California Politics, Greek Mythology, and The Future of the West

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So the next time you need someone to get the job done right, get matched with quality candidates with an Indeed sponsored job. Visit Indeed.com slash Next hire and sponsor your job today. Hello and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. This is our Saturday show in which we do something a little bit different in the middle segment, a little history. And today we're going to look at Hermes. We've been doing a series on the Greek gods. And so the Greek gods, the messenger god will be our middle segment. Before that, we're going to explore California and California and all sorts of things going on in California and then maybe some Canada and Finland things in the European region as well. So stay with us and we'll be back with some of those new stories. 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 might always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the 1982 Falklands war and in the age of clickbait and rage bait. That's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. And 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, D.C. as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policymaking process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially 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, we're 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 Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. You can find him at his website. It is called The Blade of Perseus and the URL is VictorHansen.com. So you can find all Victor's works there, his links to his books, the articles he's written, either for the site itself or for publications, other publications, and then all of the podcasts that he does. So please join us there. So Victor, I thought maybe we would start out with the May Oriel race and Nitya Raman, I think with her first, just a little news story, that somebody played a prank on her, apparently one of her neighbors, and brought in a homeless camp in front of her house. And she was offended. She said that her children shouldn't be subject to this. And she is one who has voted that voted out or did not vote for public safety laws of not having homeless people near schools and parks and other places like that. So she's got a little bit of hypocrisy to deal with. What are your thoughts? Her worldview is that homeless people belong near working class people because their jobs are not essential and their lives are insignificant. But certain elites that live in homes are two or three million dollars like herself and certain neighborhoods, they are a platonic guardian and they have to have exemptions and they have to be excused from the ramifications of their own ideology and consequences. So that's what she's saying. And the only surprising thing, she was so honest about it. And the other thing very quickly, and this is going to be very controversial, I have criticized DEI, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion on a number of grounds. It's innately amoral because it gives people preference in hiring admissions, promotions based on their sexual orientation, their gender, but especially their ethnic or tribal affiliations. Okay. But one thing we forget, and I've tried to emphasize this, the worst thing about it is not just the destruction of meritocracy, but the protection that it gives people when they do things wrong or say things stupidly. Jack sent me an article where an analysis was made in news stories. If the perpetrator of a violent act was Black or Hispanic, he was either not mentioned, I think 65% of the time, or his identification was at the bottom paragraph of the article. If the person was a white male, it was at the top. So what we see in Los Angeles is when Karen Bass went to Uganda, anybody else would have been, that would have been it. But she said she was going to this through world country and she was Black and this was the, nobody would have given suspended sentence for the vice mayor to phone in a bomb threat. And he wasn't even there and then get probation. He phoned in a bomb threat and said it was about Israelis. He was African American. And then the water and power woman who came from PGA was an utter incompetent. She was a Latina. She made $700,000. She didn't monitor the hydrants. She did not fill the reservoirs. And then she moved on to be a consultant in Puerto Rico. Then we go to the fire chief and her whole emphasis was on trans and gay hiring. And she didn't monitor the fire hydrant's efficiency. And so what we're seeing in LA as far as the government is concerned are certain people who claim protected status and they're completely exempt from criticism. And that's kind of a subtext with the, with Spencer Pratt. He is a white male so they go after him and go, and racism go after him because the other candidates have that DEI status and that allows him to say crazy things. So she's basically saying, I'm an elite and how dare you do this to me because I am part of the victimized class, which has nothing to do with class anymore in the sense of money or salary. That's what so and who gave us this? This was the Parthian shot from Barack Obama to divorce class from race in terms of exploitation. And you can see it everywhere in California. If you, and as I did, if you look at the scandals in Minnesota and you look at the hospice scandal, the Medi-Cal fraud scandals, the $250 billion it's estimated in California, I looked at it today, you could argue that 75% of them were recent immigrants from Armenia, India or Hispanic or black. And there were white people so-called, but they were a small minority. That's not because there's any racial prejudice or any difference. It's because of DEI, because it's a deterrent. If you're a white male and you engage in unlawful behavior, you're going to be prosecuted because you have, you're on the victimizer oppressor side. It's almost ironic. It's the flip side of say the 1920s or 30s when you were white in a country that was 90% white, then you had advantages. And I can remember growing up when my grandfather said that boy is no good. He came out here and he broke windows on Marched and he was a white guy who's very prominent in town. Whereas if he had a bit of Mexican-American, he would have been prosecuted. But now they've taken the worst attributes of that old boy system and flipped it. And that is now privileged. And so that explains a lot of California's problems. If you have 27% of the population that was not born in the United States and probably another 28 to 25% are the second generation, and you have not acculturated, assimilated and integrated them in the body politic, then you've got a very strange thing because their ideas of how government work in the first generation will see what India is like. India is a mess or what Mexico is like. Mexico is a mess or what Armenia was like. It's a mess. It takes immediate, if you're going to do this vastly radical social experiment and say so-called white people are toxic and we want everybody to come in the United States, legal or otherwise, but not them from Europe, then you have to teach them the American values. And the argument, well, those are mostly white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant values from the family, doesn't hold it because you wouldn't be coming here if those values didn't appeal to you because you're leaving India, you're leaving Armenia, you're leaving the western hemisphere south of the border, you're leaving Africa for particular reasons, money, better economic system, more freedom, more security, the rule of law. Where did that come from? It came from the founders. So that is something that we don't talk about. And it's very controversial and you'll be called a racist if you dare say it, but DEI has to end because everybody has to be treated equally under the law. And Tim Waltz and Keith Ellison and Mayor Fryer, whatever his name is, maybe that's the wrong mayor, but in Minneapolis, they knew that the Somali community was knee-deep in it and they gave them an exemption because they didn't want to be called a racist. The other thing very quickly about the mayor's race there, in a sane world, a sane logical, rational world, when you go into Los Angeles, you think of two things. One, this is California. We have the highest poverty rate in the United States. We have among the worst schools in the United States, even though we spend about, I don't know, money that would put us in the top 20 schools. We have the highest gas prices. We have the highest gas taxes in the continental United States. We have the highest income taxes yet, but we have one out of every three people on public assistance. Should only, given our demography, have one out of six. In addition to that, we have about 40% of the illegal aliens and 40% of the homeless people here. Our electricity is the most expensive in the United States, continental United States. Yet we sit on a whole wealth of untapped natural gas and oil. We used to be the leader in nuclear power. We're down to one nuclear power plant and they wanted to take out Diablo Canyon. They've taken the state and they've ruined it. The people are going to vote for Karen Bass, apparently, and not Spencer Pratt for two reasons. One, the wealthy elite that run California from San Diego to north of Santa Rosa or Napa Valley, they're very wealthy people. Their homes are worth three or four million bucks. They feel that in their particular enclaves, as Ms. Ramon showed, they are protected from, as I said, the consequences of their own bankrupt philosophies and policies. We're the lab rats and they inject us with all these different protocols. Homeless is okay and you can have them near schools and then they get out of the laboratory and watch us die. That never affects them unless they get infected. Once in a while, they get too close to the lab rats and they get infected and they get angry. Who did this to me? Who bought these homeless people to me? That's one reason that it's going to be hard for Spencer Pratt. I'm not being pessimistic. I want him to win, dearly so, but all the upper upper, the Hollywood crowd, the lawyers, all those people are going to not vote for him because they're not affected by it. They have the money for their own security. They don't go down to downtown LA. They shop in Brentwood or they shop and they patrol it. Second, although if you go to Santa Monica, that's destroyed now. There's no safe places there. The second thing is, you have 30%, 27, 30% of people who have not born in the United States, they have a very different view. If you go to Mexico and see what conditions are like in Mexico and then you come here, well, you may be classified as poor, but I can guarantee you if you're an indigenous person and most of the recent Mexican diaspora are indigenous, at least partly indigenous, the Mexican government doesn't give you healthcare. I go to the local emergency room. I can tell you that I am the only person twice that was speaking English and a lot of people, not a lot, but maybe four or five were speaking a dialogue that was not Spanish. So what I'm getting at very quickly is things are much better here than in Mexico. You can get a house. They're giving solar panels to illegal aliens in California. They're giving free healthcare. So you've got two types of people, a mass of subsidized poor through WIC cards and EBT cards and housing subsidies and healthcare. That combined basket is probably worth $100,000 a year. It is unimaginable in Mexico or in Central America or in Peru or in Venezuela. So when they get to the LA area, which is our version of Miami, but not like Miami because that's a middle-class diaspora, they think, this is heaven. I'm going to vote to keep continuing it. I'm going to join the SCIU. Maybe my son will be in the teachers union. And then the wealthy say, well, you know, it's kind of funny. The guy that my carpenter comes over to fix the door, he complains. And you know, the guy that fixes my solar panels is angry. And the guy that drives my Amazon truck is angry. And the electrician who fix my hot tub is angry. But I'm not. They live. Why do they have to live in Torrens or why they have to live in Simi? But why? That's their problem. In other words, the middle working classes take the brunt of it. They're not, they're too wealthy to get completely subsidized. And they don't have the money to create enclaves that protect them from these crazy people. And that's what raw moments are representative of. And do you think that's the largest voting constituency, which is why Spitz or Pratt could maybe lose the race, not that we want to? Well, he's behind. Yeah, he is behind. Yeah, he's behind Karen Bass and he's running kind of neck and neck of Ramon. Yeah. He has to get, he has to prevent her from getting 51% of the vote. Yeah. To get them the runoff. Yeah. His only chance, his only chance, conservatives will go out and vote for him. But I bet in Los Angeles, it's not Samuities Los Angeles anymore, believe me. That was a clean, well run conservative Democrat. He was like, Samuity was a Democrat, but he was like a Republican. So it's going to be people who are liberal and they're saying they're not going to vote for Spitzer Pratt. But when they fill out in the sanctity and quiet of their home, their mail-in ballot, they're going to think, man, I got it on my gym and there was human feces all over the street. And I'm not going to tell any of the women at our bridge club. I'm not going to tell anybody at the country club, but I'm going to vote for them. And then I'm going to say I'm not. That's his only chance. And there will be a considerable number of people about. The number of people who've been broken in, robbed, had their cars stolen, been assaulted, stepped in feces, seen needles, had their children in a park and somebody exposed it. Those are a lot of people. We just don't know how many will actually, they will never admit to it. That's important because the polls rest on people being honest and willing to express a political opinion. But if you have a lot of people who are afraid that if they go to work at the law firm, if they're a legal assistant or they're a dental hygienist or something and they say something that they voted for Pratt, it could hurt them. So they're not going to talk, but they might be, you know, it could happen. A significant amount of vote. Yeah, it could be. Who knows? Well, Victor, let's welcome back to our show, a sponsor, Pure Health Research. If you want to drop extra pounds, boost energy levels, and reduce swelling in your legs and feet, then this message is for you. Pure Health Research is on a mission to make America healthy again. And two of their best-selling supplements are leading the way. First is liver health formula. 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Again, that's purehealthresearch.com and we'd like to thank Pure Health Research for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show. So Victor, I just wanted to note a couple of things since you did bring in Minnesota. There's been a new arrest of two women who have stolen from autism funds, $2 million. So they are alleged to have stolen. So we got a new case in Minnesota. So let's turn into the... I will make a point on that very quickly. The Democrats are screaming and yelling that the earlier doge cuts ransacked federal health care. All they'd have to do is not steal the money. It's estimated in the United States is $250 billion and counting. Some people have said it's a half a trillion dollars. So all they would have to do is say we're $31 trillion in debt and we're running a $2 trillion deficit. And now we found out we've got all these fraudsters in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, in Minneapolis, in Chicago. Let's get together Democrats and let's make sure that nobody is stealing and put the people who are stealing in jail and deter that. And then we would have enough money for the people who are deserving. And let's close the border because people who come here illegally and then get on public assistance take that away from the citizen because the Democrats used to say, oh, we have enough money for everybody. Well, now they're saying they don't have enough money for everybody. Well, why don't you pick and choose your citizens over the people who came from different countries illegally? They're so full of contradictions. Yeah. And they never take good advice. No, they're illogical people. It's just pure emotion. Yeah. So Victor, there is a slush fund that was created by Trump. I think it had $1.8 million in it. And he was planning on giving it to those who were wrong, either wrongly arrested or did long sentences, unduly long sentences from January 6. And so he's created a slush fund. And now these left wing states- I think other people are eligible too. You know, the government went out. It got like Carter Page or somebody would be eligible. Oh, wow. Cool. And they went, the governors in left wing states like California, Illinois, New York are starting to say that they would like to tax it people who receive those funds at 100%. And that's just sounds like theft to me, but I'm not sure what are your thoughts on it. From May, here's my thought, from May to October 2020, there were continuous nights of murder, killing, arson, rioting demonstration after George Floyd's death. It is estimated that they arrested 14,000 people. Over 35 people were killed. None of the J6 people killed anybody. The only person that died violently was Ashley Babbitt, shot while on the arm for the misdemeanor of entering a broken window into the Capitol by officer Byrd. But there were over 1500 police officers injured. They burned down a federal courthouse. They torched a police precinct. They tried to burn up the historic St. John's Church across from the White House. They tried to storm into the White House grounds. They put trunk in the bunker and then the New York Times ridicule him. He's not so tough now and cheered that on. And when it was all over, 90 to 95% of all those people were let go. Now, what was that? What was that? These were people who attacked police officers, who killed people, who broke windows, who set fires, and they were let go either by state or local officials. And so did anybody say to them, we're going, you people got an exemption. They basically got a fund, a reverse fund. You didn't face any consequences. Is anybody saying to that, it's probably about 13,000 people. Did anybody say to them, we're going to attack you now because you were unduly let off and you got special preferences? No, of course not. They're heroes. So ostensibly, it sounds bad that Trump is setting up a fund partly funded or mostly from the IRS attack on him. And by the way, everybody, remember that was a bill of attainer that's outlawed in the Constitution. A bill of attainer is a fancy word that you pass a post facto law after the fact to direct your venom at a particular or group of individuals. Donald Trump filed his income tax. They leaked it. And then he said, would you close that seal it? And the New York legislature passed a law that said anybody tax returns that our Congress wants to look at, the New York controller will send his state taxes too. It was all, it was like the E. Gene Carroll bill of attainer. Once she filed all of these crazy charges, and she's in the news again this week, she had lied on her oath when she said that nobody funded her lawsuit against Trump. And now we know that Reid Hoffman, the left wing billionaire who helped found LinkedIn, he funded the whole thing. And she bragged about that. But like that, they passed a law in the New York legislature that said, whoa, she can't file a defamation, she can't file a rape, can't file anything because, well, they didn't care that she didn't know when it happened. They didn't care that she got the dates completely wrong. She couldn't tell anybody, she said that she knew when it happened because of the dress that she wore, and that identified the year, well, the year that she identified the dress wasn't even there. She couldn't even explain why a law and order episode had the same department store, same department store, same type of woman, same celebrity who they, she said, she said, and that was a thing before this happened. She couldn't even say she had a dating app, how to break up people's marriages. That was her thing. She couldn't even say that she had a tour. She made money on showing where sex offenders who were wealthy were. She couldn't say any of this. It's the most ridiculous thing. I'm only getting, running like that because in the counter revolution, the book that's coming out, I devoted a lot to this, not because she's important, but to show you how corrupt this legal system is. And that Judge Cohen just green-lighted it the whole way. He had contempt charges against Trump. And it was horrible, but that was a bill of attainer. And that's what the tax thing was in New York. So I don't know. I mean, an ideal world, if he would not mention it, he would say, I'm in the presidency. That's the Treasury Department controls the IRS and the DOJ. And if they want to have restitution for deliberately leaking my records to destroy my presidential campaign, I'm just one person, but that could have changed the history of the United States. And that was our aim. It was a coup to take my taxes that were legitimate. Nothing was found wrong. So that the left wing would have a talking point that said Donald Trump doesn't pay enough taxes and ruin my chances to be president. And that's a historic interference in the electoral process. Okay. If he says that, and then he could put a fund and have a board of directors decide what to do with it, I think he does, but there's claiming that they're Republicans. Well, who would you want? Chuck Chumer and Nancy Pelosi? All right. One last thing. A lot of this problem they have with Trump is he is taking what they did and just modeling them. He's just saying, you changed all the rules. So I'm going to change all of it. I'm just going to follow your prom. You know what? You let everybody go in 2020 for four months. I'm going to let people get pardoned and restitute them maybe for one day of bad behavior. And the same thing about law fairs. How he's going after Eugene Carroll. I can't believe this. He's going after Jack Smith. They went after him, but the only difference is you, let's see if the prosecutions are more logical because I think they are. Because I remember her testimony. I almost fell over when I heard it, but she said, I have not been given financial assistance to file this suit. His lawyers asked that. At the time, I think she got over a million dollars. All right. Well, let's hope that things change. And again, Governor Newsom is the one who started the idea of 100% tax on those slush funds for individuals and he's followed. Yeah. Go ahead. He did that. Yeah. He gets. But he's working on the high speed rail to reduce the cost. He's trying to get a new fire policy so we don't burn up California again. He's working on the homeless problem. He's trying to reduce the highest tax rate in the United States. He's trying to get more refiners coming here so we don't have the highest gas prices. Somebody from other states said he didn't know how he's going to function on 480 gas. And I wrote back and said, 480 dollar gas anytime in California is cheap. Heaven. We're at six and seven dollars. But the country's going wild because they're paying what California is now. It's so funny. Well, let's talk a little bit more about Newsom. In his state, he just signed a Senate bill 73, which restricts law enforcement from taking custody of ballots or election equipment. They are going after poor old Chad Bianco in Riverside County, who is the sheriff there, who seized 600,000 plus ballots. He has a warrant from the Superior Court, Judge. He has a right to do that. This Senate bill 73 is supposed to override that. So they say. That's basically saying we have a license to cheat. And we can never... Everybody knows what's going on in California. They have an automatic mail out ballot. You go to the DMV, you apply for unemployment, you go to the disability office, you go get a billing permit, and they say, do you want to be on your mail in... And we don't even think they ask an ID. And then they mail it to your house. There's no ID. You can fill it out and you can say, on Monday, I'm going to the disability. I'm Victor Hansen. On Tuesday, I'm Davis Victor. On Wednesday, I'm going to go over to unemployment. And I'm Hansen Davis. And then four ballots come and they don't check them. They even admitted that a few years ago. They said 100,000 ballots were sent out to illegal aliens. Well, didn't you just see the headline that a woman in California received two ballots in the current primaries, both with different serial numbers on them and just sent her two ballots? Well, Karen Bass was asked, you think that illegal aliens should be allowed to vote? She said, I'm not going to answer that. I think about it. No, you don't have to think about it. It's illegal. It's against federal law. You can't do that. You have to be a U.S. citizen to vote. But when you have 53 million people that weren't born in the United States and only a fraction of them are U.S. citizens, that's what the Democrats wanted. They basically said in 1965, Ted Kennedy, he said, and Philip Hart said, we are losing because this country is, and they, everybody got mad at Tucker Carlson. That's one thing he got right. He basically said the country was 9010. There were small fractions of Asians, Hispanics, but it was 9010, white and black. And then people said, it's too conservative. It's too weird a country. They're not accepting the post-New Deal welfare state and we'll never win. So we've got to quit making meritocratic immigration. Can you support yourself? Do you have skills? Can you read English? Can you write English? Can you pass this test? I can remember when I was in grammar school, when you go to the hospital or you go to the school, there would be a Russian immigrant or a Czech immigrant or a Polish immigrant or an Armenian immigrant or a Mexican immigrant. They all spoke English. They all were very skilled. They transitioned into the middle classes very quickly. And then they said it was unfair. We want the great society welfare program. Let's just open the gates. Don't let those people in anymore. And they didn't and get as many poor people as you can for our future constituencies. And we'll see if there is a God of nemesis or hubris or what comes around goes around because a lot of the Mexican American vote in the last election went to Donald Trump. They feel that was an aberration and they're going to get it back. But if the Republicans were smart, they would run a big ad every day with three, let's just say three ICE officers. How do you feel about protecting the borders of your country? They would say this, I really am honored to do that. Why would people are attacking you? I don't know why they're attacking. What are the things they do to you? Does it ever occur to them that you are yourself Mexican American and these are very professional? Well, I don't think about that, but I've noticed that. So they could really tell people that the subtext of the entire ICE, anti-ICE violence is a bunch of Hollywood celebrities, academics, media people, unemployed, nutty Antifa, union type, SEIU, attacking mostly Hispanics who are trying to keep their own community safe and doing service to their country. And that is a win-win issue if the Republicans are smart enough to show up, that sophisticated, where is Lee Outwater where we need him? You know, 1988. Is that the blood? I'm doing this by memory. Mike Dukakis was leading out of the Democratic convention, George H.W. Bush by 17 points. They said he was a shoe-in that Bush, people were really mad at Bush because he said things like, I'm going to have a thousand points of life. I'm going to have a kinder, gentler nation and all these Reaganites and I'm going to vote for that guy. Nancy Reagan even got them. She goes, well, kinder than what? Gentler than what? We picked you to be part of our administration. We weren't kind. Now you're going to do better than Ronnie did. So there was a defection and then they unleashed the madman, Lee Outwater. And the first thing you saw was a guy standing in front of Boston Harbor and it was all this debris floating and he basically said, this is Mike Dukakis, the environmental president. And this is his city. Next thing you knew, Mike Dukakis felt that cold war was heating up and he needed to reestablish his feed days as a tough military hawk. They put him in an Abrams tank. I think it was an early eight. Might have been an M60. And it was sad. It was in his defense. It gave him too big of a helmet and he just was like a bobble toy and he was very diminutive and he stood up like this and it was a disaster. And then they thought, that's not enough. Well, yeah, I got a trifecta. So then they put Willie Horton and Willie Horton had been released by liberal polo office and went out and killed right the whole thing. So they had, you know, like when you go to the state fair, those metal things you go through, they show him go. And as they were going over his record, they just kept spinning and spinning and spinning. Mike Dukakis in his parob or let out a queer criminal to prey on people. And when they got done with him, he lost by, you know, he lost by four or five points. And later Lee Atwater got a brain tumor and he apologized. He said, I said, I was going to take the bark off you. But the attitude of Bush was basically, well, I'm a New England, I'm a New England type of respected sober and judicious aristocrat. And I kind of wandered into the Lee Atwater and that Southern kind of left old good old boy hardball. And I don't think that I would ever do that again. Then when he died, it was basically I would rather lose nobly than win ugly again. So then when they did Clinton campaign, Clinton just tore the bar quad. You know, he was just, they just, we were not in the worst depression since 1929. It was just a mild recession and they carvel got on TV. It's economy stupid. It's gotta submit. I'll tell you that we were going there. And they destroyed him because there was no Lee Atwater. And then the Republicans, you know, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, John McCain, this is a good model to be very liked by the Washington Post and the New York Times, to be honored by your Republican, your Democratic Tip O'Neill likes me. It's called bipartisanship. And I would really like to be an NPR more. And I have a Hollywood star who's gonna endorse me. And this is going to be really wonderful because I can lose like a gentleman. And then think about it. They didn't get the popular vote since 2004 and only slightly with George W. Bush against John Kier. And that was only because they unleashed Carl Rowe. And that was good. Because they did the unlist the swift boat. Remember that? And then John Kier goes, I'm very disturbed about Roe v. politics. So 20 years, they didn't win the popular vote. And then the Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack came. That was strong. And he just, I just thought to myself, or maybe Wiley Coyote being them, and he was wrong. I thought, how is he going to get out of this? He did this 10 years ago with Billy Bush on Access Hollywood. He just got out of the car and he was talking in a private way. And he said, do you have aggressive women? He said, yeah, you sometimes they want you to grab their pee. It was a vulgarity, but it was a private conversation years ago. And they taped it. And then the Democrats got a hold of it. And they just kept it, kept it, kept it right till the debate. Remember that? And then they released it. And then it was just so perfect. All of the traditional Republicans who wanted to lose nobly. Unfortunately, my former colleagues at National Review, I didn't get involved in it. They wanted everybody to, but this is shocking. We can't have a president that used that P word. I'm thinking, you don't know what LBJ said. You have no idea what FDR said. You have no idea what John Kennedy said. John Kennedy was betting interns in his wife's bed. Come on. FDR had Anna Roosevelt going up and down the halls of the White House, making sure Lucy Mercer could come in and be with FDR and Edith wouldn't find out. So, but anyway, that was, that was very, that was really funny because they didn't understand Roadrunner. So they thought they had him. And then all of a sudden, here at the debate and everybody's looking around and here comes Steve Bannon. And there's Paula Jones. And there's four of them all had been sexually harassed by Bill Clinton and had sexual twists. You know, the poor woman and the rest, ran a rest home, forget her name, but she was really good. So they all sat there and stared at Hillary and so when she started in about his, they just looked at him and it just, and then I thought, you think she got flustered enough from having all of Bill Clinton's victims in the front of her? Well, it was exactly like a Roadrunner cartoon where Roadrunner goes off the cliff and he, he's, he defies gravity and he goes and looks back at Wiley Coyote and then Wiley Coyote follows him and goes straight down to the canyon and then Roadrunner walks back on air and that's what's what he did. But they don't like to do that. No. Trump was the only person that, that wanted to win ugly anyway. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and we better take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about the God, I think he's a demigod, isn't he? Hermes? Oh, he's okay. The God Hermes. So stay with us. Yeah. If you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, you might enjoy the Daily Signals flagship show, the Tony Kennett cast, the same common sense perspectives you love weekdays at 7pm Eastern. And unlike some of the other evening shows, we work up until showtime to bring you the latest breaking news, analysis and good old American star cast. Tom Tillis, I'm pretty sure might have been useful at one time as a doorstop, find the Tony Kennett cast on YouTube, X, radio, TV, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Anybody who would like to find Victor on social media, you can find him at his X account, VD Hans, sorry, his handle is VD Hansen and at Facebook, on Hansen's Morning Cup, so you can connect up with him there. So Victor, I'm anxious or ready to hear about the messenger God Hermes and his significance in the godly panoply. Why do you need a messenger God anyways, right? Well, you need a messenger God because they're up on Mount Olympus and we're down here and some of us are down in hell. So how you connect the three worlds and Hermes does it. So he is the swift God and he's usually portrayed with a kind of a, they call it a petso, it's a round hat because he's a traveler and he has the katekuik chaos, it's a staff with little wings on it. It's a magic like Gandalf the wizard staff and he can kill people, he can put them to sleep, he can trick them with it and then he either has wing sandals or in some sculptures he has wings going out of his feet. He's the Roman Mercury. Everybody thinks because we're so Romanized that you know, you have a car and it's hot, they call it a mercury. Maybe the French have a Hermes car, but he's just the Roman equivalent that the Romans borrowed or incorporated a local god and then assumed Hermes attributes. So he is, if you're, he's usually out in Arcadia, the rustic part of Greece and the Peloponnes. So if you're out there and you are a traveler or you're a shepherd or you're a thief, he's the God you pray to for protection against robbers or other thieves. But he's also the messenger, so if Zeus has an idiot and the Iliad to stop something that the war is doing, he sends Hermes down there or if you die and you're important, Hermes will be the one who guides you across the sticks river, you know what I mean? To see Charonk, Charonk. So he's a god of messenger. The name Hermes, it's from a word, an old word and actually it appears on linear B. So it's not just part of the post-dark, Greek dark ages and it means hill or mound and that people have suggested it might be because of Arcadia and his haunt or his little territory is in Mount Selene in Arcadia. It's the second highest mountain in the Peloponnese. It's about like Huntington Lake in California, about 72, 7500 feet. I've been up the top of it. It's very beautiful and there's an, there's a shrine there. I don't think there's more than three or four Hermes temples. I mean, how do you, it's not really, most people don't need that kind of protection, you know, oh, I'm undead, I'm dead or I don't walk alone at night out in the countryside. But if you do, he's the person that you call to protect yourself. So he's in the Iliad and the Odyssey and the first real description of him is another group of hexameter poems called the Homeric hymns and there is a fourth one, I think, a hymn to Hermes about stealing the, when he's born, the first thing he does go out and steal Apollo's cattle. My professor at UC Santa Cruz, when I was an undergraduate, was Norman O'Brown and he wrote a book, Hermes the Thief. So even though we were reading Greek literary poetry, almost every lecture was on Hermes. Hermes the Thief, Hermes the Trickster, Hermes the Scoundrel. And so he's, I don't think outside of Arcadia and Athens, there's more than one or two temples to him, but in Athens, for some reason, he has a lot of cults and little temples all over and he's the person that people pray to for fertility. And there's something, I have to be very careful because we have an audience of young people and I will respect their innocence in youth and propriety, but people in the ancient world did not understand the mechanics of infertility because they didn't have sophisticated knowledge of sperm counts and ovaries and so when people were not fertile, they didn't blame a low sperm count on the part of the male or infant fertility and part of the female. They said it was the inability to, how should I say this politely, achieve erection. And so Hermes was the god of that fertility. So on every home, most homes, there was something called Hermes and they had a picture of the god on a plaque and then proportionately where his hips would be, they would have a very long, quite prominent phallus in the erect state and that would say that in this particular house, we honor and we will be fertile. It became notorious because on the eve of the Sicilian expedition in 415, Alcibiades was one of the three to be generals and he allegedly got drunk the night before with a hammer and he went through the neighborhoods and knocked off these things and it was considered horrendous. He thought, wow, he insulted Hermes and now our family is not going to be able to have any more children and that's one of the reasons they recalled him and lost the expedition. So it was very considered very important. We have a couple of words in English from Hermes. Anybody remember what they are? Hermeneux, the science of Hermeneux translation or understanding messages from Hermes, the messenger and we have another one. I don't know, go. Hermaphrodite, that's true. That's Hermes and Aphrodite. He had a liaison twist with Aphrodite and so it didn't work out too well. So people that had part Hermes and part Aphrodite, they had sexual organs from both sexes and that was part of the explanation. So he's not a mean god, he's just sort of a devilish and they've associated him with Pan, the god of Dionysus, the god of the countryside. Arcadia, people should, if you have a chance to go to Greece, I know the Greek islands are so beautiful and northern Greece and Thessaloniki is beautiful and I always like Attica and Biosha but the Greek countryside, the creek Seashore is so beautiful, all these little towns with these seaside cafes. However, Arcadia is stunning if you drive through the highlands. Some of these mountain passes are hair-raising, like Tiogo Pass in California, the old Tiogo Pass, not the new road, straight down. But I took my daughter and my colleague Bruce Thornton and his son when they graduated from high school for two weeks. We drove all through there. It's quite something. Does the Don't Kill the Messenger have anything to do with Hermes or his experience in some way or was that completely separate of military experience with Saint-Mexico? I don't think so. He was sacrosanct. So when he brought a message from the gods of someone, no one would think of killing him. And he had his Caduceus, which was kind of like a wand. He could do anything to you with it. I don't know, quite. I think there was a, wasn't there a florist company that used his, you know, a national florist that uses sandals or maybe his feet. Or maybe a communication company that used his wings and him flying by with his little staff. But when you see him in art or statuary, you either see the sandals with the wings or the wings growing out of his heel, kind of both sides. I don't know how you could fly with, seems like it's not aerodynamic. But anyway, that's all of our 12 gods and goddesses because the 12th, Hestia, the god, Roman Vestia, the god of the household, the maternal protector of the home, she's, she vies with Dionysus. He kind of kicked her out. And she became less an Olympian. But those are the 12 gods. And we're thinking of a new series coming up next week. So we'll tell everybody about it. Yeah, we'll do something. Well, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about, hmm, we've got so much on the agenda here. How about Canada? So stay with us and we'll be back. Since the founding of America 250 years ago, many things have changed. But some things never do. The commitment of husband and wife, the importance of passing along our values to our children, the faithfulness of God. Some wonder how we can ensure America will continue to thrive. As long as we keep first things first, we've only just begun. America, the beautiful. Welcome back. This is Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. We are subsidiary of the Daily Signal. So I highly encourage everybody to go to the Daily Signal. I've got lots of good work there, both articles and podcasts. And you can find Victor's short podcasts at the Daily Signal, eight minutes or so podcasts on different topics during the week. So please join him there. So Victor, the two things in Canada, first one though is their Prime Minister, Carney, has decided that it might be better to improve relations with the United States instead of with China as he implied earlier in his challenge to Donald Trump. I was wondering what you make of this. He just runs around like a chicken with his head cut off. I mean, he got in this tiff with Donald Trump. And all he had to do was say, yes, there is a problem with Canada, the United States. We're a small country and we're running a huge trade surplus with you 53 billion a year. And we're going to work on that. Number two, yes, we're a member of NATO and of the 32 members, we're number second from the last. We only spend 1.5% of GDP on defense. We've broken our promise. We said we were going to do two. But what the world needs now in the North American sphere of NATO are icebreakers because the Arctic is becoming very important. So that's one thing that we're really good at. We used to have the fourth largest navy in the world. So we're going to have a multi-billion dollar plan on icebreakers and we'll get up to the 2% and we'll make the 5%. And then he can say, there's been a lot of problems on oil and we have kind of presented it that we have this oil and we supply Detroit and the border states in the North with oil and we've done you a big favor. All he had to do was say, you know what, this is a mutually beneficial relationship because these come out of the tar sands of Alberta and it's very hard to refine. It's very hard to put them on a pipeline, go all the way to Vancouver. So what we find really advantageous for us and for you is for us to build pipelines across the border to serve this huge American market that has the refinery capacity to turn high tar oil into gasoline. So let's do it. But he took, you know, when Trump was sort of baiting him about making Alberta the 51st state or Canada the first, that was sort of like Greenland, you know, and it was just a way of egging up, get the issue that you've got Alberta there and it's kind of like an American state and it's being treated terribly and it can always join us. It's not going to happen. Nobody in America on the conservative side wants Canada here and you know, a bunch of left-wing senators and representatives. But he took it seriously. He was a citizen of three countries. He lived much of his life in the United Kingdom and then he got angry at Trump. So then he thought, well, Trump's not the whole world. I'm going to go over to the EU and trash the United States and then cozy up to China. And I thought that when he did this, I thought, you fool, you're completely ignorant. You don't understand that it's not what you think. China is not the rising star. It's got one point zero fertility. It's shrinking. It's aging. It's corrupt. It's air defenses and a random word joke. The Israelis, the United States penetrated them in one day. They only have three carrier groups. They're now, they used to be self-sufficient. They import 30% of their food. The United States is the greatest egg exporter now. They have 10, 11 million barrels of oil they have to import. We're the biggest producer of oil and natural gas in history. Their military is inefficient. For all the new things they're doing, it's not that good. And the United States fertility rate is still at 1.7. GDP, it takes four Chinese citizens to produce 60% of what one American produces. Where have you been? And the only reason that they're even competitive is their 300,000 students come to North American, but particularly American, STEM programs and universities and graduate programs. And they appropriate bioengineering, sophisticated physics, electrical, computer engineering, and they take it back. And we can stop at any time we want. And then it would all be derivative. And about 20 years, they would fall way behind because of their closed system that politicizes research. So he said that, you know, he was going to reach out to China and the rules-based order of European. And then all of a sudden people shook him by the ear, I guess, and said, you idiot, your economy is a complete creation of the United States. Your defense is a complete creation of the United States. Don't you know how to handle Donald Trump? Talk to the NATO secretary general of NATO. He does. He doesn't speak ill about, he filters through what Trump says and he focuses on the things that will help NATO be stronger. Why don't you do the same? Well, now he's desperate. Yes. Well, in addition to all those problems with China, it's completely antithetical to the West. Well, I mean, I realize that communism does come out of the burst from the ideas of the West, but it's antithetical to a prosperous Western model. It is. I don't know what he's looking at, but he led in 400,000 new immigrants. And he's led in all of these immigrants with no legality necessarily. They're not able to immigrate, I mean, to assimilate, integrate, acculturate. He's asking nothing of them. And you want to say to him, Karni, go look at Europe. You're a European, basically. You came back to Canada, but look at it. Look at the open borders. Look at their crazy green policy that's destroyed the German economy. Look at their dependence on the North Stream imported Russian gas. Look at the crime rate. Look at the grooming in England. Look at all those natural resources that are not playing. Look at their pathetic defense budget until you want to copy all that socialism. Can I answer for him? I think he thinks he does. Yeah, I do, but I especially want to. I really like their censorship of disinformation and mince information, and I really enjoy their anti-Trump stuff. So then he kind of puts his tail between his legs and once it trips into Washington and say, may a culpa, may a culpa, may a maxima culpa. We like the United States and we want to help America be great. Yes, Prime Minister Karni, whether we're going to be great again depends on you. That's right. No, you don't have the ability to hurt us or help us. The Canadian people are wonderful people. We want to be as friendly as we can, but don't be like a billiard ball bouncing all over the table. One day you're going to court the United States and Trump hurts your feelings. The next day you're a Eurocrat and that's the wills-based order. And then the next day you're a begging China and then somebody taps him on the shoulder and says, hey, Karni, Trump represents a constitutional free society. Xi represents a repressive Communist Party that has killed more people than any government in the history of civilization under Mao. Is that what you want to cozy up to? Yeah, as you're talking, you're reminding me of how Donald Trump is so hard for these diplomats to deal with because he says things that they get provoked and they do something extreme that's offensive to him, but then they come over and he's so gracious with the exception of Zelensky. I think he led Zelensky out of the White House one time, but otherwise he's very gracious to these people when they do come in. So I'm sure Karni will get a nice reception. I was in faculty meetings for 20 years at Cal State and every once in a while they would have a person come and tell us certain things. We've had a lot of serious assaults at night and the cop would come in. Sometimes they were big guys and they were all these Nambi Pambi professors and it was like talking to aliens. They said, well, what strategies should we use when we leave our classrooms at nine? Well, don't get out in the dark. Who'd do that? Walk where the light is. Call me. We're armed. Stuff like that. And that's what Trump is. And they're the faculty guys and they just look at him and they say, oh my God, it's blue suit, red tie, wing tips, makeup, orange makeup, comb over, queen's accent, says any first thing that comes into his mind, cuts through all the crap, ogre, ogre, ogre. We were sober and judicious and refined. And then they take a deep breath and they say, but why is the United States leaving us in the dust? The Euro used to be a dollar 40 very quickly. It's only a dollar 10. It got down to 95 cents. Where'd they get all that energy? What come we don't have any? Why do we import natural gas in the United States? We used to have the second biggest navy in the world, the British. Where's our carrier groups? And then the Germans think, we were the cradle of military technology. We only have six liver tanks that work. So that's what they can't figure out. How can this crude figure be engineering a renaissance and leaving them in the dust on bioengineering, robotics, AI, space exploration, satellite technology? Well, I have a message for them. I know how Donald Trump does that. He believes he got into a job and he's supposed to do the job as other people get in. He has another trait too. He admires competency. So somebody like Elon Musk not only voted against him in 2016 and 2020, but sharply ridiculed him. Donald Trump for all of his been dictating us is, he has not been dictated. If he's a utilitarian. So what does he do? He courts Musk and he thinks, man, this guy's a genius. NASA is ossified. He'll either make NASA compete with NASA and make NASA better or leave them in the dust. But either way, we win. And he recruited that genius Tesla, the boring company, X, you know, rock. Since you brought Elon up, did you see that, that rocket that Jeff Bezos shot off just blew up like a nuclear long? I like Jeff Bezos. That happens. But he's behind. It's hard to compete. If you've got $200 billion and he's got 450 billion, and then you see those massive rockets he's making, they're almost up. I mean, they're just, they make the old Saturn rocket that was supposed to be the most powerful rocket in the world. And they make them look small and they work. And he's, I get really angry when you get these mediocre, like people in the squad. I don't know if it was Jasmine Crocker or somebody made fun of Elon Musk and said he's an idiot and all that. They all say that. He's got, he's done more for the United States in his fingernail than they will do their whole life. And yes, he's eccentric. Yes, he can be erratic. Yes, he fights with Trump, makes up, all we care is that he does like his country, the United States, and he wants it to be second to nobody. And he's determined to insist that we'll have the best satellites in the world, we'll have the best electric cars in the world, we will have the best social media in the world, we'll have the best artificial intelligence in the world, et cetera. And that's rare to find people like that. Yeah, very, very much so. What is it? Europe have all those guys? I don't understand. Because they would be taxed to death and their money would be regulated to death. It's more progressive in Europe's matter. Yeah, but I think they would. It's the climate, the envy over Europe. They don't want anybody with too much more than anybody. It's like Tocqueville said, what destroys societies, he's talking about the difference between America and Europe is that certain systems prefer everybody to be equal and poor, and other systems are except on inequality when the poorest are better off than elsewhere. And that's the United States. I mean, you can have a guy with $400 billion, but the only thing we worry about if you're a truck driver, can you make a good living? And then we don't worry about how many times Elon Musk makes more than a truck driver. All right, Victor, let's go ahead and end this episode with Jill Biden, who came out and said that when Joe had his little blip in the debate where he kind of stopped and murmured and mumbled, and then when he finished, Donald Trump said, I don't know what this guy said. Either to you. Or to say either to the, I can't remember, either to you, the moderator. And Jill Biden said about that now that her book is coming out, that she thought he might have had a stroke at that point, or somebody gave him drugs. You claim that a hunter said he took too much ambience. Nobody believes that. You know why they don't believe it? Because all you women out there, if your husband was on stage and he looked like Joe Biden, and then you really did believe he had a stroke, as soon as he got off that stage, you would escort him into the ER and have a simple MRI. And she didn't do that. She took him to a post-rally party, and then she told the world that he answered every question in detail. So you didn't do that. You're just lying. And he knew all the facts. That was what she said. He answered every question. He knew the facts. He didn't know any of them. He didn't know where he was. It's really sad. No Democrat knows facts, Victor. Basically, she was reminding us how the Biden administration worked. It was people like her that went out and lied to the country and said he was perfectly fit. Then privately, she said, now listen, you're not capable of doing anything. So we're going to go home every weekend, two days a week, and stay in the beach house. And you're going to go out in the, we have an auto pen to sign everything, and we've got all the Obama people to get the appointments. So we'll just outsource everything, and we'll say that Donald Trump is senile, and he's a crook. That's what they did. Now they're even saying that Donald Trump may be unhealthy, that he's senile. I watched that cabinet meeting when he has to televised. It's kind of strange, because each person has to pledge allegiance to Trump before he talks. I understand that. But it's amazing how open it is. And they all say that, oh, he's a democracy, Dyson, he's the most transparent. They talk about anything and everything in those meetings, and he's sharp. He tells all of these experts, well, and remember this and do this. So he's at the top of his game at 79. Yeah, he sure does an amazing job. I'm not sure I'll be that fit when I reach that age. Well, Victor, let's turn to comments for On Yours and Jack's show. And one of them, you guys did talk about the slush fund money of Trump's, and Mary Statter White, 1982, wrote, that slush fund is Trump's money. Payout won through court cases. He is now giving back to those who cannot fight financially, and his haters are livid. Yes, that's true, Mary. So thank you. Rosemary Whiteley, there are few, if any, that can fill Tulsi Gavir's shoes. Like Tulsi, I've said that so many times. Yeah, she is and was a great asset to our country. God bless her and her husband, may the Lord help her. She did something that no other person ever did. She released all these files that showed what Comey, Brennan, Clapper were doing, especially what they were doing with Obama during their transition. And there's more to come that she's released. And that's been very important. She may have disagreed about Iran, but she was very, she wasn't like, is it kid, you know, that Kent, Joe Kent, that sort of went public when he was disdain. That's what's important, that people realize it just because you disagree on one particular aspect, that doesn't cancel the whole agenda. So her attitude was, I think that going in on a preemptive incursion to Iran may be on the borderline of a forever war. But so I'm opposed to it. I'm going to keep my mouth shut. And I'm going to try to find things to emphasize the good part of this administration, which is far better than the alternative. And I don't know why the other pundits that we know so well couldn't do that. Yeah, she certainly does have a lot of decorum about her as she went about her job. I heard something out there. I'm just vague that was she brought in to testify on the Epstein files or something like that? Or did they bring in Pam Bondi? She's going to be coming in to She's suffering from thyroid cancer. Is she? Yeah, that can be eminently treatable if it's found early. It's about a 90% cure rate, but you have to find it early because it's sort of near your limb system and it can go take off your limb notes. But I think they got it early. I think that was the real reason why she stepped down. She didn't feel well. Yeah. All right. And then Jerry Sprague, 90-22. Trump's present move is getting the Muslim majority Arabs to join the Abraham Accords. Take ownership of the Middle East. Same thing happening with NATO versus Russia. Russia and Iran are severely weakened so their neighbors can manage themselves without the USA. This is bringing the world into a better world order. China is getting better managed by its neighbors who have stepped up. Japan, Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea. Trump has done this and controls most of the world's oil. What is left to do? That's a very good point. And that's why I mentioned I was so disappointed in Robert Kagan's essay that this is a disaster for the United States and all the people that hate Trump who claim that they were geo-strategic pundits and experts, they've all lost their reputation because if you're just empirical, take Trump out of the equation as the catalyst, just say, is Venezuela better or not now? It's not exporting criminals. It's not exporting illegal aliens. It's not selling secret oil to China. The government has a chance for a transition to democracy. We are banking their oil, keeping it in reserve and keeping them on us and giving it back to the people when they follow what we've told them to do. Is Panama better? Are the Chinese getting out of the exit? Yes. Is the Middle East better? Does China have a proxy in Iran? Not really anymore. Has Russia in Syria? No, they're kicked out. Do they have one in Venezuela and Iran? No, they're out of the picture. And for all Donald Trump's hyperbolic rhetoric about Ukraine, he was the first American president. It's a matter of historical fact to green light offensive weapons. Joe Biden and Obama put them on hold and he allowed them, Javelins, that saved Kiev to go to them. And he's been harder on Putin, whether you talk about jaw-boing about the Nordstrom pipeline or getting out of an asymmetrical missile deal or killing the Wagner group or trying to crash oil prices as first. So the world is changing. I never thought in my lifetime that Israel would be helping to engineer the missile defense of the Gulf States on their invitation against another Muslim country. So that's a radical thing that's happened. And yet they can't see anything. You turn on CNN and you have every Heikham Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, the guy, the former astronaut Kelly, Mark Kelly from Arizona that's all gloom and doom. And it's horrible, horrible, horrible. Yeah, a whole series of Debbie Downers. China is much weaker position than it was 10 years ago. Much, much weaker. So is Russia. And Australia is rearming Japan. Japan is rearming. Taiwan is arming. South Korea is arming. The Philippines are arming. NATO is rearming. We are rearming. Only two countries that don't seem to be doing it are Canada and Spain. All right. Well, thank you for that around the world. And thanks to our audience for listening to us today. This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen and we're signing off. Thank you, everybody, for listening and viewing. We'll see you next time. 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.