him on either of those sites. So Victor Hephaistis is my favorite God and he is the God of craftsmen and he's lame and in fact he had the most beautiful wife, I think. But I was looking forward to hearing a little bit about.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Before I do, I'll just mention I'm not exaggerating. I can just tell one other anecdote right during the first year of COVID there was a forum that had been planned before in Seattle and they asked the people to go and they weren't familiar yet whether you could do it on Zoom or not. They were, but I went to the Fresno airport and flew to Seattle and I think there were four people on the airplane and I got there in the middle of COVID and then I got a hotel and I went to sleep about 10:30 and I had a knock on my door. I thought there's nobody in this hotel, it's only me and about five people. And it was the concierge and he says we're going to have to move you to the other side of the hotel. And I said why? And he said did you see down there? And I said yeah, what are these people? And they had taken over the intersection below these cars and they were going out of control and there was this whole mob and I heard stuff. I said those are fire. He said no, those are gunshots and they're shooting this way and we've been worried about our guest. I said, all five of us. So. So I had to get up, I was asleep, repack and then move to the other side because as I mumbled something I said well, isn't there a police force in Seattle? And he said apparently not, but they had taken over the whole intersection. We're spinning wheelies and that's the least of the problems. Hephaistus is one of those gods that is known on Linear B tablets. Linear B, remember, is the Greek speaking pre classical civilization. It was sort of Near Eastern in its form with a palatial culture. And then we had the dark ages for 400 years and the city state reemerged at 800. But it shows you there was a continuity of culture because his name is on Linear B tablets. He's a very. You know, it's kind of funny, we've talked about that before. Hestia and Hephaestus, this he is a son of Hera and Zeus. They all have dead end kids, you know I don't mean that, but he's not. When you see the number of sanctuaries to Athena or to Apollo or to Zeus or to Herod and then you see Ephesus, there's only. I think, I'm just thinking memory. There's the Hephaistion. That is probably the best preserved Greek temple on the Greek mainland. And it's right in the Agora of Athens. If you ever want to see an actual Greek temple without restoration, there's some restoration, but what it would look like, you can go to the Hephaestus. The Temple of Hephaestus.

[Sammy Wink]

Wasn't it redecorated, Christian?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Inside it was a Byzantine church for a long time. And then it was redecor. The archaeologists restored it. It was by what I guess we call it the Attic architect. Because there were a series of William Dinsmore Jr. And his father, the great William. Well, they were both good architects. I had a classroom when I was Greece and we went to the architect of the Hephaiston, that's what they called him. And the temple of Apollo, excuse me, the temple of Poseidon at Sunian on Cape Sounian. It's almost exactly the same S and there's a temple of Artemis at Browron about 30 miles outside Athens. And then there's the temple of Aphaia at Ramnus. And I think there was even a temple at Carni that's been lost. But those temples are almost the same, so they were kind of blueprinting them to the gods. But Athens worshiped Ephesus and so did the island of Limnos. That's that big island if you come out of the Hellespont or the Darnell, it sits right there and it controls the exit. The Germans took that in World War II, first thing when they invaded Greece and they held it for most of the war. And it's a very beautiful island. But they have a cult of Ephesus there and they've excavated it. But otherwise he's the God of the volcanoes, he's the God of the smith, he's Roman, Vulcan, and he's lame and that supposedly reflects some of. I mean, there's been a whole scientific literature is why would a blacksmith God appear lame? Did he drop a hammer on his foot? Did he inhale arsenic that they used to temper bronze? Was it birth defect as you get the impression? According to Greek mythology, Zeus bore Athena out of his head. And supposedly Hera birthed Hephaestus out of his head without conjugal relations with Zeus. And he got mad and threw him off Olympus. And he fell for days into Limnos, where he crashed and broke his leg or his foot, or maybe he injured it during the process. He's not very well represented in popular mythologies. The most famous is in the Iliad, where he's deformed and kind of brawny and ugly. And Aphrodite is the most beautiful woman in the world, and she's having an affair with Ares, the duplicitous God of war. And so Ephesus creates a little net that's kind of like a blanket, but it has mesh wires. And then they start fornicating and he pulls the. The rope and they're caught in a net. And then he takes it up to Olympus and all the gods look at it. But Greek mythology being what it is, the joke's kind of on him. So they said, well, it's kind of wrong what they're doing, but man, I wish I was Aries. And so this is this trope too. And you see it a lot in Greek mythology of the contrast. And I know that Levi Strauss and all these French anthropologists and a lot of British mythographers have all, you know, Robert Graves, the combination of the ugly and the beautiful. So you can. Or civilization in the wild. So you see a centaur and it's got a wild horse body, but it's got an educated man's torso on it. And that is somewhat like the marriage between Hephaestus, who's deformed and swarthy because of the smoke and muscular. And then he marries this beautiful woman. And I guess he's sort of the male counterpart of Athena. She's the God of wisdom and craftsmanship and civilization and industry. Athena Propolis, that protects Athens. And he's the one, she's sort of the strategist, he's a tactician that tells people, here's how you build a fire, here's how you smelt iron, here's how you mold bronze. And so when you go to sanctuaries, sometimes outside the sanctuaries, if you see places that were crafts smith or places where they Smelted iron. You'll see little dedications to Hephaistos or you'll see even people giving army farmer at Delphi to Hephaestus because of his craftsmanship. So he's credited with all the great crafts products of the ancient Greek mythological world. So the beautiful shield of Achilles, he made it. Or Zeus's thunderbolt, he made it. But I think Vulcan is a much more prominent Roman God than if Isis was a Greek God. Because the Romans were far more industrious and, you know, they were much better. They weren't as aesthetic builders, but they were much more gigantic. They built buildings with vaulted domes and cement in a way that the Greeks couldn't.

[Sammy Wink]

Maybe Hephaestus was lame because they noticed that often among craftsmen, because they're doing these massive projects, they're involved with dangerous technologies that accidents happen. And so a lot of the craftsmen end up hurt.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That's a theory. There's two or three theories and they have support, both scientific but also mythological, that it's like, if you're blind in Greece, what can you do? You can develop your memory and be a bard like Homer. If you were born crippled and you can't walk around very much, maybe you can just be in a stationary occupation by a smith, build up your upper body. People have suggested that. They've suggested. But every time there's a scientific question, you know, what caused the Athenian plague? Or why were the Cephaesus lame? Then a classic. Enlist a scientist and they'll tell you that he was ugly because the forging of copper requires arsenic. Or if there's a shortage of tin and it causes skin diseases and neuropathies of the leg and foot. But I think more it's the idea of the contrast that here's a very strong. And he has references to the same phenomena as does Petronius and the tapos in Roman literature of the late republic is. Is that beautiful Roman women who have white lead paint and wigs. They sit at the first row of the gladiatorial and they want to feel the blood and the sweat and the dirt get on them. And they love these big muscular. That was really played upon when that weird Spartacus series showed. It was a very strange TV show because it was supposed to talk about the slavery zone revolts.

[Sammy Wink]

But the one that was called Spartacus Blood and Sand, I think, yeah, it

[Victor Davis Hanson]

was basically softcore pornography where they just showed a bunch of guys that were really good shape and women and then they were fornicating and they showed it full funnel Nudity or they were fighting.

[Sammy Wink]

So it was the violence and the fornication.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

The point was that they tried to pick up on things that their researchers had read in Petronius and Ovid and because they had these very perfume lovely dressed women who were like hugging and making out and having relations with these sweaty, big muscular guys that had just been covered with blood, you know, so that's kind of what the. That's kind of one of the interpretations of hapisis. He hasn't. Women have an attraction for a big, muscular, brawny guy from the Smith and

[Sammy Wink]

they don't care how ugly he is.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

No.

[Sammy Wink]

Did women, speaking of blood and sand, did women really wear wigs as they had in that movie? That was weird.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I think people should realize because the whole field of classics, from Martin Bernal's Black Athena to the uncle of Highcomb Jeffries, by the way, who was a racist professor at Wellesley and tormented the great classicist Mary Lefkowitz. But he had this theory of ice people and sun people. And the sun people, of course, were noble black people. Frank Snowden was a great classicist. He was an African American and he wrote Blacks in Antiquity and he discussed that whole issue. There was no racial prejudice in antiquity. That was a later phenomenon when Europeans in the age of discovery, 16th century, went to Africa. And then they extrapolated that because they didn't have cities or technologies like Europe, that they were, were backward genetically and therefore they fulfilled Aristotle's requisite that slaves should be less capable. Slaves were natural. There were people who were natural slaves. But until then, you know, slave comes from the word for a white Balkan person, a Slav.

[Sammy Wink]

Isn't it Aristotle that said some people by their very natures are just slavish?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yes. Okay, so that may have been the Orthodox view, but you got to remember he was talking about Greeks that looked alike. So nobody knew. You couldn't tell necessarily that somebody was a slave and it wasn't based on inferiority. That's why Aristotle has to write that, because most people didn't believe at the time it was, it was based on an accident of birth or being in a city that was taken, captured, and then all the people were enslaved. The idea of a particular race that came in the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries. But in any case, what I'm getting at is that Roman women, as today you get really wealthy kids and they want to. I see this at Stanford all the time. When I park at the parking lot, I'll see a kid come in with a BMW and he'll Come out with flip flops. But he'll be, be playing some of the most obscene rap music there is, you know, or I'll be walking and you'll see somebody whose parents are multi, multi millionaires and he's, you know, I don't know what he's pre law, pre medicine and yet he talks like jive talk because it's a fascination with the inner city. Well, the same thing happened in Rome with the wealthy. So because the wealth, because people who, who the Romans looked down on or they thought were more violent, that is the Germans especially and some of the Gauls, they were white skinned and blonde and so a lot of Roman women wanted to wear white lead makeup and then they had blonde wings. Red haired wigs are really valuable from Scotland and Ireland. And that showed that you were daring or you were out, you know, or you were pushing the limits and you made a statement. Statement just like you know, trying to be. I don't know what the attraction is for suburban kids, whether they're black, white or what with when they pull their pants half down and they, they wear their sneakers and they, they have the window down. I was at the service station about five months ago and a guy pulled in the BMW. When he got out I thought his pants were going to fall off and he had had the boombox coming out. But he was a affluent white guy. That same attraction is in Rome.

[Sammy Wink]

Did you just see that video where the guy, a guy came in to take over his car with his family in it and he got out with a gun and was trying to tell him get away from my car and my family. And he was hijacking the car. He had his pants halfway down and his boxers up and, and in that particular fashion. So it's kind of interesting.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

It's funny though because the left has told us that illegal immigrants are noble and people who want to deport them are racist and bigots and nativists. And that was an African American family.

[Sammy Wink]

Yes. And that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And this was a Hispanic of some background. Illegal alien that was gonna shoot em and take their car until they shot him.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, yeah, sure.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

And I can tell you that here in southwestern Fresno county when I look at the KMPH website or some Valley websites or even the Fresno B website, when you look at the illegal alien wrecks, car wrecks, DUIs, usually you can tell because the driver leaves the scene of the accident. And I would say 90% of the. Our dogs are out here on the studio are barking. But I'd say 90% of the people who are victimized, are Hispanic. And the people who want that not want illegal aliens to be amnesty or the immigration law not enforced or mostly wealthy people. But they never suffer the consequences of their own ideology.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, Victor, we need to welcome back a sponsor, Patriot Mobile. Every day Americans make choices that shape our country's future right down to which cell phone provider we support. Here's what most people don't realize. Patriot Mobile isn't just a wireless provider. They're an activist organization funded by selling top tier cell phone service. They've been on the front lines defending our freedoms long before it was cool, standing in the gap when others were wouldn't. The best part is they deliver prioritized premium service on all three major US Networks giving you the same or even better coverage backed by 100% US based customer support. Get unlimited data plans, mobile hotspots, international roaming and more. And when you switch to Patriot Mobile, you'll help grow a movement that fuels the Christian conservative cause. Every bill you pay helps advance the values of faith, family and freedom. Switching is easier than ever. Activate in minutes. Keep your number, keep your phone or even upgrade. Take a stand today. Go to patriotmobile.com VDH or call 972patriot and use promo code VDH for a free month of service. That's patriotmobile.com VDH or Call 972patriot and use promo Code VDH. Make the switch today. That's patriot mobile.com VDH and we'd like to thank Patriot Mobile for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, let's go ahead and just move on. I this might not be a long one, but the White House correspondent's dinner shooter Alan Cole has. Sorry. Cole Allen has an apology apologetic judge who has been apologizing to him for the conditions he's suffering in the jail. And there's some talk out there that he was probably triggered by the Iran war. Sad thing, huh?

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah. Only in the left wing, American mind and judicial mind. Can you have somebody who wrote a manifesto that he was going to kill Donald Trump for three reasons. The lie that he was a traitor, that was Russian collusion hoax. It was just bunked. The lie that he was a rapist from the E. Jean Carroll trial which he was not convicted of. And the lie that he was a pedophile, which the left circulated without evidence from despite the testimonies of some of the victims. And Giselle Maxwell that Trump was not involved sexually with the young girls. So he said he had a motive and then he outlined what he was going to do he confessed that once he did what he was going to do, he'd probably be dead. He's on film all through the hotel, scouting out. He's on film shooting somebody with a shotgun on his way in. And he is on, he chronicles all. And they know how he got from Los Angeles on the train vis a vis Washington and then a judge. And because he's acted as if he's from an affluent family, half African American, and he almost immediately posed as a victim. And now we're supposed to feel that this either Biden or Obama appointed judge is being empirical and rational. When he is sympathizing, he apologizes to the way he's treated. They were people, not a lot of them, but maybe 200 people of the 1400 that were arrested that walked into the rotunda and they did not commit an act of violence. They thought the door was open, that was a misdemeanor trespassing. And they walked around and went out and they were arrested. Some of them got 80, 90 days in miserable jail conditions. Julie Kelly has really chronicled the other people that were in solitary confinement. They were, some of them had medical conditions. They were denied access to food that didn't make them sick. They were to medicines. They were ridiculed by the guards. They were tormented and they hadn't done. I mean, this man killed the highest federal office, tried to kill the President of the United States. And a federal judge is now contextualizing him. And we know what he's going to do. He's going to try to oversee a trial in which he is declared either medically mentally incompetent or that it was manslaughter, attempted manslaughter. So.

[Sammy Wink]

And we'll see what happens with him.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Yeah, I mean, it will just reinforce the conservative stereotype that if you're, if the victim is white and conservative and you're in Washington, you're not going to get a fair judge and you're not going to get a fair jury and you're not going to get anyway either way. And so you can go back to when the same thing is true of New York, when people, you can see all of these people that had no cash bail that just went in and then they went out and you know the judges who did it. And then the same thing happens in New York. And so believe me, and heaven forbid, if he had attempted this against Barack Obama and he was some rural white guy from Alabama who took the train up and he wrote a manifesto that Barack Obama was a rapist, a pedophile, And a traitor. And then he said he wanted to kill him and he rushed through that thing with a shotgun. He would be in solitary confinement right now, and he should be if that were true. But it's so patently obvious that this thing is already becoming ideological.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, well, speaking of ideological and criminality, our representative, Ilhan Omar is refusing to hand over evidence or records for investigators in the fraud case in Minnesota. But also, just to add to that picture, and Ohio, they're now investigating fraud in Ohio's Medicaid system. And in fact, they've found that they think 66 million in fraud, where 94 businesses in one building were charging for medical services that were never rendered. 94 businesses in one building.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Ilhan Omar has really had her brand tarnished. She was the heartthrob of the left, but her sister was involved, and she was running protection for her sister along with Tim Waltz and Keith Ellison, the Attorney General. And then we know, in addition to that, she's got all these immigration problems where it's pretty obvious, allegedly, that she married her brother to bring him into the United States because he was engaged in a gay lifestyle in the UK and his parents traditional. Pretty clear also that her family was not poor refugees from Somalia. They were functionaries, military functionaries of a corrupt elite that did commit a genocide. So it's kind of ironic when she talks about genocide in Gaza when her father was engaged in slaughtering people in the Somali civil wars, civilians especially. And then she can't decide on Monday whether she's worth $30 million or on Tuesday she's worth 20. Nothing. It's kind of like I have an accountant that would be like. I said, well, I'm worth $30 million. And he said, no, you're not. And I said, well, I turned in this form. I must have made a mistake. I didn't understand it was estimated value versus real value or I didn't look at the liabilities. No accountant would ever allow that. That was a complete lie. I don't know what the purpose of it was, either to sound like she very rich or to mask what her husband was really doing. I don't care. The other thing about her is she's. We had this idea. The left tried to promulgate that the squad were Rashid Tlaib and Presley and AOC and Ilya and Omar were really bright upcoming young people. They weren't. They were mostly admitted to the university under DEI auspices. They never did much, much work. And AOC doesn't know anything. She said recently that black woman create didn't she say black women created democracy?

[Sammy Wink]

Yes, she did, in an interview. Yes.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Let me ask you, aoc so

[Sammy Wink]

the

[Victor Davis Hanson]

three luminaries who signed, we just had Michael Austin on, you know, National Treasure, author of National Treasure, great book on the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence. So the three most famous of the many, these signees of the Declaration of Independent were Ben Franklin, John Adams. John Adams. Was John Adams black? Was Benjamin Franklin black? I don't think so. Was Thomas Jefferson black? I don't think so. How about the Constitution? James Madison? Oh, he was black. Black. Oh, I meant Professor Hanson. I meant the original creators. Well, that's already been debunked. Martin Bernal tried to tell us that Socrates was black and therefore democracy was. But Socrates was. Even if he was right, and he's not, Socrates was an opponent of democracy. His students were the 30 tyrants that overthrew it in 403. So that's just bogus. So the people who created democracy, and I mean, not just as Plato says, don't confuse. I'm extrapolating. But when you thieves rob a bank, they choose who gets salute by voting. Right. Should we split it up according to this way or. Let's vote on it. Oh, it's democracy. So according to the left, a bunch of Iroquois tribal leaders were saying, who's going to be the next successor? Well, my tribe. No, my tribe. No, my tribe. Well, let's vote on. Well, they. They invented democracy. Voting is not democracy. Democracy is a constitutional system in which you have formal protocols about legislative, judicial and executive power and type of either representative or direct voting. And that's very rare. It was inaugurated in Greece and the constitutional form of it, republicanism, was created in Rome. And so when she says, when AOC says that black women created democracy, or Ilyan Omar's reading a script and It's World War II with Roman numerals, he said, and then World War 11. Where have you been? You know what a Roman Numeral is? It's two capital I's. You think that's 11?

[Sammy Wink]

Okay, just in her defense, she did correct herself immediately.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She corrected herself when she saw people in the audience and their facial expressions like, what an idiot. And so that squad's reputation has been severely tarnished.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, it sure hasn't.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Although I give credit now, though, because there are people now. I was watching Trace Gallagher the other night, and they had a Democratic activist there, and he said, well, our party has been evolving like the mega. And he said, Trace said, you mean kind of like a democratic socialist? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he there I've been watching TV and reading and really a new thing that what's happened is the Democratic Party, younger people are running the party. They're full of themselves. They're heady drunk. They're punch drunk. And they say now that every billionaire did something like Ken Griffith, Mondalmi taps on his window. You know, it's not just that they didn't build out Elizabeth Warren, but they stole it. And it was. Was that AOC was saying or was that Ilion? Omar said, you just can't make that much money. It's just impossible. That was aoc, I believe it's just impossible. No, it's not impossible.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

I mean, Balzac may have said, behind every fortune is a crime. And maybe they have.

[Sammy Wink]

That's what she was trying to suggest, that there was a crime.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

She should ask Barack Obama, how do you make 75 million bucks? How he could never see do that, I don't know. Speaking. He spent the last year they came to him and said, your polls are at 39%. Hang out the golf course, let Hillary and this new guy Trump fight it out and keep out of it and smile. And then cut Netflix deals and all these deals with Michelle and Hawk your memoir. And that's what they did. And they ended up worth 75 million with 4 million. Imagine it. Had he not been in politics. He never made a dime. How did Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton become worth 100 million bucks? What? They sold influence. They built Uranium One 500,000 for speaking to communist mayor of this former Soviet Union in Moscow. They all do that. How did Al gore become worth 100 million bucks? How can you do that? Haoc? He, he. I know how he did it. He got a sweetheart deal with a cable company and then he went around the world telling everybody we were going to die from carbon emissions. And then he sold it to the big carbon emission producer, Guttar, to bail him out on the proviso that there would be a hardcore. His cable would become a hardcore Al Jazeera station. And then he went to all this, the schools of education and all of the Department of education at the state level. And he said, I got a great book, Earth and the Balance, and you need my book and you need me my video and you need my teaching plan. And he sold it and he made millions on it. So that's how they do it.

[Sammy Wink]

And his new gig is that we're entering an ice age, so he's going to make.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

How did Hasan Aoc, Could I ask one Last question. How did Hasan Paiko, a socialist podcaster, drive a $200,000 Porsche? You can't do that. You'd have to make. Where he lives in California to afford that. You'd have to have 400,000 bucks. But he's. Oh, he has a podcast, and he has this and this so he can make money. And he's making more than the poor guy from Mexico who's pouring cement at 20 bucks an hour. That's not fair. Well, why don't you give up your poor? All these people. Mandami was a rich, rich Ugandan. His mother was a subsidized filmmaker that made millions. His father was an endowed professor. You think at some point they would say, wow, nobody even knew who we were? And we left Uganda. We were kind of foreign implants into a native culture. We came from India, and that wasn't our country. We just settled there as colonial settlers, sort of like what we say the Israelis are. And then we made a fortune. Now we were despised by the Ugandan population as interlopers, like the Chinese are in Vietnam. So then we came to the United States and we really struck it rich. Okay, fine, I think that's great. But then don't go around calling people colonial settlers or. You know what I mean? Or then he says, I'm going to tax the rich districts higher. The whiter districts, I mean. Well, as I've said before, that per capita income, people from India have the highest income income of any ethnic group in the United States. So why doesn't he just be honest instead of saying, why, I'm Mandami and I'm going to be taxing the wealthier and here, I mean, Indian Americans.

[Sammy Wink]

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back for a little bit more of the richness of the left's rhetoric lately. Stay with us and we'll be right back.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed, but some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife. The importance of passing along our values to our children. The faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive as long as we keep first things first. We've only just begun. America the Beautiful.

[Sammy Wink]

Welcome back. So, Victor, recently Obama has declared that the Attorney General of the United States is not the President's consigliere, and he was implicating Trump. And I'll get you the other one first, and you can say as you want. And Graham Platner, who has worn a Nazi insignia on his chest, tattooed on his chest, is now lecturing us about the evils of xenophobia, phobia.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Well, dear Mr. Eric Holder, in 2013, you gave an interview and you said they asked you. Ask him. Are you kind of. You've been here now, you know, for. Since 2009. You've been here for five, six years. Are you getting kind of tired? Nope. I enjoy my job. I enjoy. I'm the President's wingman, by the way. He was Attorney General, and I got to take. And then he said, which anybody else would be considered racist. I got to take care of my boy. So here you have the President of the United States being referred to as his boy by the Attorney General of the United States, who says he's his wingman. In other words, he's flying a plane next to Barack Obama's and protecting him from incoming flak. If you don't think that there was a close relationship between John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, his brother, who was Attorney General. So this is just. It doesn't even. It's not. What was Merrick Garland? Every time that Joe Biden said, why hasn't he indicted anybody? And then the next thing we know, Nathan Wade is in the White House on that day, and Jack Smith is appointed special counsel on November. I think it was November 13th, Jack. 2022. Miraculously, maybe it was a 23rd or 13. It was miraculous. It was three day. It was three weeks to the day, almost after Donald Trump announced his candidacy. And then, like, he was murder in the cathedral. You know, Beckett, will some. Not someone not relieve me of this menace? You know, King Henry ii. Oh. And so he said, well, why isn't he indicted? And then his little underlings, they said, okay, Michael Coentelo, you got to resign your prestigious number three post at the Attorney General's staff at Department of Justice and go right over and bail out that crazy, foolish Alvin Bragg and get a conviction, just like you did with Letitia James. And then call up Fannie. She's sending her consort, Nathan Wade. He's going to be in the White House that same day. Oh, and get Jack Smith appointed today. And they did. Oh, by the way, Letita James showed up. She's just in there. She's in the White House. That was all the wingman.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Merrick Garland turning the law enforcement into your private, private execution squad to the extent you could execute. And Graham Platner, with his xenophobia. I don't need to be.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Lex is so sick, because that Totenkopf, it wasn't just the third Panzer Division, it was the special assigned groups into the Holocaust. So he's. He. He deliberately put on a tattoo, which you could argue that thousands of people, that one of the last things they saw before they were incinerated were those tattoos on the arms or hands of SS soldiers that were conducting the Holocaust. And then he lied about it. He said that he was drunk and he didn't know what it meant. And then when some comrades of his leaked out that he did know what it meant, he bragged about it and used the word Totenkov. Then he pled that he was disabled and that he had fallen for the toxic masculinity of the US military and they forced him to do it. And that's the person Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer and Pelosi want to be senator.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. And they may elect him. So that brings me actually.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

They're not going to elect him. I don't think they're going to elect him.

[Sammy Wink]

That brings me actually to a bet on the LA mayoral race. I would like to have with you and I'll let you have the guy we both want. You can bet on Spencer Pratt, but I going to bet that those crazy people in LA are going to reelect that Bass, no matter how bad that guy made her look in that mayoral debate.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

There's a lot of money. I mean, more important than polls is always who raises the money because that tells you where the weight is going and he's starting to raise money. And that means that a lot of very affluent, professional, liberal people in Los Angeles are secretly not talking about. They're saying that they support Karen Bass and they're giving money to these PACs that support him. But I'm afraid it is more likely, I hope not, that on election day it'll be neck and neck and he may be ahead. And then, as in the case of our own Congressman Jim Acosta, a Democrat, he usually, I shouldn't say usually, that's unfair. But for two or three elections, he loses on election day and then take a deep breath and two, three, four weeks, the SEIU ballots, and I'm being generically, generally characterizing it's accurate, but union. Get out the boat. Come in. So she has all the unions, and in her case, because they ask her directly, I'm not imputing any illegality to her. They ask her on the debate, would you think illegal aliens should vote yes or no? And she tried to, well, what should I do? Because they're all going to vote. And yet if I say yes, it's. It'll be. And she tried to say, well, it depends, yes or no. And she's for it. And that means that she knows that there's going to be a lot of mail in ballots that are going to be dumped right after the vote counts in, and she's going to win.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show and I have a few of the handwritten cards that you received. So here. This is from Paula Reinhart. When my husband developed AML acute leukemia, I would listen to your podcast after I read my Bible. You and the Bible Bible, my ticket to. To remaining sane. I grew up in a small town, Virginia, with my father, the banker. So we know. We knew everyone. Your voice has the same ring of integrity of so many wonderful salt of the earth people that I knew. Please know I'm among the host of people who pray for, who have prayed for your service.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Thank you. I know a lot about aml. I have an unfortunate ability. I shouldn't say ability. Morbid research, curiosity. When people in my family get very sick, I try to spend hours. So I think I could write a book on astrocytomas, meningiomas, glioblastomas. My mother died of a rare cancerous meningioma and my daughter died of AML leukemia. So I used to know a lot about that.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. And this is from Beverly and Kevin Doyle. And I'm not reading all that.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That was a very kind letter. That's what I wanted to. To say.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah, I'm not reading all of it, but they wanted to say or. I have a feeling it's Beverly, I'm always sorry. I'm always thrilled to see you on FOX News and love the Blade of Perseus. I just gave my old boss a copy of the Dying Citizen and ordered another one for me. And so I hope you're enjoying that. Beverly Doyle.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

That's nice of her. Thank you.

[Sammy Wink]

And the reason I like this card, too is because of the. The picture on the front. And so for those with video, you'll see that cute little dog laying on its blanket looking out the window. Very cute. And this also had a. You got some beautiful cards. Beautiful sight of a beautiful picture of mountains with evergreen trees and a lake. Very relaxing. Mr. Hanson, please know that I am praying for you and your family. You are a blessing to me. Your works both inspire and encourage. Encourage me. I also appreciate your patriotism. May Christ continue to heal you and bless your family.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Thank you. That's very timely.

[Sammy Wink]

That's from David And David, your last name is very hard to read. I couldn't even I'm going to be

[Victor Davis Hanson]

spending next week at Stanford Med getting, gosh, when you go through this, getting scans and electrocardiograms and monitors for your heart and everything. So yeah, never ends. But I will know a lot more work. I am.

[Sammy Wink]

Yeah. Well, thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom today.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Thanks for listening and watching, everyone.

[Sammy Wink]

Thanks to the audience for spending a party of our weekend with us. We will see you in the future. And Jack and Victor will be with you on Tuesday, Thursday next week. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off.

[Victor Davis Hanson]

Thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like share and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own [e-mail] and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.