DOJ Bombshell: Did the SPLC Fund the Chaos It Warned About? | Victor Davis Hanson

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 one of our middle segments. Victor is going to be talking about the God Apollo today. So stay with us for that until then we'll look at a few news stories and Victor wanted to give an update on the Iraq War first and then we'll turn to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Stay with us and we'll be right back. 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 show time to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American star cast. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop. Find the Tony Kennett Cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. He is a subsidiary of the Daily Signal and you can find lots of articles and podcasts at the Daily Signal in fact. Victor has short form podcasts that you can find there as well. So please join him there. He is the Martin and Nellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Wait, wait, I'm a real person with feelings. You said I was a subsidiary. You're objectifying me as an inanimate object. I'm a person. Don't you remember the Thornbirds? What's her name? Barbara Stanway. She said I'm trapped in this old body, but I'm young. I'm young. I'm a person. I'm still a person. I'm not a subsidiary and inanimate. Oh, you got a good point there. Alright, Victor. So I know that you wanted to say a few more things on Iran this morning and then we'll turn to the Southern Poverty Law Center, but go ahead. Well, I think everybody should keep in mind what the Iranian strategy is because they're bleeding out $400 million in economic activity of all sorts, imports coming in that are necessary to fuel their industries to oil going out their revenue. And it's only a matter of time until they implode, but they're trying to, as they always do, they're trying to negotiate, negotiate, and then stop negotiating, then talk, talk, then start, and then to revive their feed days, send a few boats out to lay a mine or attack a thing and say, no, no, we're still in peace. And to give them their due, they've already dragged it out for two months. And it's all predicated on one premise. They think Donald Trump has a climate, they have climatized Donald Trump to a peace. So we haven't had any kinetic action in two or three weeks. So the American people are getting used to that. The stock market's gone up, oil's gone down. And so now they say it's a status quo. So now they're going to push it, push it, push it a little bit. And why doesn't Donald Trump unload on them for three reasons? He doesn't want to go back and have a war that you'd have to finish them off because there is stirrings, rumors that the resistance is getting emboldened. They may within three or four months rise up and you don't want them to be without power or water or bridges. The other thing is the Israelis came out with a report that they might have over a thousand missiles that we thought were destroyed that actually they wheeled out shot and then we hit their subterranean cover and they went to other places. So if that's true, Trump may think they've already inflicted billions of dollars of damage on the Gulf. If we sink too many of their ships and bomb them in retaliation for breaking the armistice, ceasefire, then they may take out the Saudi oil petroleum refining. I don't think they will because if they do that, they're not going to have a country. So where we are right now is each day things get worse for Iran and they know that, but they think, especially as they distill what Americans are saying on the left, whether it's Senator Murphy or Tom Friedman or the squad or Chuck Schumer, they're openly rooting for Iran. They really are. I'm going to be frank about that. So they feel that the Europeans don't like Trump and they're sitting it out and they feel that if they can just keep talking, hit now, hit there and get away with it. Trump will bleed in the polls to the 30s. He'll lose the midterms. He will be impeached. They'll cut off aid. That's their strategy. So sum it up. Hit just enough not to earn a full reprisal. Threaten just enough that you have enough missiles to hit the Gulf States hard, but not too much to earn a reprisal. And that's where we are. And at some point, somebody in the administration is going to have to get out their calculator. That's an archaic term slide rule and say, these are the amount of days left that they can be viable. Two weeks, three weeks. And so if it's eight weeks, you better do something because I don't think he has that much time. He should precipitate a conclusion within two weeks or so. Part of the problem is we don't know how much oil they had stocked in tankers. They're sitting around the world ready to go to the places that'll buy it. Number one, number two, we don't know to what degree the Chinese are sending by rail weapons and across Asia. They have a rail line directly into Iran. We don't know, as I said earlier, if the Russians are supplying them across the Caspian Sea, but I don't think that much is getting in by sea or air, but I don't know about land. So we need to get an accurate assessment. The economist for the Center for the Defense of Democracy has made that now widely quoted estimate of 420-something million in loss revenue a day. And that's not sustainable. But we also don't know how many mines they have laid. And where they were laid, it seems that they didn't lay them too close to the coast of Oman. So maybe there's a channel that we could demine and direct traffic away from their coast through. And I think that's what we're doing. Yeah, well, we'll see next week, especially how things turn out. So the Southern Poverty Law Center is under investigation for funding the exact people it says it's trying to fight extremists, and in particular the Clu-Klex Klam. But I think they also funded the, I think, they also funded the people that sponsored the Charlotte... Unite the Right. Yeah, Unite the Right. Charlotte rally right before Biden was elected, I believe it. Well, that was the accusation. And he kept saying that. So the strange thing about the Southern Poverty Law Center is then they've been funding the people that they say are their enemies. And so now they're under investigation for a fraudulent front. It started out as a good grassroots organization years ago, but now it's utterly corrupt. Every word in that title is misleading. Southern, no, it's not just Southern. It's all across the United States. It doesn't deal... Blacks are treated probably better, longevity for blacks are probably better in the New South than they are in Detroit, or Washington, D.C., or any of these other places. Southern Antipoverty, 21% of the California residents are below the poverty line. And we have a higher poverty rate than Florida does, the Southern State. Mississippi has a higher test scores, and there's eighth and ninth, tenth grade test scores than does California. So it's not a poverty organization. And then the Law Center, they're not just going out and suing people. They are just what has happened to the ACLU. They are a political extension of the Democratic Party. And they're not poor. They have almost a billion dollars in assets. And what they did, and this is not me speaking, and it's not the attorney generals in the department speaking, it's a grand jury that indicted them. And what they were doing is they were telling donors that give us this money for this particular purpose, and then they were secretly paying off Klansmen, neo-Nazis to stir things up so then that they could say white supremacy is on the rise. And it worked brilliantly for them and unite the right when someone was killed. But the person that was in charge of the travel arrangements to getting there was likely being paid a couple hundred thousand dollars for them. And so they remind me of what they called in Rome, the Wigillies, we get that word vigilant, the watchers or people. They were fire brigades in late Rome and they would go around and spot fires. And they took their cue from hundreds of years earlier, Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome, had a fire brigade. And he pulled up in front of houses that were on fire and he said, I will buy that house for a quarter of the worth or I won't put up the fire. But there was always accusation that he'd lit the fire. And the same thing with the Wigillies, they would show up and say, oh, there's a fire going on. And then they would show up with a brigade of slaves and fire equipment. In other words, like the Southern Poverty Center, they ceded these demonstrations with their own people to gin up the violence so then they could say, give us money to stop the violence. So the donors unknowingly were paying to help prompt the violence so that they could then get more money and say, well, you gave us money to stop white supremacy. But in North Carolina, Charlottesville, there's killing people and Donald Trump said there were good people on both sides and give us, and it was a work like a charm. And so that's what they were doing, allegedly. And it's had a horrible reputation the last decade. Morris D. is the person who founded it. We had to resign because of systematic charges of racism that they were not hiring people proportionately representative of their constituencies. And there was an epidemic of sexual harassment during the Me Too period. And so he's gone and they've been wracked by scandal. This is the biggest scandal. And of course, the Democrats are going to be very, very upset. Chuck Schumer went to the floor of the U.S. Senate saying that this was a witch hunt and a politicalization of the Justice Department. We should talk to the grand jury because they surely found enough evidence that they were ceding violence. And the Democrats, I think, know that the white supremacy card is pretty much played out. We're a long way from 2022 when Mark Milley went before Congress and would Lloyd Austin and said that the Pentagon ranks were rife with white supremacists. That was when they were urging people to read Professor Kinde how to be an anti-racist, all that stuff. And they said they're going to have a comprehensive report and they issued it. And I think it was in December 23, they found nothing. And so until Obama came, we were almost at a racially blind society. It was Obama that ginned up the DEI binaries and said it's not just blacks that have been victimized. It's anybody that's not white and it's not just 12% of the population, it's 30%. And they have legitimate claims against the white majority. I guess he met his mother too, was just his grandmother. So that started it all and that gave a breath of new air to this defunct organization. And they cannot exist unless they find white racism. The problem finally is if you want to find systemic white racism, you can find systemic black racism, you find a systemic any racism given human nature. But if you look at certain statistics, which particular ethnic group is the subject of inordinate hate crimes? Jews, which particular groups inordinately commit hate crimes larger than their demographic percentages, blacks, Hispanics to a degree, and Muslim. So you can't find any systemic racism there if you say, well, let me use another parameter. How about rare cases of interracial violence? It's about 7% to 8% of all crime. Oh, can't do that. Blacks are six times more likely to commit violent assaults, including murder on whites than whites are on blacks. Okay, well, how about just general crime? Who commits, who are the predator class that commits 48% of all murders, 12% of the population, blacks? So all of the statistics that you want to prove the existence of the organization, I vanish. It's not 1960 anymore, 70. If you say, okay, well, Victor, let's try per capita income by ethnic and racial group. I wouldn't do that if I were you. It's Zoran Mondami's Indian immigrants that have the highest per capita income and household income in the United States, followed by about six different Asian groups, Japanese, Chinese, etc. And white, so-called whites are about eighth or ninth down. And so it doesn't serve a function. And we know it doesn't serve a function because they're paying now to create racism so they can address it because they can't find enough. There's too many victims and not enough victimizers. So the market has to adjust and the market is adjusting by them creating more victims and more victimizers. And you would never know this if you just took the Biden years and all of the outcry that they had against white supremacy being the worst of all terrorism. We are never going to find the full story that went on in the Biden. There is no Biden years. There was just a wax and effigy. We saw him in the internight. I was talking, I saw him on TV the other night and he was completely, I felt bad for him. He's got stage four prostate cancer. He's got dementia. The idea that he could be president in a second year right now is frightening. He just talked and it was a language other than English. Nobody could understand what he was saying. And so he wasn't running the country. It was the Obama era activists with a conduit of Jill Biden and they were running the country. And they got the, their agenda was the most radical in the last 100 years. Not since the new deal. Have you seen socialism, open borders, politicized DAs, pacifism, appeasement abroad? It was a complete disaster. Yeah, sure was. Well, Victor, let's welcome back pure health research, one of our sponsors. 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 healthy again. And two of their best selling health supplements are leading the way. First is liver health formula. 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Pure health research, we'd like to thank them for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hanson show. So Victor, moving on to the really, one of the really big things this week is the redistricting of the Virginia, which passed in a special election to say marginally it passed and it, if it is successful in the courts, because I understand they're going to, you know, appeal it, it will redistrict Virginia to 10 districts that are Democrat and one that is Republican. And that's from five. I think it had 47, 48% voted for Trump. So they're going to give 10%. It's kind of like California. We're going to have about 9% of Republican representation for 40%. But Virginia is even worse if it survives the court. And I think Florida, Ronda, Santos will retaliate. And the funny thing about all of this is the Democrats have all, they were the ones that led this reform supposedly 15 years ago against gerrymandering and they wanted independent commissions. They wanted independent commissions not so they could stop gerrymandering. They wanted independent commissions to stop the appearance of gerrymandering because they knew that public interest lawyers, retired politicians on pensions, retired politicians on prestigious government boards were for the most part big government people. So when they would say five Republicans, two independents, it turns out that the Republicans were always Rhinos. So they got, they had most of their wish, but they, it was, it worked out well for them because they always said that we don't, we're not partisan. And now in California and Virginia, they overturned that. And it was the people who did it. And so when you looked at that California debate last night, yesterday, and you looked at the Democrats on there and they were asked to judge Gavin Newsom, homelessness, you know, we have half the homeless people in the country. They've ruined, they've actually ruined San Francisco. They ruined Venice Beach. They just can't go anywhere without defecation, urination, fornication, injection. And they were giving him a B. Most of them gave him A's. Kathleen Porter said, Oh, I might have to give him a B. And so it's, there was not one Democrat there who could say anything that distinguished themselves from what, what Gavin Newsom has done. So in any case, excuse me, in any case, I don't know why I left my phone on, they cut that. But when you listen, when you listen to the Democratic candidates, all they did was say, essentially, if you translate that what they were saying, we're going to get, we have more than, we have 55% registration advantage. We vote and we get what we want. We have super majorities. So we can do anything we want. And then when they were asked about the actual data on the Newsom Democratic administration with super majorities in the California legislature, all the judges in California from the most border left wing, they just said, everything's fine. So we have six, we have $8 gas on the coast. Well, it's fine. We drove out two refineries. It's okay. We were the fifth largest reserves of gas and oil of the 50 states, but we're not using it. That's okay. We've destroyed LA and San Francisco. That's okay. We haven't, if you have a fire, you can't afford fire insurance. You can't afford house insurance. You can't afford car insurance. We have the most dangerous highways in the country. Some of the worst school, highest tax, but nobody talks about that because, so then you say, who are the people? Who are they? They're not, well, first of all, there are 11 million people who left. Those are the conservatives now for the most part that are in Tennessee, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Texas, Arizona, Georgia, the Carolinas, Florida. They're gone. And then what we placed them, huge amounts of money, $11, $12 million in market capitalization in Silicon Valley, they're going to drive them out too. And then it's mostly poor people, poor people who can't afford housing. They can't afford insurance. We had half the nation's illegal immigrants and 27% of the people of California were not born in the United States, mostly from China and from Latin America. And so they're very poor and they tend to be in social work, government positions, SEIU, which is the teachers union and the SEIU are the most powerful unions in the country. So the problem California has is everybody's a victim and wants 40% Medi-Cal for everybody, including illegal aliens who want to change their sex. And 50% of all births are on Medi-Cal and we have a $250 billion scandal on hospice and COVID money that no one's talking about. But there's not enough victimizers. They're all gone. So all the people that were professionals and independent businessmen that paid the bills, when I'm talking about the 5% who pay about 60% of income tax and the 1% who pay about 48% they're leaving. And so at some point California is going to have to say, wow, we drove out all these small contractors, we drove out all these small accounting companies, we drove out all these insurance agencies, we drove out all these oil companies, Silicon Valley. And there's nobody left to feed us and to do the work so we can call billionaire rip-off artists. So when I looked at that cast of Democratic characters, it was all billionaires did this and that you don't get it, they're going, they're gone. You got your, you made your point. What you should be talking about, how are you going to pay off this massive $20, $30 billion deficit when you have already the highest income taxes at 13.3, if you raise it any more, you're going to lose everybody. And I can tell you that the things that California used to be noted for, the best medical care at med centers, the best freeways, the best aqueducts, the best reservoir system, the best transportation, the best tripartite, junior college, state college, it's all gone. They destroy them all. Yeah, they sure have. They really have. And I think it's tragic given the beauty and the natural riches of the state and the good governance we had for 30 or 40 years on her prior governor. Yeah, it's hard to see it right up close to us, that's for sure. Victor, so there were people that leaving our government, I was wondering if we have thoughts on, we have a labor secretary who resigned by the name of Lori Chavez, DeRemer, and she apparently is being accused of being drunk while at work and, sorry, let me see what else I had on her. Yeah, she was drunk during office hours, created a hostile work environment for top aides and pursued an extramarital affair with her security guard, and her husband as well as accused of sexual. This is the third female cabinet secretary. And it wasn't much to ask of a cabinet secretary. All the male or female, don't make it about yourself. Don't think you're an internet influencer. Don't think you belong on the cover of Vogue Magazine. Don't use your position to obtain sex or special deals for your family. That's not a hard thing to do. And yet, we know Kristi Noem and her boyfriend Corey, there was no reason for her to dress up the way she did. You know what I mean? It wasn't workman like for that type of job, but she made it almost a cult of being ageously attractive. And then she had this consort who had a lot of hangers on and they had this huge advertising budget, which allegedly went to people with connections to him, I guess, or both of them, I don't know. And then this case is even worse because it's a trifecta. It was, she was having allegedly improper relations. She was drinking while she was managing this vast government agency and she was using our assets for personal travel, etc. while her husband was also trying to get special perks. Pam Bondi was not like that, but Pam Bondi apparently had problems regulating or hurting all those attorneys. If you're going to be an attorney generally, you have to be an SOB because there's so many left-wing people embedded in there and she wasn't able apparently to get them out and get the team organized to indict people who needed to be indicted. But you know, I said that before about the agricultural secretary Brooke Rollins. I mean, she had, the difference is that she had, from some of these secretaries, Christie Nome was a very good house representative and very good governor, but she ran a big policy center in Texas. She's married, happily married with children. She's someone who ages gracefully, and that's not a majority of all, she's very beautiful without all of that makeup and all of that stuff. No one would ever accuse her of drinking on the job or having it. So why couldn't they just use her as a model and get people like that? It's what I don't understand. I don't understand that at all. I've seen some say that women are being treated unjustly in these positions that Trump's had. What's the unjustly about it? That they are looking for things. We'll see. We'll see if Cash Patel, we'll see if it's true that he's been allegedly drinking on the job. Yeah, drinking on the job. He's supposedly using transportation for personal use. He's supposedly too distracted by his hot girlfriend. Some of the things that they have accused the other people of, well, we'll see if these are accurate charges or whether the Atlantic will have to withdraw those charges, but it's going to be investigated. Didn't the Atlantic, in the case of Cash Patel, who was accused by the Atlantic of being absenteeism and drinking on the job in an article, and so he's suing them for libel. Cash Patel, they've retracted the story. Allegedly, people have said that and I looked at it. I saw an early report that said that they apologized, but I haven't seen confirmation of that. And I doubt they have. I mean, they're funded by Steve Jobs Whittle. They have an unlimited amount of money and their whole purpose is to give a upper-crust intellectual, cultural take on hard-left politics to package it under that veneer, with that veneer. And the editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, do you remember when Kevin Williamson of the National Review quit the National Review and he went over there? And I had always gotten along with him, but he fired at what we call Parthian shot, the Parthians, when they would attack Roman soldiers, they would run, they would ride away and then they had this technique of turning around and shooting a bow as they were going the opposite direction. And they were very good at it. Well, he said, I can't believe they're publishing Victor Hansen anymore. I said something about the dangers of unrestricted laissez-faire capitalism. So he attacked me and I just said, I didn't know what was going on, but he had been announced that he was getting this big salary at the Atlantic and I thought, well, you say very radical, volatile things. He was the one that said after, when Trump left on January 20th, 2021, he said, the eight gets in the helicopter. What a thing to say about anybody, about a president. But he said really strange things, especially about penalties for abortion. But I just said, he's going to find that his new employer is much less tolerant than National Review when I'm just predicting it won't last long. I didn't know how any idea. I think five hours later after they posted, they fired him the first day on the job because he had said things about abortion that was contrary to the liberal credo. So they're a hard leftist magazine, but they disguise that with culture and they get, but Jeffrey Goldberg is a hard court leftist. And so they go after certain people like that. Yeah. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Apollo. Stay with us and we'll be right back. 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. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. You can find Victor at his website, VictorHansen.com. The name of the website is the Belated Perseus and you can come join us there for all the free stuff that he writes and that these podcasts produced. And then there's also the VDH Ultra material that is $6.50 a month or $65 a year if you want to join as a Ultra member. And he does two articles a week and a video for the Ultra subscribers. So please come join us. So Victor, I'm anxious to hear. He's probably the God of all the gods that I think most people know, Apollo. And so we're anxious to hear about him. Well, like all gods, he has different aspects. I should say that the four or five gods that are actual legitimate children of Zeus and Hera are kind of mediocrities. Their Hephaestus will get to the Smithy God, Vulcan in Rome. And we talked about Aries, Mars in Rome, that he's kind of bloodthirsty and he's volatile and crazy, but he actually is not that adept, at least in some of the early epic poetry, for example, and the Iliad. Apollo, who's also on the Trojan side in the Iliad, starts out as a uniquely Greek god. All of these other gods, they had counterparts in earlier Middle Eastern civilizations or in Minoan Crete before the Mycenaean Greeks appropriated them. But it's very hard. I don't think the word Apollo, as I remember, appears on linear B tablets. And we don't, there's a big argument about what the word means. There's a word in Dori Greek, Apollo, that means fence. Another one, Apolloso, Apolloumi in Greek means to destroy. He could be the destroyer. But his original connotation was he was the god of the muses, music, and intelligence, rational thinking, and especially healing. His son, Asclepius, was the actual god that was the mechanics of healing. And Apollo was more, I can bring a plague or stop a plague, as he does in the Iliad. And so he was a of youth, beauty, rational thought, music. He always has a liar, archery, the refined arts, much different than Aries. For Nietzsche, he contrasted the Apollonian with the Dionysic. And he tried to say that what made possible the Greek genius was they compartmentalized, or they leapt open an avenue for cult irrationality. And E.R. Dodd's kind of corrected Nietzsche, but he wrote a book called Greeks and the Irrational. So getting drunk, worshiping Dionysus, or gastic sex, all of that stuff was controlled by Dionysus. And that was not part of the Apollonian creed, which was beauty, symmetry. These are often associated with the most symmetric and Doric of temples. So if you look at the Peloponnes, and it seems to dominate in the Peloponnes and Ionia. Probably the biggest temple, I think, Olympian Zeus, Athens is big, but I think the temple of Apollo at Dedema on the coast of Turkey is the biggest Greek temple. It's a Hellenistic temple. I went there once and visited it. There's a oracle there, and he's also associated very early on with prophecy. But there's a big temple there. There's a big temple of Apollo in the Peloponnes. If you're ever in Arcadia, out in the middle of nowhere at the temple of Basai, there's the second most preserved temple in the world, in the Greek world, except maybe for the Havaiston and Athens and some of the ones in Sicily and southern Italy. But you go out, you know, you go to central Arcadia, and you're out in the middle of nowhere, then you take a road even more out, and you end up with this beautiful gray limestone temple in the middle of nowhere. Probably was built by Arcadian mercenaries that came back with their wages for combat and honored Apollo, because he's often, before battle start, people pray to Apollo, the Lucifer. He can loosen war. He can loosen violence, but he can also stop it. But he has a military aspect that in some ways is more pronounced than Aries, the representative war god. He's most famous, however, for the sanctuary of Apollo, Pythian Apollo at Delphi. Delphi, I remember, is called the Amphilos of the world, the belly button of the world, the center. And it's probably the most beautiful site in Greece today, this biggest tourist attraction. And he had a temple of Apollo, and it was famous because on the architrave, on east and west, one site said, no thyself, no they say aton, and on the other side it said nothing too much, whether it was made in Leon or made in Agon. But it was the idea of perfect symmetry, calmness, rationality, and you would go to find out the future from the prophet, the Pythia, in the temple of Apollo, whether she inhaled psychedelic drugs, people have argued about that. And then she went into a trance and you've gotten a big line and you waited and you gave a written request for a prophecy and you had to pay for it. I had a friend once, I asked for a favor and he said, I need a Pro-Manteon. Pro-Manteon, if you were in line, the long line to get a prophecy at the Apollo and you paid off the person with a Pro-Manyan front, you got in front of the line. So I was happy to pay because he's a very good guy. But in any case, that temple is still there, the fourth century. There was a temple in Thebes, there was a temple at Apollo, there were temples all over the Peloponnese and in the islands. So there was two, finally there's two places where he reigns supreme, as goddess of prophecy, goddess of music, goddess of music, goddess of prophecy, goddess of medicine. And by the fourth, mid, late fifth and fourth century, they began to associate him with the son. And his son Helios was the actual manifestation of the chariot that represented the son. But he was the overseer of what made the sun come up every morning and set every evening. And people would worship him as Apollo the sun god, Apollo the prophets god, Apollo the muse god, Apollo the destroyer, Apollo the healer. He had so many manifestations and as I said before, he was purely Greek. So in some ways he was the most popular of all the gods. And I think you could make the argument that if you were to look at all the temples, I think there was a study in the 19th century that labeled them, which how many were devoted to most gods that the three were Athena, Zeus and Apollo. And so he was very, very popular. But later philosophy that the Germans, especially, they saw him as the antithesis to Dionysus. So Dionysus the god of wine, Apollo's the god of sobriety. Apollo is the god of reasoned warfare, phalanx warfare, sacrificing before the two phalanxes met. Dionysus is just random violence, sexual, rape, all of this stuff. As we see in Euripides, Baca, and I don't know if that distinction was so sharp between the Apollonian and the Dionysic and the ancient world, but later philosophers made a lot of it. But essentially when you say Apollo, we associated it with Greek rationalism. And that's important because as the fifth century wore on and the scientific method inductive thinking caught on where you didn't just start deductively and say Zeus is supreme and he is in charge of thunderbolts and therefore there's a thunderbolt. So Zeus threw it. They were starting to say, what causes thunderbolts? When do they appear during storms? Is there friction or there are atoms? It was a scientific effort to explain natural phenomenon. And that's when he kind of escaped the paradox because it wasn't a rejection of him because he was a god of rational thought. So people who were in the scientific community or medical community would sacrifice to Asclepius's son or Apollo, the father of rational thought. Is Pan also like Dionysus and antithesis of Apollo? Yes. And we get the word panic from it. Yeah, Pan. Apollo had one manifestation I mentioned. When I said that there are linguists who try to associate his name with fence, he's also the god of the countryside. And I mentioned that at the temple of Apollo is in the middle of nowhere. And sure enough, if you go there today, you will see goats and sheep hurting around the site just because it's so rural. But he was the god of herdsmen and his accolade or his subordinate was Pan. And sometimes Pan is also associated with fluke plane. And just like Apollo was with a liar and there's mythologies that they competed with each other. And Pan though, unlike Apollo, is on the Dionysic side of Greek mythology and deities. He's kind of wild out in the country. He gets drunk and he's associated with satyrs and Dionysus and creatures that are not human or not. And he's also the prototype in many people think he's the prototype with the hooves and the horns, the prototype of satanic representations in early Christianity, what the devil looked like. Just because he was so, he would come upon people and he would make them do things they didn't want to do, kind of like Dionysus. But Dionysus was that way himself. They were in the bar guy, there were references that he can assume the appearance of a bull or with horns or hooves. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and we'll talk a little bit more about people leaving the government. She the sheriff feel this McCormick. And then we'll look into Kevin Warsh's appointment to the Federal Reserve. Stay with us and we'll be right back. 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 Hansen in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war and in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. Well, if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signals Long Form interview podcast called The Signal Sitdown. Every week, we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington DC as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policy making 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 at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on The Signal Sitdown. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. So we have another person leaving government in disgrace this time. She is Sheila Sir Phyllis, sorry, McCormick. And she's accused of embezzling $5 million from FEMA, in fact, which sounds pretty egregious. So usually the house protects its own. But George Sorrell, George, what's his name? They kicked out the Republican Santos. He's hardly George Sorrell. But he was so egregious about not telling the truth and having financial problems and lying. And he was all so boisterous. And he was, he was a Republican that won in a purple district. So once they got rid of him, the left, you know, the Democrat, the Republicans who had such a slim margin, they didn't want to get rid of him. But they made this statement that he was so egregious, but they never in their right mind thought that their own people, because they were always protected by the media, you know, you don't investigate Democrats because they're morally superior to the rest of us. But once that broke the ice now after Swalwell, who was a systematic sexual harasser and allegedly a rapist, but after he broke the ice, now they're going to look at everybody. And she, she thought she could survive. She played the race car. She's a member of the Black Caucus. She said she didn't do anything wrong, but she had her whole wet tonne and all of her family. And it was all, it was just shut and dry. And if she didn't resign, she was going, she'll probably be indicted for embezzlement or fraud or misuse of federal funds. So it's just a matter of how, how far down the ladder they want to go, because there's probably dozens of them that Eric Swalwell was using campaign funds for childcare, remember? And, and he's, they knew all about that. But we'll see how far they want to go. Nancy Pelosi and her husband probably quadrupled their hundred million dollars they made in inside trading. Nobody ever said a word. They were so terrified of it. If you mentioned that and you were a Democratic congressman, you were going to be off all the committees. Yeah. And that sounds a lot more egregious than maybe somebody had a drink or, you know, anybody can be said to be tough and harass. And what did, what was she was? She had, she... The neighbor secretary was accused of creating a hostile work environment for top aides. That's a generic catch-all phrase. Yeah. I mean, you could say, oh, it hurt my feeling, whatever. I won't mention any details, but a very liberal, liberal, liberal, liberal leftist colleague at a place I was at attacked me publicly for no reason, you know, on X. I was, I guess it was Twitter then. And I wrote and said, why, you know, why are you doing this? Is breaking the rule of attacking a colleague in public? Because I hadn't done anything. And what I had said had nothing to do with this person. And they said, they thought they were going to double back and said, I could have said more and all that stuff. So I just read, you're creating a hostile work environment for me. And this person went ballistic and said, don't use that legalistic phrase if you're prepping for a lawsuit. In other words, I've done it myself probably so many times and you're not going to get away with this. I felt injured. Yeah. Hostile workplace. That's, that's, but that is what, it's a generic use. Yeah, definitely. Hostile workplace in the old days was somebody going in there and you know, as I said before, my mother was a judge and she felt she was being sexually harassed. She didn't felt that she was a very prominent person in the legal profession was chasing around his desk every day. This is in the, so my father who knew the person and liked him walked up one day and said, he said to me, you know, I want you to come up to the court with me. I said, why? It's be interesting. Maybe you can calm me down. So he just went in, he said, hello and hi. My dad was pretty big. Almost six, four is very strong. So he picked up this, I won't mention the person profession, but it was among the highest and put him on top of a legal cabinet. You know, they kind of bend like something like this, put him up on top of that and said, think, sit up there and ponder whether you think it's a wise idea to chase Pauline around the desk, you know, and that would be creating a hostile workplace. I don't know. That's the end of that. That was the end of that. And he became a good friend after that. And I said, to my father once, I thought, I witnessed you put him on top of a cabinet. I said, well, I did it gently. I said, but he wasn't able to get off on his own. Well, he got off somehow. So I said, so that was the thing about, I liked about my dad. He didn't hold grudges, you know what I mean? He liked the guy, but he just said, you're out of bounds. Yeah. Today, I don't know what they would say, we'd file a lawsuit or hostile workplace. Yeah. In those days, the family, I know a lot of you listeners believe in the kin that that if a woman who was kind of a pioneer in her field, there weren't a lot of women, but she had a support group called husbands, sons, cousins, fathers. And so when she went in there and some male tried to harass her or really tried to, you know, go beyond that in this medieval way of thinking, thinking kin would come in there and they confront the person. If you think you're so bold with my daughter, my sister, why don't you try it with me? But that's all considered taboo now and primitive. I would have calmed about that, about chivalry, that the death of chivalry is one reason that me too took off. Because when all these women in Hollywood were being harassed by this ogre, Harvey Weinstein, why didn't their boyfriends or husbands or do something confront him? And I guess that he had such power, they thought he would ruin careers. But they could have done that. That was a deterrent, but it doesn't exist anymore with the decline of the nuclear family. And it's considered pre-civilizational, taking, you know, not going to the... Because I just did my two-hour sexual harassment annual. We all have to do it to get our checks at Stanford. And it's like this. It's questioned, you can't speed it up. It's a video and it's multiple choice, but you could take drugs or get drunk and you could still get the answers right. Because they're like... They show a little drama, it's like watching TV. And so a guy walks in and he says to the young woman, you're looking good today. And she says, thank you. And then he hovers around her desk and says, what's your secret to being... And then it stops. And it says, choice A, he has a perfect right to express his opinion. You know, that's not going to be it. B, he was just saying if she was interested in him. C, she should slap him. D, she should report him to the Human Resources Director and have a formal complaint. And that was almost every question. It was that one. But my point is that the human resources thing is the solution for all problems today, human resources. But in the old days, it would have been very hard for me to... I mean, they would have had some help. That's what I'm trying to say. And there were some major stars whose girlfriends were being harassed by. And I think maybe Brad Pitt said to knock it off, told him. But it was all that Harvey Weinstein, who... What? The Obama daughter interned with him and the Clintons cultivated him. They all thought he was wonderful until he wasn't. But they all knew. He was a prototype of Eric Swalwell. Everybody knew what he was doing on the Democratic side, but he was their SOB, so to speak. All right. So we had a very good opinion. On the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, Matt Contanetti wrote an interesting article about how a sentiment against Israel is uniting the Democratic Party. And I thought he had some interesting points. He said Bernie Sanders was leading this anti-Israel position. And that supporters of... In contrast to the anti-Israel people, supporters of Israel tend to also be supporters of America. And these anti-Israel tend not to be on the side of America. And then finally, he was looking at Federman, who is the only one who is not anti-Israel. And he said that guy has an uphill battle and he is alone. He'll lose the nomination, a Democratic nomination, unless, as I said earlier, the Republicans cross over if they can in Pennsylvania. What about the thesis there? But Matt Contanetti is a very gifted writer. He's a son-in-law of Bill Crystal. And he was always very gifted, always. And when you see him on TV, he's always very reasoned. But in the last three or four years, he's been writing some really brilliant stuff. He's reached his apex. Maybe, I don't mean that in the negative, he can go for it. But he's really come into his own. And he's a very mature young guy. And he's very brilliant. And he's trying to point out that the Democratic Party now is the home of anti-Semitism. And there's a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, which he accentuates. Hassan Piker is a complete crazy man, right? And he's the one that says that October 7th is justified and Hamas is wonderful, all that stuff. He's the one that was just supporting Luigi Mangione and said that the healthcare executive who was from the middle class and ran UnitedHealthcare, I have an insurance policy, UnitedHealthcare. I have a huge bill from this. And they've been very cooperative and very fair. And if they had a problem, they built me for a pet scam. And they said it wasn't necessary when I wouldn't have been able to be an operator without it. Because if I had a metastasis, it would be hopeless. But it came too close to another pet. But they were very good. And then I appealed and there was reason. But he said that was justified in killing him. But my point is that in the Democratic Party, a guy like Hassan Parker is celebrated, justified murder, justifying October 7th. He's on, but in the Republican Party, when you had a Nick Fuentes who was about the same, he's an ostracized. I mean, and people who did not ostracize him, like Tucker paid a big price for it. So it's different. He makes a distinction. One of the things, and he's talking about anti-Semitism, I'm going to call him about two years ago and I'm going to try to elaborate on it. Everybody says, I'm not an anti-Semite. Some of my best friends are Jews. I only hate Israel. I only hate Netanyahu. And there's arguments that you can dislike Israel and like Jews. But here's the point that I'm going to make and Matt referred to these things as well. It's frequency, frequency and it's fairness and it's objectivity. So what I mean is take occupied land. Cyprus is occupied right now. 20% of the island has been illegally stolen by the Turkish government and had settlers that increased the ratio of Turks, almost to 30 or 40%. And it's no other country recognizes the Turkish sort. Why don't people get upset about that? Armenians were just ethnically cleansed. In Azerbaijanis, nobody talks about that. There were about 250,000 that were lost. They had land there from 250 years. Nobody's talking about that occupied land. So why is it just Israel? My point is why emphasize what you think is occupied land there, but you don't talk about anywhere else. And then they said, well, Arabs, Israel treats Arabs terribly. Have they ever been to Israel and seen an Arab Muslim versus a Uyghur Muslim in China? So my point is if you look at Muslim minorities, say in Russia, where they leveled Grozny in the Chechen war or the Uyghurs, why did they just look at this particular case when it's not even in the same league as those others? So it's that selectivity. Or when you're looking at Tucker, when he says, I'm not anti-Semitic and I'm not, I just treat everybody fairly, but almost every single day of his broadcast is focused on Israel, Israel, Netanyahu, Israel, and people who support Israel, almost 70% of them. Why not talk about it? He used to talk about UFOs more, you know, but it's all on that. And so when a person disproportionately does that, or when they accuse Israel of particular crimes and yet much more flagrant crimes are all over the globe, but you only talk about this little tiny country and you ignore all, you look at the misdemeanor, if there is a misdemeanor and you ignore all the felons, there has to be a reason why that is. Or if you say somebody got, and this is what the right and the left internet influencers do, they always say, I'm just going to throw this out. I don't know. I'm Victor. I'm just throwing it out there, not saying it's true, but you might consider how did we get in that war? Who were the people who got us in that war? I think Netanyahu did. I'm just saying, well, if you're going to look at it very carefully, if somebody got us into the war and they were willing to risk their entire air force, 300 combat to the effort, and they wiped out the command and control of our enemy. And as recompense for that, they were showered with 500 missiles that hit their main cities. And the Gulf over there who also was hit, but they didn't send one plane over and they have 10,000 times of financial resources as Israel. And they endow almost every major Ivy League school with lavish 50, $60 million for Middle East studies. And the Islamic groups in the United States are exercising as much power as the Jews now. And the Democratic Party is basically a socialist Islamist base. Why wouldn't anybody say, if you believe that a particular ethnic group or a particular group abroad influences US policy to the extent that they would cause a war? Why not say, well, maybe Israel and Netanyahu had vested interest in this war, but also the Gulf did too, because they're mortal enemies of Shia Muslims, and they've been lobbying the United States for years to take care of Iran. And therefore, they got us into, but nobody says that. See, so it's the disproportionality, the selectivity, where the emphasis is put. And when people say, and the Jews do this and they control this, then why not say, well, somebody is inordinate represented in hate crimes, and somebody is inordinately represented as victims of hate crimes, and it's Jews. Why not say that? But they never say any of that. And that's what's disturbing. What do you make of the thesis that it's uniting the left, this anti-Semitism or anti-Israel, whichever one you want to call it, right? His thesis was it's the thing that's binding all of these desperate groups together. You see how it binds people is, it does it in about three ways. The Democratic Party is a socialist party, and it has adopted a Marxist paradigm to explain inequality. It doesn't care about fluidity between the classes. We are the most fluid country in the world, as far as going from the wealthy to the poor, and the poor to the middle, the middle to the wealthy, the middle to the poor. I know so many families that kids were born with affluence, and they're poor now. And I know so many people who came here with nothing and are rich. But my point is this, in that Marxist binary, that doesn't happen. It's a complete wall between the oppressed and the oppressors. And that socialist message appeals to a country that has 53 million people that weren't born here, 16% of the population. So that envy, the rich are doing this to me, okay. And that is now combined with DEI. And the idea is the wealthy are the white people, even though I just quoted that statistically it's Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Arab Americans that statistically are more likely to have a higher household income than so-called whites. So my point is then you get in DEI and that unites the democratic base and they say, well, we're socialist, and all the wealthy people are doing this to all the poor people, and they're mostly white. Okay. And then so now you have Jews who, if you look at household income, are among the more affluent groups, and they tend to be called white, and you can combine the ancient plague of anti-Semitism, I can't think of a major black leader that has not at some time expressed an anti-Semitic. Reverend Wright said, well, Obama, they don't let me talk to him, Obama, dim Jews. Jesse Jackson said, I'm going to New York, I'm going to go to Heimeytown. Remember that? Al Sharpton said, get on your Yarmulke's and come over here, I'll fight you. So I could go on. But the point I'm making is when you have a large foreign-born constituency, when you have DEI that says race, racism oppresses us and it's white victimizers, when you have a class socialist communist idea that a small group at the top own things, then to unite all those disparate ideas into a synthetic, you can synthesize them into one general theme, the Jews. The Jews are white, the Jews are in early wealthy, the Jews oppressed us in the ghetto, the Jews oppressed us with finance, they're always in Wall Street, they're overrepresented in Wall Street. See what I mean? They're overrepresented in Hollywood, I'm back to Kenya West. The Jews have screwed me over in Hollywood, the record producers are all Jews, the producers are all Jews and all of the talent that makes the money, they're all whipped off as if Jay-Z and Kane West are not billionaires, right? But there's some Jew as if he's in Wizard of the Boss behind the curtain with Levers and that's what they, that unites all those different ideologies and so it's easy to blame them. And so a lot of white people too in the Democratic Party who would be objects under this Marxist analysis and the DEI analysis, they just say, it's not white people, it's Jews, it's Jews, they're getting us an award, they're always conniving. And it's very funny if they would go back in the 1930s and look at what Göring and Goebbels and Hitler were saying, it's the same thing, these are troublesome people, they have this weird clannish religion and they're always trying to get in the shadows and run things and every once in a while you gotta clear them out and that's what's really scary because it's getting insidious now and each day it seems to get more flagrant. I think that's what Matt Contanetti is sensing, that it's getting more acceptable. It used to be, it was just Netanyahu and then it was Israel, besides Netanyahu, everybody in Israel gets us into wars and they're not worth it and now it is Jews people and they're saying that specifically. So for, give you one last example, when the IDF went into Lebanon, they saw a statue of Christ, it was a shrine and four soldiers turned it upside down and desecrated it and they're gonna be, they're gonna be cart-martialed and held on trial for that and that's what soldiers do sometimes, they do horrific things and it was especially sensitive to Israel because traditionally when they go into Lebanon, their staunch allies were Lebanese Christians because of the shared Judeo-Christian ethos and they were both very skeptical or hostile to the Palestinians who encroached into Lebanon and the Shia has a Iranian faction that was dominant. So it made, it was, Israel did not want that to happen, so they're gonna punish this people but all of a sudden you see in the news today, the Jews, Israel, now they've overturned the statue of Jesus and they're going to talent that. But if you really wanted to be empirical, why instead of focusing on four Jewish shoulders that overturned a statue, why wouldn't you talk about 60,000 Kenyan, Nigerian people in Central Africa are being slaughtered by Muslims? Or why wouldn't you talk about Jewish people in London that were just attacked, a guy tried to get into the, or get into the Israeli embassy but you only focus on that when there's so many more egregious attacks on Christians by Muslims. And that's a sign of what's going on. I don't think it's gonna get better because the left believes it and you know Chuck Schumer who's Jewish, a few other Jewish people in the Democratic Party know what's coming and they're gonna retire and they're scared stiff to confront this because it's young and there are people who are by and large and doctrineated in the universities. That's where it starts. It's all the Middle East studies programs, all the DEI programs, all the Marxist programs. You add those three things together and the ideology of the university is to hate Jews. It is. I saw it at Stanford when a professor the day after October 7, not a professor but a lecturer said everybody that's Jewish put all your stuff, computers, bags on there and go and sit over here and you're gonna learn how what apartheid's like. That was his reaction. And we had flags in some places, I think to Chicago State or somewhere where they showed the airborne Hamas people with those gliders coming in, glorifying the slaughter. So that's what fuels it. Those three ideologies, socialism, communism, DEI and the Middle East study Islamistism and they were all combined now in a trifecta. It's like the three headed, the three heads of the dog caribos that guarded hell and boy they're powerful. At least the Republicans have spoken out against it. Any Republican, Democrats are, here's the difference, Democrats are dying to get Hasan Parker to have them on the show. Is it Parker or Piker? Yeah, he's half Turkey but no Republican wants to be caught with Fuentes, none. No, of course not. Well, we're gonna end it with that grim tale, Victor, because we're on a hard break here. So we'd like to thank the audience for joining us for this Saturday and thank you, Victor. Thank you everybody for watching and listening. This is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink and we're signing off. 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 website at VictorHansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.