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

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This is our Saturday edition where we do something a little bit different in the middle. Victor's been looking at ancient great 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, Correspondents 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. 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 ragebait 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. Victor is the Martin and Neely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. Please come join him at his website, victorhansen.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 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 and the Persian Gulf. And I was wondering what your thoughts are on those? Well, you have to deal with the reality first. You 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. And 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 was it that 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, 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 could quote, we have 800 Apaches and Warthogs that can be in the skies over the Gulf. They can destroy all the PT boats. 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's saying, we have the ability if you take us down to destroy the Gulf oil industries, their desalination plants, their distillery, all that. And that's holding us back. And so they, 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. But, 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 and military complex that 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 U.S. 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 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 meme 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 of 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 he, 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 would all dismiss Israel. I've never seen just as a excursus, 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. 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 are the ones that's sending shape-charge to blow up Americans? Who was the Pani bomber? What are we called? 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? It says coal, right? The whole one was died. USS coal, we know who it is. It's not Jewish terrorist, 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 Israel poses a greater threat than either China or the Islamic world. That's just crazy. Megan said that she was manipulated by the pro-Israel voice in the United States. I just thought that was, she was manipulated. But how do you be... That's a pathetic thing to say. She's very bright. How could she be manipulated? The evidence is all out. 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 Pierce Morgan, who is in that camp and a professor from the UAE and they kind of... I thought, I didn't... I haven't been feeding 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 of the 500 million person Arab, Islamic... Can they think of anything comparable? They look at the UAE and they think it's so... It 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 an apostate to have your podcast? When Pierce 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. Yeah. Oh, did he? I was going to say he probably didn't say anything to that. No, he was intellectually honest. 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 Patrick Moynihan or you look at even the Clintons, you know what I mean? What are the Clintons saying about all this in the Democratic Party? That a guy with a Nazi tattoo 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 Gutter or I've been to Dubai or Abu-Dhabi. Abu-Dhabi, yeah. And I've been to Kuwait City Bay 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, 2026, 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 totes? 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 and 67 and 73 wars, it was an existential wars and it didn't die during all of the first and second end defaulter. I was there during the 2006, 2007 end defaulter, or maybe it was 2005, it was terrible. I saw a piece of 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 I, as I said to you the other day, the only thing I can think of is that Israel refused to die and not, and then it thrived and unleashed its economy and its talent and its booming and its powerful. And then they said on this, Pears Morgan, this to be a name 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 tuck or two. 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 multimillion-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 had the West Bank because in 67, five Arab nations in the West Bank and Jordan, which it wasn't even the West Bank, there was no term 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 have plenty of land. There wouldn't be, there would have never been an occupation of the Sinai. They would never have been an occupation of Gaza or the West Bank or Trans-Jew. They would have never been an occupation of the Golan Heights. They would never have 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 forever we won't rock at their civil, it would be peaceful. And when they're now there on the bomb, they kept saying, Piers Morgan kept saying, they won't tell us how many bombs they have. You mean nuclear bombs? Yes. Israel. I said they have about 175. And he said, how do you know that? I said, because I'm not stupid, I can go on any rock 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, do 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 war bombs in Turkey at Isselarck 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, and then I saw and see it in, Van Jones, to his credit, challenged the left wing consensus. They're all now, and 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 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 can make, you conjecture what that, conjecture what that means. Yeah, they have always been, we've got nuclear weapons, so just leave us alone. Not, not, we're going to try to expand things for ourselves. 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 a nuclear weapon. It's a little different, Tucker, because Rafa and Johnny said that the nice thing about Israel was that half the Jews were there and so one bomb state reportedly he said that. He tried to deny it later. But there's people, Akmanijad, threatened to destroy you. 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 that sleep 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 profess to be didn't really know what river or what sea they were talking about, the might 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. No, Israel's never given any indication that it's expansionary. No, but I've never seen anything like a 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. He said international Jewy. That came right out of Mein Kampf. Yeah. International Jewy is a word that's translated directly from the German and Mein Kampf. 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 position. This is going to be very interesting because when I knew Tucker and I was on a show, he haphazardly, nonchalantly often made critical references to Bill Crystal and the neocon. Well, the neocons agree with him now. David From or Bill Crystal, they're all bulwark people or Max Booth or the rest of them. And you read the bulwark and therefore Graham Plattner. 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 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 position. That's what's so weird. Yeah, it is really strange. It's been interesting, New Age and 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 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. 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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. 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 much 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 real is what, a million to the dollar, what are you going to tell your people that all these things are more important than they are? 93 million people. Well, Victor, let's turn to Britain then and the Reform Party. Election results came in yesterday and it was a big win for Nile Farage's Reform Party. And I was wondering if you had thoughts on that. That's amazing. Yeah, everybody thought that the labor party originally would be okay because Nile Farage, they said, was a fringe candidate, eccentric, loudmouth, they called him. And that conservatives, then they were kind of like the Bob Dole Republican Party. Then they were ossified, calcified, and that the labor, new labor, new labor, it was kind of like Neil Kenuck, but they had a twist to it. It wasn't just socialist quasi-communist now, although it was, but they had the DEI and the open borders and the green, they had all the winning issues. And so they thought that their future was going to be assured because 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. An elderly population that gets ill is going to be fined to be reported by a shrinking youthful population. And history says the opposite and giving you a lot of examples about decreasing decreased fertility, ruining a country. But so that was a whole, the conservatives were just, they didn't believe anything. Truss did a little bit, she did, but she was not an in-depth politician. So forage, what they didn't realize is that they were, 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 looked to labor politicians and the green party in 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, storm it, storm her 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, you know, solar and 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 sometime. 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, it was the 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 or, 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, 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 and the labor and these seats put together. We don't know the whole tally, but it's, and Stormer, if, Stormer, if he should just resign, he should just say, I led the, the labor part into oblivion and we need to have an election. Or if he's not going to have an election, then let's point somebody else that might have better luck. 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, he, I think, well, I don't think I know they did a poll and 89% of the people that were pulled 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 debate? Well, he 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 were, and she didn't oversee prohibitions on gleaning the hills. And the, her vice mayor was not a bomb-throwing felon and the head of the water and power was not a PG&E 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 and gay than they were protecting. And that's what he's basically said. And he said, you go, you, you spent $400,000 per person, you know, unhomeless 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 the 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 Salma train station and I'd have 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 a 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 the fortune on hotels and everything. It's drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs that people self-medicate. And then 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 pain 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 nightmare Stalag. And then that swept, and then all of these state officials thought, well, at 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. 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, COVID. And they're just ripping us off. But it's drugs and everybody gets mad at Donald Trump for blowing up these cargo shit 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. The interesting thing in that debate was that Spencer Pratt said downtown is zombie land, 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. Yeah, what will that do to them? Nothing, absolutely nothing. What about, she should be ashamed of herself. 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 showers and mental health care. They're all going to put on work clothes and take paint and paint all like graffiti. They're going to get pride of them. They're not. They're going to light fires in their room and they're going to destroy it like they've done in everywhere else. And everybody knows it. I think I've 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 I, she said, can you take me into downtown LA? 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, 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 kind of walk on the, so you couldn't walk on the sidewalk. There were all these canteens and homeless people. It was just, it was a dystopian nightmare. Yes. Zombieland, definitely. It was, I, you know, I can't, 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. 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 Heusdus. 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 Kennetcast. The same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7 p.m. 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 star cast. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop, find The Tony Kennetcast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Heusdus 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 Heusdus. 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 form 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 was, 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 was 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 and I said, those are fire. He said, no, those are gunshots and they're shooting this way and we've been worried about our guests. I said, all five of us. 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 problems. Hephaistus is one of those gods that is known on linear B tablets. Linear B remember is the Greek speaking pre classical civilization that was sort of Near Eastern in its form with a palatial culture. And then we had the dark ages for 400 years in 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 Hephaistus, he is a son of Hera and Zeus, they all have dead-end kids. 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 Hera. And then you see Hephaistus, there's only, I think, I'm just thinking by memory, there's the Hephaistion. That is probably the best preserved Greek temple on the Greek mainland. And it's right in the agrarian 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 Hephaist on the temple of Hephaistus. Doesn't it, wasn't it redecorated Christian inside? It was a Byzantine church for a long time. And then it was re, the archaeologists re-stored it. It was by what, I guess we call it the Attic architect because there were a series of William Densmore Jr. and his father, the Great William. Well, they were both good architects. I had a class from him 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 Sunion, on Cape Sunion, it's almost exactly the same size. And there's a temple of Artemis at Braoron, about 30 miles outside Athens. And then there's a temple of Afea at Ramnus. And I think there was even a temple, a carnai that's been lost, but those temples are almost the same. So they were kind of blueprinting them to the gods, but Athens worshipped the feces. And so did the island of Limnos. That's that big island. If you come out of the Hell's Pond or the Dardanelles, 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 a feces there and they've excavated it. But otherwise, he's a god of volcanoes, he's a god of the Smith, he's a woman, Vulcan, and he's lame. And that supposedly reflects some of, I mean, there's been a whole scientific literature as 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 a birth defect as you get the impression, according to Greek mythology, Zeus bore Athena out of his head and supposedly Hera, birthed Hephaistus 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 disformed and kind of brawny and ugly and our Aphrodite is the most beautiful woman in the world and she's having an affair with Ares, the duplicitous god of war. And so, a feces 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 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 Ares. 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, but, and then he marries this beautiful woman. And he's, 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, I think you'll see little dedications to Hephaestus, or you'll see even people giving armor at Delphi to Hephaestus because of his craftsmanship. He created, so he's credited with all the great craftsmen, crafts products of the ancient Greek mythological world. So the beautiful shield of Achilles, he made it, or Zeus's Thunderbolt, he made it. And, but I think Vulcan is a much more prominent Roman God than Hephaestus was a Greek God because the Romans were far more industrial. And 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. 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. That's a theory. There's two or three theories, and they have support, both scientific, but also mythological, that 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 that every time there's a scientific question, you know, what caused the Athenian plague or why were the Saphysus lame, then a classicist enlists the scientist. And they'll tell you that he was ugly because this, 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 phenomenon as does Patronius and that the topos in Roman literature of the late republic and it's that beautiful Roman women who have white led 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'd 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 slave result revolts but it. The one that was called Spartacus blood and sand I think. Yeah, it was basically soft core 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 so it was the violence and the publication. Yeah, but the point was they tried to pick up on things that their researchers had read in Patronius 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 ends that's kind of one of the interpretations of Hephaecis. He hasn't women have an attraction for a big muscular brawny guy from the Smith. And they don't care how ugly he is. No. Did women speaking of Spartacus blood and sand, did women really wear wigs that as they had in that movie that was weird? I think people should realize because the whole field of classics from Martin Bernal's black Athena to the uncle of Heikam 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 black blacks and antiquity and he discussed that whole issue. There was no racial prejudice and antiquity. That was a later phenomenon when Europeans in the age of discovery 16th century went to Africa and they extrapolated that because they didn't have cities or technologies like Europe that they 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, slaves comes from the word for a white Balkan person, a slog. Isn't it Aristotle that said some people by their very natures are just slavish? Yes. Okay, so that's- 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 racial, 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, you know, they, 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 playing some of the most obscene rap music there is, you know, or he'll talk, I'll be walking and they'll, 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 gybe 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 the Romans looked down on are big, they thought were more violent, i.e. the Germans, especially, and some of the Gauls, they were white skin and blonde. And so a lot of Roman women wanted to wear white led makeup and then they had blonde winks. Red haired winks are really valuable from, from Scotland and Ireland. And that showed that you were dairy or daring or you were out, you know, or you were pushing the limits and you made a 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 them, when they pull their pants half down and they, they wear their sneakers and they, they had 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 the boom box coming out, but he was an absolute white guy. That same attraction is in Rome. Did you just see that video where the guy, his, a guy came in to take over his car with his family in it? I do. And he got out with the 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 in that particular fashion. So it's kind of interesting. It was funny though, because the left has told us that illegal immigrants are noble and people who wanted to deport them are racist and bigots and nativist and that was an African American family. Yes. And this was a Hispanic of some background, illegal alien, it was going to shoot them and take their car until they shot him. Yeah. Yeah, sure. And I can tell you that that here in Southwestern Fresno County, when I look at the KMPH website or some Valley websites, 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 our dogs are out here on the studio or 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 are mostly wealthy people, but they never suffer the consequences of their own ideology. Well, Victor, we need to welcome back a sponsor, Patreon 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. Patreon 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 wouldn't. The best part is they deliver prioritized premium service on all three major U.S. networks, giving you the same or even better coverage backed by 100% U.S. based customer support, get unlimited data plans, mobile hotspots, international roaming and more. And when you switch to Patreon 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 Patreon Mobile.com slash VDH or call 972-Patriot and use promo code VDH for a free month of service. That's Patreon Mobile.com slash VDH or call 972-Patriot and use promo code VDH. Make the switch today. That's Patreon Mobile.com slash VDH. We'd like to thank Patreon Mobile for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So, Victor, let's go ahead and just move on. This might not be a long one, but the White House Correspondents Dinner Shooter, Colin Cole, has an 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? 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 advanced in Russian collusion hoax that was disbunked. The lie that he was a rapist from the Eugene 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 one, 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 sympathized. He apologizes to the way he's treated. There were people, not a lot of them, but maybe 200 people of the 1400 who 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. And Julie Kelly is really chronicled the other people that were in solitary confinement. They were double, 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 off, tried to kill the president of the United States and a federal judge is now contextualizing. And we know what he's going to do. He's going to try to oversee a trial in which he is declared either mentally incompetent or that it was manslaughter, attempted manslaughter. So and... We'll see what happens with him. 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 in New York, when people, you can see all of these people that had no cash bail, it 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 he, 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. Yeah. Well, speaking of ideological and criminality, our representative Ilan 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. In Ohio, they're now investigating fraud in Ohio's Medicaid system. And in fact, they've found that they think 66 million in fraud were 94 businesses in one building were charging for medical services that were never rendered. 94 businesses in one building. Ilan 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' traditionalist. Pretty clear also that her family was not poor refugees from Somalia. They were military functionaries of 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 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's 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 Nomar were really bright upcoming young people. They weren't. They were mostly admitted to the university under DI auspices. They never did much work. And AOC doesn't know anything. She said recently that black women create, didn't she say black women created democracy? Yes, she did in an interview. Let me ask you AOC. So the three luminaries who signed, we just had Michael Austin on, you know, National Treasure, Author of National Treasure, a great book on the constitution, the Declaration of Independence. So the three most famous of the many signees of the Declaration of Independence were Ben Franklin, John Adams, John Adams, was John Adams black, was Ben 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. Oh, I meant Professor Hansen. I meant the original creators. Well, that's already been debunked. People, Mark 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. He didn't let his students with the 30 tyrants that overthrew it in 403. So that's this bogus. So the people who created democracy and I mean, not just as Plato says, don't confuse, extrapolate, 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 are 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 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 in the constitutional form of it. Republicanism was created in Rome. And so when she says, when AOC says black women created democracy or Iliad Omar is reading a script and it's World War II with Roman numerals, she said, well, and then World War XI, where have you been? You know what a Roman numeral is? It's two capital I's. You think that's 11? Okay, just in her defense, she did correct herself immediately after she saw people in the audience and their facial expression. Like what an idiot. So that squad's reputation has been severely tarnished. Yeah, it sure has. Although I didn't regret it now, though, because there are people now, I was watching Trace Gallagher there at night and they had a democratic activist there. And he said, well, our party has been evolving like the mega and he said, Trace, you mean kind of like a democratic socialist? He said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then he's there. What I've been watching TV and reading and it's really a new thing that what's happened is the democratic party younger people are running the party, they're full of themselves are heady drunk, they're punch drunk. And they say now that every billionaire did something like Ken Griffith at Mondami taps on his window, you know, that they didn't, it's not just that they didn't build that Elizabeth Warren, but they stole it. And it was, was that AOC was saying, or was that Ilyan Olmour said, you just can't make that much money. It's just impossible. That was AOC, I believe. Yeah, it just, it's just impossible. No, it's not impossible. I mean, Balzac may have said behind every fortune is a crime, but maybe they have, that's what she was trying to suggest that there was a criminality. Well, she should ask Barack Obama, how do you make 75 million bucks? How could he could never do that? I don't know, speaking. He spent the last, he spent the last year, he, 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 write, hawk your memoir. And that's what they did. And they ended up worth 75 million with four mansion. Had he not been in politics, he never made a dime. How did Bill Clinton and Hilary Clinton become worth a hundred million bucks? What, were they sold influence? They built, you know, 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 a hundred million bucks? How can you do that? He'll see. 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, Guttart, to bail him out on the provisio that it 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 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. And his new gig is that we're entering an ice age. So he's going to... How did Hassan, AOC, could I ask one last question? How did Hassan Piker, 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. But he's a... 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 an hour. That's not fair. Well, why don't you give up your Porsche then? All these people, it's so... Mondami was a rich, rich Ugandan. His mother was a subsidized filmmaker that made millions. His father was an endowed professor. You'd 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 of any ethnic group of the United States. So why doesn't he just be honest instead of saying, why? I'm going, I'm Mondami and I'm going to be taxing their wealthier. And here I mean Indian Americans. 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. 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. So Victor, recently Obama has declared that the attorney general of the United States is not the president's conceit gliary. And he was implicating Trump. And I'll get you the other one first thing you can say as you want. And Graham Plattner, who has worn a Nazi insignia on his chest, tattooed on his chest, is now lecturing us about the evils of xenophobia. Well, dear Mr. Eric Holder, in 2013, you gave an interview and you said, they asked, 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'm the, I'm the president's wingman. He was, by the way, he was attorney general. And I got to take, and then he said, it's kind of, 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 Joe Biden said, what, 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 13th, it was miraculous. It was three days, 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 someone not relieve me of this menace? You know, the King Henry II, oh, and so he said, well, why isn't he indicted? And then his little underlings, they said, okay, Michael Quincell, you got to resolve, you got to resign your prestigious number three post at the attorney general's staff, Department of Justice, and go right over and bail out that crazy foolish album, album brag and get a conviction, just like you do with Latita James. And then get a call up Fanny, 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, Latita James showed up, she's just in there, she's in the White House. That was all the wingman, Mary Garland. Turning the law enforcement into your private, private execution squad to the extent you could execute. And Graham Palatner with his xenophobia, I don't need to be lectured by. That's so sick because that Totenkov, it wasn't just the third Panzer Division, it was the special assigned groups into the Holocaust. So he's, he deliberately put on a tattoo, which you could argue that thousands of people, but 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 them, 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. Yeah, and they may elect him. So that brings me actually to- They're not going to elect him. I don't think they're going to elect him. 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'm going to bet that those crazy people in LA are going to re-elect that bass no matter how bad that guy made her look in that mayoral debate. So- 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 Costa, 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 in two or three, four weeks, the SCIU ballots. And I'm being generically, I'm character, I'm, you know, generally characterizing, it's accurate, but union, get out the vote, come in. So she has all the unions and in her case, because they ask her directly, I'm not imputing any illegality toward, they ask her on the debate, would you, you think illegal savings should vote? And yes or no, and she tried to, well, what should I do? Because I'm going, they're all going to vote and yet if I say yes, 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. Yeah. Well, Victor, we're at the end of our show and I have a few of the hand written 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, 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, who have prayed for your surgery. Thank you. I know a lot about AML. I have an unfortunate ability, I shouldn't say ability, morbid research. 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. Yeah. And this is from Beverly and Kevin Doyle. And I'm not reading all of it. That was a very kind letter. That's what I wanted to say. 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. That's nice of her. Thank you. And the reason I like this card too is because of 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. Hansen, please know that I am praying for you and your family. You are blessing to me, your works both inspire and encourage me. I also appreciate your patriotism. May Christ continue to heal you and bless your family. Thank you. That's very timely. That's from David. And David, your last name is very hard to read. I couldn't even. I'm going to be 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 never ending. But I will know a lot more where I am. Thank you, Victor, for all your wisdom today. Thanks for listening and watching everyone. Thanks to the audience for spending a party or 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. 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 website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.