VDH: California’s Peak Dystopia, LA’s Mayoral Chaos, and New York’s Toxic Empathy

I've had this question asked of me 500 times in the last 30 years. Somebody comes up and says, Well, you work at Stanford, but why do you live in Southwest Fresno County? And I always say, why not? That's where I grew up. My point I'm making was that they were just amazed that somebody would ever not want to live in Palo Alto where they were. Karen Bass has announced she's withdrawing from the next mayoral debate. But I think she got her, you know, her heiny kick. 503 billion dollars of of a just a gross income California has lost to the rest of America. Yeah, well, if you look at the income tax rates, 13.3. So I'm not I don't know how much of that was taxed at California capital gains rather than income. But just for the sake of argument, if it was taxed at income level, it could be over 50 billion dollars. They're going to lose out of their revenues. Gavin is already running a projected 15 to 20 billion dollar deficit. And we're having scandal after scandal in Los Angeles. You can't keep track of the fraud. You can't. Well, hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen, and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on the Daily Signal Network. I am Jack Fowler, the host. I'm the lucky man. I get to ask Victor the questions. I'm confident you would want him asked and have him answered. So we are recording on Sunday, May 10th, 2026. It happens to be Mother's Day. This episode will be out on Tuesday, the 12th post Mother's Day. But my heart is about mothers today. And I wish even a little late as we appear, all mothers that you had a wonderful, wonderful. Mother's Day. Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson senior fellow with the Hoover Institution. And he is the Wayne and Marsha. Did I say that already? The, oh, no, I forgot the Hillsdale. Who's Hillsdale? Busk. The Busky. The Busky. Yeah, follow that. Had Hillsdale. And he's a man with website, Blade of Perseus. VictorHansen.com. You should subscribe. I'll tell you why later in this episode. And his forthcoming book, Victor's forthcoming book. Sure to be a bestseller counterrevolution, the fall and rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA. We can never get the last word, Victor. It's a movement. Movement. Okay. Sorry. Go to Amazon and preorder that. There is an incredible amount of material to talk to today. We won't have enough time for it. We'll save some of these topics for later on next recording, but a little follow-up to the LA mayor race and debate. And a Victor and the Great Sammy Wink talked about this in their last episode, but there's a little more to bring up now. We have the New York madman who's murdered somebody and he, he was out on the streets because, well, that's what happens in New York. You're a criminal and you're just allowed to roam around until you next draw blood. Don Trump's going to China this week and we'll get Victor's take on some thoughts on that. But we'll begin the show when we come back from these messages about a local hero passing away. And we'll do that in a few moments. As an advocate of truth, you know that women shouldn't have to share locker rooms with men. Women shouldn't have to compete against male athletes. And they shouldn't be punished for speaking the truth, but across America, that's exactly what's happening. Men are being allowed to compete in women's sports, robbing girls of scholarships, medals, titles and safety. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has heard two cases, West Virginia versus PBJ and Little B. Hecox. That happened on January 13th. That could decide the future of women's sports nationwide. This could be a watershed moment in the fight to protect biological reality and fairness. Alliance Defending Freedom needs your voice today. Visit joinadf.com slash Hansen or text Hansen to 83-848 to add your name to their declaration and side with truth and fairness. That's joinedadf.com slash Hansen or text Hansen to 83-848. What starts in women's sports spreads to schools, medicine and parental rights. This is our moment to push back. Stand with Alliance Defending Freedom today. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor also has another Daily Signal show. Victor Davis Hansen in a few words. So go to the Daily Signal's new website and find all these things and you will thoroughly enjoy Victor's 7, 8 minute daily video takes. Victor, Bobby Cox, Hall of Famer, former New York Yankee, played for two years with the Yankees, but four times manager of the year in the National League and actually has a world championship for the Atlanta Braves under his belt. He was a local Selma Reedley hero and you knew him. You want to say anything about him before we move on? Well, he was about 10 years older than I was, but I can remember, you know, when we were 8, 9, 10, 11, everybody went to Selma High School baseball. And he was, I remember he was either third base or shortstop, but he was kind of like the vacuum cleaner. He was famous in the Central Valley of California for, I think, never making an error. He wasn't as renowned as a great hitter, but he did very well at that level of hitting, but he was just fabulous arm and fabulous fielding. He came from a family. I knew the fact that his father and uncles much better because there was something called Cox Brothers Pump and they'd served all serviced and installed all the ag pumps. So from my earliest memory, there was a Cox brother out here on the farm because we had six pumps, 15 horsepower, and they were always, you know, keeping them running and drilling, I mean, installing new pumps. And then when I, when we started, when I came back from graduate school, I started farming. They were semi retired, but I had Cox brothers put in two pumps in Kingsburg, California. And they were very well known in the area for about three things. They were very competent and they were very sensitive to, you know, because out here in the country, in addition to the ag pumps, everybody has a submersible well, you know, pump and well. And when they go out, when the pressure system goes out or the regulator or whatever goes out, you don't have no water. You can't do anything out here. It's not like the city. And when you would call a Cox emergency line, they would be out here at two. And I remember being staying overnight, my grandparents and all of a sudden the pump went out and they called Cox Brothers and they were out here at midnight. And I was a little boy, went out and watched them fix the pump. And then I went to the, he had a lot younger brothers and nephews. I mean, cousins. And I went to school with Melvin. His, yeah, I think it was his brother Melvin Cox, who was a fantastic baseball player, maybe not at the level that Bobby was. And then there were some Cox girls in my class, the class ahead of me and behind me. And they were renowned for being very beautiful. I remember that. It was a wonderful family is what I'm trying to say, Jack. And everybody liked them. They were very honored. We had another famous athlete, Lloyd Allen, and he, when he was in Selma high school, 67, 68, he was throwing about 95 miles, 100 miles an hour. And he sent Selma to the Valley Championship and he was fourth batter. I watched him and he went to the angels and he, for the first, I don't know, third of his inaugural season, he just threw smoke and a curveball. But I don't think he ever had alternate pitches, you know, and once you go around the league and everybody understands. But he had a, you know, he didn't have the career that Bobby Cox did, but he was a brilliantly gifted athlete. And I knew his sister, who was a wonderful woman, Sharon, excuse me, his wife for a while. She was a wonderful person, Sharon Raven, and she's married, she was married to one of my best friends, Paul Colliver. So all of the, it was a small town at the time, Jack. It was only 5,000 people. It's a bedroom community now, a Fresno of 26,000. When I go in to Selma, I don't know anybody. When I went in, say, 50 years ago, 40 years ago, I knew every single person. It was what the classicist Moses Finley called face-to-face society. And he drew on sociological research that said communities that were about 5,000 to 10,000, and there were disagreements. If you lived 70 years, you would encounter every single person in that town and you would be able to facially recognize them. And that was one of the arguments why the city-states were so successful that unlike, you know, the great urbanization of Rome, that outside of Athens and Syracuse, which probably had a population, an urban population of maybe 100,000, those were the two largest along with Corinth, but there were 1,500 of these city-states. So it was 1,800, 2010, and people got to know each other. So it was a trust society based on who you know, and you knew everybody. So, you know, when I was young and stupid, I said, I want to get out and go to the Bay Area or Santa Cruz, because when every time I go in town, somebody comes up and says, how's your father? Oh, I saw your brother yesterday. Oh, did you hear that? And I was really, you know, oh, this is a busy, busy, gossipy town. You know, one thing happened. Did you know Mr. Smith? I saw Mr. Smith's car at Mrs. Jones's house at two in the morning. Can you believe that? That kind of stuff. And I wanted the anonymity of a... And I got it in spades at UC Santa Cruz. And I went from a very stable community that I did not appreciate to a lawless chaos that I thought at 17 when I went there. But I learned very quickly. Well, I love... You've talked about that study once before, and it's amazing how transient a people we are in America. It is. We are as great a nation. We are without having that deep localism. I don't think people... You know, I don't think people mean to me, Rue, but I would say I've had this question asked of me 500 times in the last 30 years. Somebody comes up and says, will you work at Stanford? But why don't you... Why do you live in Southwest Fresno County? And I always say, why not? That's where I grew up. And it's... You know, I mean, the air is not great. There's some drawbacks. There used to be one of the safest places in the world, believe me. But now with gangs and stuff and open borders in the past, it's not that safe. But my point I'm making was they were just amazed that somebody would ever not want to live in Palo Alto where they were, you know. And when I go to Palo Alto, I think I get tense almost immediately because there's something about the... It's a beautiful town and it's a beautiful climate and the Stanford campus is beautiful. But when you start to interact with people, you get this... I'm an untitled person. You never get that. You never get that here, believe me. You know, I have five children and they're all adults and they're all local. It was very rare, I think, for many people. You meet all kinds of folks and you have my two kids. One lives in Seattle, the other lives in Dallas. We see them twice a year. Yeah, I know that. I'm blessed. I have two. I have a daughter and a son. And my son lives 28 miles away in the Madera foothills. And then my daughter lives in outside of Auburn, California. Beautiful place to live. She just moved there three years ago. But I can get there in three hours. Yeah. Well, you know what's not a beautiful place to live, Victor Segway? It's Los Angeles. And you talked with Sammy about the really terrific, I think, debate between the mayoral candidates, Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt, the Republican who you've actually talked to and you've talked about talking to him, and Nithya Raymond, who's a city councilwoman. So we won't go over the debate again, but just to let folks know that an online poll from NBC Los Angeles showed that as of Thursday morning, this was right after the debate, 89% of the voters picked Spencer Pratt when asked who they thought had emerged victorious from the Wednesday night showdown. Now two other things, and then please, any opinions you please share. Today Karen Bass has announced she's withdrawing from the next mayoral debate. This was being sponsored by the League of Women Voters on the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs. She had promised she would come, but I think she got her, you know, her heiny kicked by Pratt the other day and she's just going to ghost them. And then finally, worth raising about the debate is that Nithya Raymond, the other, the city councilwoman was running during the debate, she backed off her, she took a position change. Guess what, Victor? She used to be for defunding the police. She's no longer for defunding the police. No longer for now. She will when she's, if she were to be elected on the city council. Once the race is over, she's a city council member. They're all Democrats. They'll go back to do that. It's chaos. It's really tragic what's happened to Los Angeles. And Karen Bass was a deer in the headlights at that debate. Both of them are incumbents. One was an incumbent city council member and once was the mayor and they all had a hand in the policies of no cash bail, not arresting people for theft under a particular, you know, they, they ease that. It wasn't just 950. They're even when people did a little bit more, they kind of winked and nodded their homeless parks. If you go to Venice Beach, I used to teach at Pepperdine one day a week and I would ride my bike through there. And in 2000, I think the last time I did it was 2020. It was just, it was dystopian. I mean, there's zombie. It looked like, you know, the last of us or some TV show with all of these zombies. And then it was filthy dirty. I could use, my bike would get a human excretion on the tires. And then you're going down the Pacific coast highway, people were just crazy walking around in the middle of traffic and just a total chaos. And then when he brought all of itself, all they could say is he's Donald Trump or he's a right wing Republican and he's apolitical. I think he's an independent. All he stuck to was we didn't have water and the fire burned down and then you won't even issue building permits. He wouldn't let us clean the hills so we could get that flammable brush out. We tried, you didn't do that. Your fire chief was more interested in DEI than monitoring why all these hundreds of fire hydrants did not work. Your power and water, uh, Grandi was hired kind of as a flunky from PG&E. You paid her 700,000. She left two critical reservoirs for months dry right during the Santa Ana wind season when we had this flare up. You went to Ghana for no reason. Just for personal, your vice mayor, as I said to Sammy was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat. Of course it was a faint. He claimed that Israel had phoned in a bomb threat and it was complete lie. He's in jail I think now. And they, and your fire chief was bragging about her DEI hiring, but nobody was saying that we're in a very fragile landscape where we have to get these reservoirs full because they had other interests. And every time you mentioned that about DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion, the problem with it is it's not just commission. It's omission. When you put so many resources and so much virtual signaling and performance art all about how diverse we are and you never ask yourself, is that person meritocratic, meritocratically hired? Is that person competent because six million people's lives depend on that job in the air traffic controller or in the water and power or getting oil? And the answer is we don't care. We live in, and that's what Spencer Pratt's ads are so effective. He walks through the detritus of Los Angeles and then he superimposes Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass laughing and very beautiful homes. And his point is the ramifications, the consequences of these people's ideology never affects them. For them it's all some utopian exercise. And we're all the lab rats. We're in cages and we can't get out and they experiment on us and then they go home to nice, happy, secure lives and they're well paid. And their pay has nothing to do with their actual performance. And so, and then when you see Gavin Newsom endorser and say all these things and then you see people in the debate stage for the governor's race, which was really pathetic. They were all praising Gavin Newsom. You say to yourself, California fell apart around 2008, 2006, started going downhill, people started to leave, taxes started to get really high. Who more than anybody could have been responsible? Because it was a Bay Area phenomenon where it started. Well who was city, county's official? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was mayor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was lieutenant governor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was governor? Gavin Newsom for six years now and count. So there's no person more responsible and yet when you see him talk Jack, if you mentioned high speed rail, he said, oh, you know, he just, he moves his hands and his shakes his head and he says, we've got this doing in this. And you say you've spent 250, it's going to be 250 billion. You probably spent 30, there's no way you can build it. There's no way you can run it if you was free. And he just ignores it. And then when you say after the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire, the Palisades Fire, don't you get it? That you drove out all the lumber companies, they can't glean the hillsides. You don't let people go up and harvest wood. You think it's natural to let all these dead trees from the drought just sit there, 60 million of them as Kenley. And then you say, you have no margin of error, Gavin. You drove out two big refineries. You've got all of these people on the Air Resources Board that wants the purest gas that doesn't pollute and you can only get it in the Caribbean to still refine these in Japan. And you talk about fossil fuels as evil, but then you import it from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. You think that they pump it more ecologically sound than we could? So you want to use it, but you just don't want to get your hands dirty. And then when the price goes up, you have a Steven Chu attitude that you don't express. Well, gas goes up to European levels, we'll use less. Well, yeah, if you live in Palo Alto and Santa Monica and Montecito, you don't care. But if you live in Huron or, I don't know, Five Points or Parlier, you do care. And $2 can break you if you've got a commute. You don't can't afford a Tesla. You have maybe a 2003 Pontiac or something that gets about 16 miles the gallon and you can buy for 1500 bucks. But they have no idea. And why the people who are harmed the most by them vote for them? I don't know. But if it's not sustainable, as I said to Sammy, it won't go on. And we're getting to peak dystopia. Yeah. But it's not going. It's not working. Yeah. The fact that Pratt has seemingly has traction here is helpful, Victor. But I think it's a test here. Can a city that's been so committed such self-inflicted wounds, can the people snap to their senses and say, we're not going to do this anymore? I don't know. It seems like there's some hope here. But if he loses, I would think all these big cities suggest they're circling a train. I mean, how much torture can you create? I think if you go into the LA area now and you go into places in Orange County or communities along the coast, blue chip places, or you go into CME Valley, you're starting to see the breakup of the idea of Los Angeles. They're just small communities and they're run locally and they want nothing to do with LA and they're very suspicious of anybody coming in anymore. You know what I mean? They're trying to re-establish local control and they're saying, we're going to be like Augustine in North Africa and the fifth century AD when the whole world was collapsing. They're going to have fortified hippo or something, communities. I think that's very similar to the late Byzantine Empire and the late Western Empire where the federal system collapses and the elected officials collapse and you have these huge migrations of people that are antithetical to the system and the people in power are incompetent, uncorrupt. Then people on their own, they either migrate, which is happening now, or they create cocoons where, I'll give you an example, there's a rural school not too far from here. I grew up with it. It was just a rural school, but some very concerned people began to move into that district and then they fixed the school up and then they began paying much more in that little school district and they recruited the best teachers in the country. Now that school, a rural school K through eight, I think it is, you have to register when your child is born to get into it, but they're very careful. They move there. They live in that district and they said to this wider world, we don't believe in your schools. We don't believe in any of this. We're going to go live near a school, get our school board, control it, and then we're going to have meritocratic hiring only and we're not going to have any DEI. We're not going to have any teachers union. We're not going to have any of that. Weaponized curriculum, just a classical curriculum and everybody wants to go there and they're very careful. Where I live in a 50 mile radius, I'd say there's three or four communities that have decided, as the Romans say, known hick porcus, not this pig, we're not going to do it. They have reestablished local traditions. They have good restaurants. They're very careful about zoning. They don't have a lot of new housing development. They discourage rentals and they are throwbacks to the 1950s. It works and they're very coveted to live there. If you want to go to their schools, it's very hard to get a transfer. I can see where my daughter lives in the foothills, that there's a whole bunch of people and they're not conservative necessarily from the Bay Area. She lives on a dead end road cul-de-sac. It's about a quarter mile long and there's homes there and they all have one thing in common. They're all semi upper class or middle class professionals at one point, but usually the woman is now raising children at home. They have chickens or back to the land and they don't talk politics and they're very involved in little league, local PTA schools and their whole existence is a rejection of the Bay Area and that's why they're there. They voted with their feet to stay in California for a variety of reasons, but they're creating an alternative identity and I think that's going to happen. That's what red state America is becoming. This is funny when you see Gavin Newsom when he looked at, because he is really the most disingenuous politician of my lifetime. He looks at these red states and now they're redistricting. Now he calls them the Confederate states. That's really, Gavin, if they're the Confederate states, after the Civil War, the Confederate states were devastated. They were plagued with racism. They were the home of the Klan. They had Jim Crow in the Northern Industrial States and New England were booming and you tell me how that flipped because people vote regardless of ideology and they're leaving your paradigm for that paradigm and they're not going there for Jim Crow. They're going there for safety, low taxes, good infrastructure, responsible government, police security. Then he said, and I'll end with this, Jackie, he said, or he wrote, he was very anguished because he showed the Confederate states, he called them and he said, their legislatures have redistricted, like Louisiana and now Tennessee and it's eight zero house seats, even though the Democrats in those states had 45% in the last election or 38%. Look at Alabama is doing it. You just stop and take a deep breath and say, my God, this guy really is shameless. He's shameless because everybody knows that you can take a blue state paradigm of New England and you look at Delaware, New England, they're the same. They're nine Massachusetts, nine zero. They have no representation, even though Trump and those states got from 38 to 45%. Then you look at California and under his directorship, we're going to have about of the 53 or 52, 53 seats. We're going to have maybe 9%, I don't know, seven Republicans. Here he is in the most gerrymandered and biggest state in the union calling others Confederates for doing what New England does and what he does in spades. It's really projectionism, which is there. I don't understand his career. I never understood his career. I have never understood it. I understand the Getties launched it. I understand he was the tutelage of the Pelosi's. I understand that the Bay Area assumed political power after the riches of Silicon Valley were manifest. I understand Willie Brown. I understand Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown. I understand that was the power, but he was the prodigal son. He was the black sheep of that group. He never distinguished himself and yet somehow he became the most influential California in the last 30 years. Yeah, now he's handing out diapers, which maybe we should talk about in a second. But first, Victor, I want to tell our listeners and our viewers about fluoride. The government has been medicating your water with it for over 80 years, not because you asked for it, not because you voted for it, but because they decided you needed it. Well, that's not a decision someone else should be making for our families, which is why you should filter the water in your home with Cove Pure. And if you're watching this podcast, I've got mine over my left shoulder there. I've got my Cove Pure right at hand. There were 209 million Americans are on fluoridated water right now, and here's what the science actually shows. In September 2024, a federal judge ruled that adding fluoride to water poses, and I'm quoting the court directly, quote, an unreasonable risk, end quote, to neurological health. Not a fringe study, a federal court ordering the EPA to act. Then in January 2025, a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pediatrics, one of the most respected medical journals in the world, confirmed a link between fluoride exposure and children's IQ scores. The higher the exposure, the lower the IQ. Sure, some states are moving on this, Utah, Florida, they've banned it, but that process takes years. Your kids, your family, they're drinking this water today. You need something that works now, and that's exactly what Cove Pure is. It's clear wave reverse osmosis technology is certified to remove up to 99.9% of contaminants. Fluoride, PFA, lead, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, anything that is in water gets filtered out. I love that Cove Pure makes my water taste like pure, delicious water, refreshing, refreshing, nothing else. I like it came out of a swimming pool, or a rusty can, which is how the water tastes coming out of the tap in Milford, Connecticut. It's super easy to set up and gives you water just how you want it in an instant. Don't wait for the government to catch up. Go get yourself a Cove Pure. If you use our link, CovePure.com slash VDH, you'll get $250 off. It's C-O-V-E-P-U-R-E, CovePure.com slash VDH, and we thank the good people from Cove Pure and their delicious, refreshing water for sponsoring. Victor Davis Hansen, in his own words, I love my Cove Pure. Even more than the plants with Cove Pure water now. Why should I give it that other crepe all the coming out of the tap? Okay, Victor, I did want to mention, I have a study on the outflow of money. California is not the worst in the nation amongst the states. That's actually New York, but $503 billion of adjusted gross income California has lost to the rest of America, but most likely Texas and Florida. New York is the worst, $660 billion. I think it's going to get a lot worse in New York after Mondami's antics. Yeah, well, if you look at the income tax rates, 13.3. Yeah, straight. I don't know how much of that was taxed at California capital gains rather than income, but just for the sake of argument, if it was taxed at income level, it could be over $50 billion. They're going to lose out of their revenues. Yeah. Gavin is already running a projected $15 to $20 billion deficit. He keeps talking about, we have a reparations committee that he appointed. They have transferred $500 million for illegal alien medical care. As I said earlier, 40% of all the births are already on MediCal. We're having scandal after scandal in Los Angeles. You can't keep track of the fraud. There's so much money in California that's been, and I used to say things that sounded so illiberal even to myself when I would go to a particular place to buy food not far from where I live in a very low income area. The people in there, I would say 75% were on electric banking cards. Yeah. Transfer cards. I know that because it was always the same thing. It wasn't just one. It was, oh, this one's expired. Try this one. Try that one. Try this one. Four, five of them. I got to the point where it took a long time off and to go in line. Just to buy some food. Then I would walk out and I'd say to my wife, let me count how many Teslas you think will be. I make a guess today. I'm going to get a $1,000 range and I'll say one Mercedes SUV and three Lexus. I wasn't off. I wasn't off. Something's going on and I don't know whether it was cash income or people were not being taxed. They were on public support and getting cash income with no taxation or there was welfare fraud or money was coming from a foreign country, but it was not computable. It didn't make sense that so many people would be on public assistance and yet the immediate parking lot and watching people go from there into the store would have luxury cars. If you tell me there was a trillion dollars in graph going on in America right now, I think I'd believe you because you have these $50 billion here, $25 billion here, $250 billion here. It's just staggering. With all the debt California has, where does he gather new some get money for this new free diapers? Which by the way, some analysis is this diaper thing is really a racket to send money to somebody that's going to put it back into the political campaigning. California, it took a smart guy like Arnold Schwarzenegger five years, first term four years in the first year. He thought he was going to root out the fraud, cut back the government, lower taxes, invite investment. Then he called them girly men, his opponents, and he went after the real problem, which was the service employees unions, the SEIU, the government bureaucracy unions, the California faculty association, national teacher, all of those groups. They roasted him. You should have seen those commercials. They would show him flying in from LA at Sacramento airport. He has a private jet. Jim Smith lost his job. Jim Smith is struggling. He's smoking a cigar and a tent. They roasted him and he was married to a Kennedy. I don't know what arrangement they worked out, but she was aware of his infidelity and his illegitimate child, apparently from the person working in their home. The last three years, I would argue that they were almost indistinguishable from a democratic governor. I'm giving him credit. He tried. You have to have somebody who's just, I don't know, Scott Walker or somebody like that or Rhonda Santis. I don't care what they say about me. I'm going to balance the budget and I'm going to cut, cut, cut. I'm going to invite people that are successful. The Democratic Party, which, I always thought there were a locomotive going over a cliff, but now they've really hit the accelerator when you saw it. Did you listen to AOC this week? She said the country was founded against billionaires. I thought to myself, there were no billionaires. Number one, but if you're saying in contemporary land values, you could argue that the country was created by Jefferson, who was a big landowner. Washington, at one point, was one of the larger landowners in the whole colonial America. They were men of property and education. They were not ... The richest man in America, I think at the time, was Charles Carroll. Yeah, he was. Charles Carroll. Who signed the Declaration of Independence and risked it all. Then I thought to myself, when she said that about billionaires, then she elaborated and said it was impossible to make a ... It was kind of the Balzac famous quote, behind every fortune there's a crime. It's impossible to make a billion dollar. What I wanted to say is it's not impossible if you have something that Americans find very useful for their lives and you can provide a service or a product to them and it's affordable, reliable, and safe, like Starlink or Tesla, something like that. Your national government can find something like SpaceX that works and is better than anything in the world. Yes, you can make a lot of money. But I would like to ask her, how did Nancy Pelosi, who has none of those demonstrable skills, go in with her husband as middle class people and end up worth between 150 and 200 million? How did the Clintons make 60, 70, 80 million? Why are the Obamas worth $75 million with four mansions? That is what she should ask herself. What did Hillary Clinton provide the world? You know what I mean? She said that and then she said a third thing. It really reminds us about who these people are when Ilian Omar said World War 11, Roman Numels, and then she said that America was created by black Americans, that American democracy was created by black Americans. Whatever you think of the morality, forget all of that, but the people who signed the declaration and created the Constitution, primarily in their architects of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, they were not black. You can make an argument maybe that Alexander Hamilton was from the Caribbean and had some black ancestry, but that was a complete lie. If you say that she meant democracy before America, it was a direct product of the European but more importantly the Scottish and British Enlightenment, John Locke, David Yume, etc. Then if you want to go earlier, it was classical Greece and Rome. It was not at all done. So she just says these things and then you realize the real truth of it. You were really ignorant. You just went and got these phony degrees and they paid your way and then you were a waitress which is a noble profession and then you demagogue your way and you got this job and you were very attractive and young and everybody wanted to identify with you and you played the DEI card and you had the right name and you trill your Rs and all that, but other than that, there was nothing there. You knew nothing, nothing. Was an economics major who never heard of Milton Friedman? Yeah, she's never heard of him. She's never heard of Adam Smith probably. Well, all right, well Victor, we're going to, since talking about AOC who represents New York, Queens and part of the Bronx, we'll talk about some New York stuff but also want to get your take on Donald Trump's forthcoming trip to China. So we'll do all that when we come back from these important messages. 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. We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words on the Daily Signal Network and Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, is victahansen.com and when you subscribe and you should, if you're a fan of Victor's, you should, you will be able to read the two articles he writes every week exclusively for The Blade of Perseus and see the one video he does exclusive, the each week for the site. And it's also a ton of free stuff there and links to Victor's various other appearances and the like. So go there, 65 dollars a year to subscribe. If you just want to try it out at 650 a month, the web address again is victahansen.com. And if you're on X, Victor's handle is APD Hansen and if Facebook, it's Victor Davis Hansen fan club. No, that's our friendly, that's our friends on Facebook. Victor's site is VDH's Morning Cup on Facebook. So, okay, Victor. The dangerous streets of New York, there was a madman, relentless criminal named Ramel Burke and he pushed a 76 year old retired teacher named Ross Valzone to his death the other day. And there's two aspects here to this story. And I just, if you bear with me, why was Burke on the streets when he killed Valzone? So this is what had happened to this character, this criminal. The New York Post has this account today. On February 2nd, he assaulted three cops at the Port Authority in Manhattan and he was released after stealing potato chips. Then he, two weeks later, he smashed cars with a stolen shovel, but he was released. A few days later, he was in a rain and he was taken to Bellevue Hospital. Somehow he got out of there. February 25th, he was charged with possessing a knife, cracked pipe and a Brooklyn subway. He was released. April 2nd, he pushed a woman in the head, pushed her on a Manhattan subway. People think trying to push her in a, but he was released. April 6th, the DA asked for $3,000 bail. The judge denied the request. May 7th, he was taken to Bellevue, the psychiatric hospital in Manhattan by police after acting erratically. Within an hour, he was released. At 9.30 that same night, he pushed the retired teacher, Ross Valzone, down subway steps and he killed him. Okay, I'm almost done. The next day, he showed up at a Manhattan criminal court for the hearing from when he had acted erratically in early April. He was allowed to leave and then finally he was arrested later that afternoon by two detectives. This is just a repeat criminal slash crazy person who is allowed by the, even though the DA wanted to have some bail, just to roam the streets and the worst thing, not the worst thing, the final thing, Victor, and I'll shut up, is the woman who he tried to push in April. She was found out and she did not want to have him prosecute. She told the New York Post the other day, I regret 100% that I didn't move to see him prosecute. Maybe a part of me was just like, I don't want to put another black man in jail, but you know at some point if you're a criminal, you're a criminal, et cetera, et cetera. So congratulations to you lady. I'm glad you feel bad that Mr. Valzone has been killed. This is New York today. And anyway, Victor, my babbling's over. Any thoughts on this? Well, I mean, it's toxic empathy, isn't it, that it gets people killed. It serves the ego of the so-called enlightened utopian, but the consequences fall on people that can't defend themselves. So every time you feel good about yourself that you're more empathetic or more virtuous than your neighbor by letting some criminal out, you've committed a moral travesty because you've unleashed that person on somebody else who will not have your money or ability to defend themselves. And then when that person is victimized, no one cares. So what's the scariest thing about our lawless society right now? And I mentioned DEI because she said that she didn't want to put another black man in. When you offer these exemptions to people, and I guess because he was homeless, they are exempted from enforcing civilized, because he was black. And we know that the black community, not the black community, but male blacks between 15 and 50 create an inordinate amount of crime given their demographics. And under the defund the police and black lives matter movement, they have not been treated the same way as other criminals. Maybe in the past they were treated inordinately harsh. Now they feel that they've been victimized by society. But whatever exegesis you use, everybody knows now in America, and this is what's really about that. If you get killed tomorrow, if I drive today to Stanford, where I have to go and somebody at an intersection shoots me, nobody's going to care. I mean, they'll just say, and you know what, and if that happens, if something happens to you, God forbid, Jack, you know who it's going to be. It's going to be a career criminal. It's going to be a person who was let out in bail, and the people are going to shrug, and they're going to say basically that famous elected official, what did she say? Was she the mayor of Charlottesville? She said that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. They're going to say, well, Jack, you and Victor were in the wrong place at the wrong time, which are false. Or that she wasn't, what was the word they use for the Ukrainian woman? She was not socially aware. You have to be socially aware. She was looking at her iPhone. And what that meant was when you go into public transportation that supposedly you have to pay to get on, and you're sitting there, and you feel that you are in a civilized country and you want to look at some news or something on your phone, that's wrong. It's your fault. Because you didn't understand that there were poorer people who were disadvantaged and might cut your throat from behind, and you should have moved away. You were an enticing target. You were like a, I don't know, a big fat candy bar at the checkout center where the clerk he turned his head for a minute. So you know what? If he's going to tempt you with that, you're going to take it. That's the attitude. I think there's going to be a, there is a reaction against it, as we talked about in Los Angeles, but I don't think it's the full reaction yet. I think a lot of people are saying the progressive project is not working, and it's doubling down. So when you hear Mondami go into Ken Griffith's place and tap on the window or whatever he was doing, that was almost like a French revolutionary warning, you know, that this landowner is next on the get list. And when you see the mayor of Seattle, Katie Wilson, say bye-bye to Billion, and then you hear AOC said you and Elizabeth Warren, you can't earn that much money, meaning we don't think it's possible, but we're going to make sure if it is possible, you're not going to be able to do it. And then you look at the list of people who bought all of these things to the United States, space travel, Google, you know, all the immigrants who left places they thought were not conducive to rewarding people for their talents. It's not sustainable. And then I just don't think people are going to, I think even liberal and independence are probably going to say, I know they're going to say the Iran war and Trump is screwed and then, but it's not sustainable. This party is not the Democratic Party. It's a revolutionary French Jacobin movement. And you mentioned Seattle's mayor, Victor, just to double down on what you said, the reaction to her. There's a new study out by the Association of Washington Business. A number of employers looking to move their business out of Washington state rose 24%, to 24%, up from 17% in the prior quarter and nearly triple the number of reported in the Association's Winter 2025 survey. Other 55% say they are considering moving their personal residence to another state up from 44% in the previous quarter. So those are quick-numbered movements and people are getting out of here because they can get out of there. And they don't think it's going to happen. They should, they're historically ignorant. You know, Polybius, the great Greek historian that was interned by the Romans and he wrote a history of the Roman Republic and why it worked. He became a fanatic supporter of Roman republicanism. But he talked about what Greece was like around 0140 BC and then Plutarch himself, who was a Greek and lived under Roman occupation, the Roman province of what they called Ikea, which was Greece. He was in a little town called Carania. He wrote about what the countryside was in 100 AD and these were periods of vast social change. Plutarch said, you know, when you look out, there's no city-states. There's no farming. The lands are idle. There's nobody here. And this was because of the war-torn time and the Roman destruction of the city-state system. And then Polybius was saying, these places have become denuded. And that happens a lot. And in the case of Seattle, there's no reason if you take out, I don't know, Amazon and you take out Starbucks and Bill Gates ever wants to move his fortune out. There's no reason, and all of these high-class, high-upper-class professionals who run this want to leave because they can't make a living anymore according to what they feel they deserve. There's no reason that it has to stay there. Same thing with Portland, same thing with New York, same thing with California. There's no intrinsic reason why Los Angeles has to be Los Angeles. Yeah, I mean, 50 years ago in finance, you had to be in New York. I mean, you physically had to be there. You did. And journalism and these, but God invented bandwidth so people can go, people can move their businesses and get out of Dodge when it's become Dodge. I know. I found that out during COVID, but you know, I've had this tachycardia problem so I can't really drive yet and I'm here on my farm with Elon Musk's Starlink out in the middle of nowhere. And I realized something that I'm not going to work yet in driving and I want to very quickly, but I can't quite yet do it. And my point is I can write, I can do, I can do, I can work what I usually do at Hoover from here. And I do zooms. I go to, you know, I do zooms for Hoover retreats. I do zooms for Hoover events, but it's not the best solution. But what I'm getting at is you're absolutely right that these, these places are so arrogant. They think they're essential. We're Seattle, Seattle, Grunge Rock. We were the, we're the, you know, Portland and Seattle. These are the alternative West Coast societies were good clubs and coffee and, and we're New York with financial capital world. People are going to Miami and Miami in five years of these trends continue will dwarf New York and capitalization. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. And so good luck, Montgomery. Just because something exists is what I'm trying to strive to suggest is it doesn't mean that it'll always exist. It was a result. There, Los Angeles is, it's past. You know, we saw the movie Chinatown and we see all these movies about corruption, but Los Angeles was created by a lot of visionaries who, you know, say what you want, but they got water, they had oil, they had natural. We, Henry Huntington wanted to make a electric cable car system and open up housing in Manhattan Beach or basically from what is now Venice to Torrance. And he went up and created Huntington Lake and Shaver Lake and he created the longest 220 mile transmission of electricity from hydroelectric power from more 70 miles from where I'm living. He transmitted that hydroelectric power. He created the lakes on the San Joaquin River and he sent it 220 miles and that, that supplied from about 1914 to the pre-war era, about 40 or 50% of LA's electricity. These were not fools. They were brilliant people and they created Los Angeles and you can see their work, their building, same thing with San Francisco. You can see these wonderful, beautiful buildings and all of these planned streets and everything and then they just handed it over to generations and my generation was worse than theirs and the generation below me was worse and the generation below that was worse and they never reinvested. They had different values. They took it for granted and they started to basically say, I'm living in this wealth, wealthy, beautiful city, unherited. I'm never reinvested in it, but I'm going to trash all the people who created it because I'm morally superior to them. That's a formula for failure. Well, we need to learn a little more about the people who created everything here, Victor. We owe them so much. Yeah. So far. Gratitude is really rare these days. Everybody in the past is supposedly illiberal and then we use everything they gave us and we trash them. You know, Bill Buckley was very big on gratitude, but now I want to let our listeners and viewers know how much are your, how much are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness worth. To you, this is the question America's founders had to answer. You see, for more than 150 years, America's 13 colonies governed themselves until Britain declared they had no right to self-rule. So ordinary people had to make extraordinary choices and risk their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight for independence. And against all odds, they won. And in victory, they built one of the most stable and lasting republics in history. Now, experience the American Revolution like never before, thanks to our friends at Hillsdale College. Revolutionary America, a new documentary from Hillsdale Studios and narrated by Tom Selick, brings the founding of our nation to life through the voices of those who lived it, alongside insights from leading scholars and commentators. And I've seen the trailer, it's about a minute and a half, two minutes. If it's an indication of what this documentary is, it's going to be like this film, I should say. It's really well, well done. I mean, Hillsdale, I've seen some of the other things they've done related to America 250. I mean, they are high quality production values. And they do. Hillsdale built a state of the art studio. And it's just stunning. It's just stunning that Hillsdale is not in a strategically located place. And yet it draws people from all over the world there now. And they're planning a big hotel system for them. They've refashioned the entire campus. It's stunning. One of the biggest regrets that I've had of being ill, because I had a clap song for a year, I didn't know it, that it was malignant. And then now, as I can't be at Hillsdale on my annual, my annual visit, because it was one of the highlights of my life to go there. And there was wonderful people there, something about it, it's re-energizing. You go there and you see people and you think it doesn't have to be otherwise than this. People say hello to you, it's safe, you don't lock your bike, you take a bike ride, you don't lock your house. You see people that say hello and they're polite. It's just different. And the students are engaged also. The roads are completely immaculate, go out in the road. You don't see trash thrown down, there's not homeless. It's just different. And you say to yourself, why can't other places be like this? And you look at the school and you go and look at the books, there's no you know, the transsexual revolution and medieval Europe and who am I transitioning at 12, all that stuff. It doesn't, it's not in the bookstore, you look at the classes and you see the books are ordered. They're all classic works and whatever the field. It is not only a great academic institution, but now through this and other things, it's doing a great cultural institution. So to our listeners and viewers again, at a time when history is distorted, this is your chance to see the story of America's independence as it truly happened and ask yourself, what would you do to risk your freedom? So face the decisions our founders grappled with in revolutionary America, Hillsdale Studios film. It's in theaters only May 31st through June 2nd. So you can get your tickets now by going to Hillsdale.edu slash revolution. You don't want to miss the opportunity to see this on the big screen. So go to Hillsdale.edu slash revolution to locate a theater near you and buy tickets now for revolutionary America. One more time that's Hillsdale.edu slash revolution. I went on, click the link and I bought tickets for the night of May 31st. My wife and me and maybe bring one of the kids. So it's easy peasy done. We thank very much the good people from Hillsdale for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Victor, any thoughts on Donald Trump will be going to China this week? And I'm not going to read this, but New York Post today had a great editorial, essentially saying, you know, Trump should not make any concessions to China implying he's in a position of power, actually more power, more powerful position than he was say a month or two ago. Anyway, your thoughts about what Donald Trump should do or should not do. I agree with that. The United States, one of the things about the around war is that the left has so dominated the narrative that it's a disaster, it's Vietnam. They don't look at the geo strategic results. And one of them is undeniable that China was getting rich for years buying sanctioned oil at a steep discount from Venezuela and Iran. And then infiltrating those countries, supplying them with weapons, they're gone. They're gone from both of them. And they're desperate to get oil out of the straight of their moves. And their former client apparently isn't listening to them and they have no influence. They didn't try to save them. And same thing with Russia, they lost both of their clients and they're in a back and they're bogged down. So Donald Trump has a lot of levers to play. They're desperate for oil. They want the straight of our moves opened. He can say, we'll help you open it or we'll keep it open under international auspices, but you can't rearm these people or we'll stop Chinese tankers. They don't, they, everybody talks about their building ships. So it's true, but they have a long way to keep catch up. And the US Navy, for all the criticism of it, is much more powerful than the Chinese Navy at this point. And then when you see that Russia, their May Day annual exhibition of weaponry and big parades, it wasn't there. It was very downscaled because they're terrified that the Ukrainians have mastered the art of drones more than any other country. And they felt that if they brought all the sophisticated weapons, there might be a fleet of drones that'll show up and destroy them or destroy the people in the day that's watching it. So I think what Trump is going to do is he's going to go back to Henry Kissinger's formula that of real politic, it's kind of a moral, but he's basically saying, I got a deal with Russia and a nuclear war power and China economic juggernaut with nuclear weapons. And I'm going to play them off against each other. And I'm going to be no better friend to China than I am to Russia, no worse enemy. And then maybe we can neutralize them getting together, stop that and break up that alliance. So I think that's one thing he's going to try to do. And I think he feels that he's close to some kind of ceasefire in Ukraine that might work out because the Russians are exhausted and they're losing the drone industry of Ukraine has radically changed the reality on the battlefield. And I think he thinks you can get a deal there and that will give momentum. He can talk to Putin. Maybe Putin won't send them things to the Iranians. They're getting their weaponry from North Korea, China and Russia. And if they would not sell them those weapons, they wouldn't be able to ever replenish their stock. So I think he's going to talk about that. He has a lot of leverage too to play Jack. And I mean, you've got 300,000 Chinese students here in the United States. And everybody knows that they are making massive transfers of U.S. technology. They're not here to study Shakespeare. They're not here. They're not in the classics department. They're in engineering and STEM courses. And they're there to expropriate technology and expertise and go back and Xerox it in China. And he can stop that. He can stop them buying farmland next to U.S. bases. He can do a lot of stuff that they won't like if he wants to. So he has a lot more cards. The United States is the greatest producer of natural gas and oil in the history of civilization right now. And he knows that. It's not like the hand that George Bush had to play during the Iraq war when we were importing almost 30 or 40 percent of our oil from the Middle East where we were at war. And so I think he's got a lot of cards to play. I think and he will. I hope he doesn't give any concessions because there's no need to give concessions to them. Anything that they could be a help in the Strait of Ramuse, not a help in the sense they do anything noble, but just they need oil and you could leverage that so that they would be open to everybody. And they could stop the Iranians from helping to stop. Although the Iranians, they're very funny people. This regime, not the people, but the regime, if you say to a theocrat or a Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Grandi, or one of their elected officials or one of their army, you say, now the stupidest thing you could think of would be to send missiles to the Arab Gulf States that appeased you all these years and draw them closer to the United States and Israel. I wouldn't do that. They'll do it. The stupidest thing you could ever do would be to fire on a Chinese tanker. They'll do that. The stupidest thing you can do when you have all these appeasers in Europe who want to find a path differently from the United States to profit from is to tell your embassies that you might have suicide bombers operating out in Europe especially. So they do things because they're so cut off on the world. I guess they don't know the reaction of people, but they are so lunatic that we'll see. I think just as a footnote, we're going to see some kind of kinetic action, if that's the word for it, very soon, because the Iranians will not accept those conditions that they will handle with the enriched uranium, even if it's to a third party like Russia. I don't think they're going to give up harassing the Strait of Hormuz. I think Donald Trump thinks the war is 73 days old and it's not even been a war for 30 days. 30 or 40 days, I should say. It's been a month, it's over a month of just haggling. We've lost a critical month closer to the midterms. It's time to fish or cut bait. Choices he has now are stark. If they continue to delay and they continue to get Pakistan in it and they won't accept the ultimatum that you sent them, then you have two choices. You can take out their oil, ability to sell oil and much more of their military targets. You can entomb where you think the uranium is, just entomb it and try to get as many missiles and then hope that they don't knock out the oil of the Gulf and then leave. Or you can do that and downsize and patrol the area and make sure that they don't, remnants don't do something and arm the opposition and encourage something. But the idea that you're going to stay there in full force and negotiate, negotiate, negotiate with these people is not going to work. And we've lost two critical months before the midterms. Now we're down to less than six months. And it's five months and three weeks. It takes a while. Despite all the new oil coming on the market from Russia and us and Venezuela and others, it's still spooky oil market. And it's going to take a while for people to see any difference at the pump, maybe two months. So you've got to, he's under a lot of pressure, Trump. And so is Iran. But they feel that we'll blink first and not do anything crazy because they keep threatening us. Today they said that we're going to use new terrible weapons that you've never heard of before and we're going to use them against them. Well, we'll see. I just think people have to die. Well, I mean, we'll just that old proverb, you do your worst and we'll do our best. And we'll see who wins. Well, you know, we've come to the end. I wish we had a little more time. We're going to save a topic or two for our next episode. One of those topics that we wouldn't bring up is Megyn Kelly talking about is the appeal of Islam listeners to her or viewers to her podcast. And Berkeley is the campus there where free speech was founded. I think it was founded in the constitution. It's now under duress there. I apologize for the background. I said, it is Mother's Day and all these children of my wife who are my children also right here get showing their mom some love. So anyway, you mentioned very quickly, I got an award the IWF, the Lady Diana Davis-Spenser award from the Independent Women's Forum this week. And I gave a talk and they asked me to talk about women and Mother's Day. And I talked about my mother, what a great influence she was. And I mentioned in passing, I had the same middle name as the honoree, Davis. And how important, because I've mentioned being Swedish, but how important her family was and her as well, because at critical points in my life, I was trying to say that I went away to Stanford like she did. And then when things, you know, you were a woman in 1946 with a law degree and two BAs, one from University Pacific and one from Stanford. And you couldn't get a job because they didn't hire women lawyers. She went back on the farm and didn't re-emerge, raising us until she was 40 and then had a meteoric rise as a superior court. And I asked her, when I had the same experience at 25, I had a PhD and I went back and farmed. I said, I guess that's it. She goes, no, that's not it. That's the best thing you can do. You'll reattach yourself to your roots and you'll get earthly experiences, practical, you'll learn farming again, and then you'll go back out. I said, how do you know I'll go back? Oh, you will, don't worry. And then I remember I asked her once about a sister I didn't know who died from measles. She was pregnant with German measles. And I asked her about, and she said, I said, did you not want to have us anymore? And said, no, no, no, it made me want to have more children. And I said, well, I was really, you know, kind of an idiot to ask these questions. But anyway, she gave a long lecture to me, which was very valuable. I remembered when I lost my daughter. And then when she got, she was very healthy and she got a meningioma and it was misdiagnosed as benign, 90% of them are benign, but this one wasn't. And it came back and killed her at 65. And so I was thinking, gosh, I got misdiagnosed for a year and then I had this cancer and I had a bleed and art. But I just stopped all that because she just shrugged her shoulders. She said, you play the cards, you're dealt and you go on and you don't look back. And you think of all the other people that had a far worse than you. And so it's key moments in my life. Women have played a very profound role and I think we should all honor them. And these, I was just giving an example as in my seven minute talk that we don't really show gratitude for our parents and sometimes our mothers, we men to our mothers, I don't know why we don't, but we don't in particular. But I think I called her maybe or she called me three times a week from the age of 20 to she passed, when I, my 22, she passed away and it was very important in my life. And I think everybody has these experiences with her mother. But I'm one of 10 and my older sister died. And for my mother, your mother to bear, and you yourself, as you mentioned, have experienced the pain, but maybe Keener for a mother. I don't want to put myself in her shoes, but for them to carry on and say, I'm not giving up, life's a good thing despite the sorrow of losing a child. It's hard to fathom. It is. It is. Herodotus said that. Very famous thing as of the tragedy of war is that fathers bury sons when they should, sons should be buried fathers. Yeah. Well, I have three comments I'm going to read today, Victor, as we head over the, head out the door. So the first is from Debard, Deb R. Levine, 2869. Victor, you punch a rocket fuel of knowledge in every episode. You're amazing. I mean, rocket fuel. There you go, Victor. That's powerful. Stephen Lucas, S1H writes, way to go into the lion's den and face fierce animals like Pierce Morgan. He is going down the same road as Tucker, Kelly, Candice, and others. How easily people throw away their moral senses for a few dollars. VDH has never wavered from his mother's teachings in over 60 years. Amen to you, Stephen Lucas. And finally, Michael Wallens, 2591 writes, what a great podcast. Thank you, Jack and Professor Hansen for sharing it and the daily signal for showing it. Jack, I have received civil thoughts and my email weekly and really enjoy your pick up articles. It's my new readest digest. Victor, love when you share your families history. Glad to see you are feeling better and praying for your continued recovery. Thank you, Michael. And for those who want to do as Michael does, go to civilthoughts.com, sign up and you'll get that free weekly email. No, we did. I mentioned just in closing with Sammy a little bit, but that was a very strange interview with Pierce Morgan. I didn't know there was going to be another guest. I thought it was going to be 20 minutes. And he had been very civil. Dirty pool, dirty pool, Victor. Yeah, he thought he was been very civil, but I had not followed him and I didn't know that he was such a fierce critic of Israel and the United States and eliminating the nuclear threat in Iran. And then I didn't know that he was going to have a radical American that was teaching at the UAE, that was mouthing this. At some point, I couldn't argue anymore because they were saying things that were just ridiculous. Like this guy, when we were supposedly talking about Iran, he talked about Israel committing genocide and then he started saying, well, how illiberal it was and it didn't have freedom and it wasn't a democracy. And he was speaking from the UAE. As I said, I asked him, I just said to him, if you say that you have a guest on your podcast, he was talking about it, and the guest says, I'm no longer a Muslim and I don't like the monarchy, you're going to be shut down in two seconds. But I have gone on Israeli podcasts where people criticize the government and they criticize traditional Jews and nothing happened to them. Do you see the difference? And genocide, Americans always commit genocide. And then there were just so many things that jumping out like the absurdities. He just said, and the resistance in Germany, one third of the people rose up until we bombed. I said, we bombed in April of 1942. Didn't you know that? We came over and we lost 40,000 people bombing. There was no resistance. They controlled 60 million people in France with less than 100,000 German soldiers. And was it the White Rose group and Bonhoeffer? Maybe like if it was a handful of people and it was just ignorance and then Pierce jumps in and says, well, you can't say it. Basically, I go all over the Middle East and I'm well treated and nobody's ever censored me. I said, what did you say? You're an international celebrity. They court you and offer you a venue because they know that you're sympathetic. But even if you weren't sympathetic, you're not going to hurt them because they have no control over a British subject. They would just ask you to leave or they wouldn't invite you. But next time you go over there, Pierce, get an internal dissident. Get somebody from the, I don't know, get a guest worker who works in Saudi and say, how are you treated? This is terrible. You don't have medical care. You don't have retirement or get a Muslim stalwart who has no, he's seen the light and he wants to be a Christian. Put them on there and then see how long you are aired. Get a cop to Christian in Egypt. It was just, I guess what I'm trying to say is when I hear these things are so absurd and you can't really argue with them because they're not empirical. I kept saying this is not empirical. It's just, so when Tucker said the other day that he wanted Iran to have the bomb, and I thought, wow, we have people in Iran who said that they liked Israel because all the Jews there and it could be eliminated with one bomb, one bomb. That's what Roth and Johnny said, one bomb. So do you know that? Do you know what Akhma Jenin said? He was going to wipe off Israel off the map. So, and yet it's this casual kind of Israel committed to inside calibrate it. What do you mean by that? Tell me exactly what you mean by that. And I said to both of them, okay, they come across the border. They slaughter 1200 people. They retreat with over 240 hostages to adulation from the crowd who eggs them on. And then they descend into a $1 billion labyrinth with absconded money from stupid donors like us in the UN. And then they entry and exit is under a law school or hospital. You tell me after three weeks of waiting, when you asked them to turn over the perpetrators of that massacre and they won't do it and they spit in your face, you tell me what to do. Well, that's greater Israel than they were. It's just, it's mindless. People can't distinguish anything anymore when they get on. It's really been valuable. I'll just stop this rant, Jack. It's been very valuable because we talk about anti-Semitism and pom-goms and and Pitzer is such a fool that the governor, he said, I was Trump 1930. There is 1932 governor and it's coming from basically people like yourself in the United States and people abroad. And they really do, but not like people like you, not because of who you are or what you said, because you're Jewish and they hate Israel as well. And the fact that you can't see that has historical precedence because there were a lot of people in Germany that didn't quite size up what's going on. Yeah, they fought. And you keep mentioning that example, but you draw the wrong analysis from it. Yeah. Well, Victor, you've been great, like ever. I kind of went on. No, stop. No, there's more. We want more. That's tough, but maybe we'll get more in the next episode. So thanks for all the wisdom you shared. Late happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. Thanks to Rob Bluey and the Daily Signal for being such a great platform for this. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. And we will be back soon with another episode of that show. Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. Thanks folks. Bye bye. Thank you, everybody. Subscribe for exclusive features in addition.