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No one yet knows the ultimate verdict on the war, given all the economic, military, political, and strategic variables still in play. A memorandum of understanding released this week might end the war, or result in further American strikes—depending on the degree of Iranian concessions and compliance. But in this confusing, ongoing drama, many fabrications and distortions still circulate.

California shows what happens when one party gains total control: soaring costs, shrinking opportunity, and a government that no longer serves its citizens. By any measure, California is a failed state—and a national embarrassment. Taxes? It has the highest income and gas taxes in the nation. Roads? A Reason Foundation survey ranks it 49th among the states. Mass flight? Between 250,000 and 350,000 more Californians leave the state than move in each year. Housing, gas, insurance, and electricity prices? The highest in the continental U.S. Illegal aliens, the poor, the homeless, the foreign-born, and welfare recipients? The largest numbers in...

1:11: Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. There's a lot of confusion, controversy, and disagreement about the latest phase of the so-called Iran war. Remember we bombed kinetically 38 to 40 days then we had 60 days of negotiation and here we are in mid June in which Donald Trump has announced yet another time there is going to be a peace deal coming with a 60-day um period for all the elements of the deal to be enacted. A lot of people are upset. They feel that Iran was on the ropes. they're going broke...

Updates on the conflict with Iran, the growing fallout from the Karmelo Anthony case, and a look at the legacies of George Washington and Joe Biden; this is “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.” As the national debate over race, justice, and identity politics continues to intensify, new controversies are raising questions about equal treatment under the law and the future of race relations in America.

Iran survives by delay, deception, and deterrence games—but the moment may be coming when airpower, not diplomacy, decides how the nuclear standoff ends. The Trump administration has bent over backward to negotiate an end to Iran’s grand plans to develop nuclear weapons—before the June 2025 bombing, afterward, and again during the follow-up diplomacy of spring 2026. Yet Iran is unlikely ever to abandon its pursuit of the bomb voluntarily. With nuclear weapons, Tehran hopes to become the de facto hegemon of the Middle East. Only then could it effectively coerce or deter both Israel and the wealthy Arab Gulf states....

The far left has enjoyed one-party rule in the City of Angels for decades, but now there’s a slight wrinkle in their plans as Los Angeles might finally get its first non-left mayor in years this Tuesday. Spencer Pratt, the nominally conservative former reality TV star turned political activist, is currently trailing by less than five points behind incumbent Mayor Karen Bass and is even closer to current City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, according to recent polling by UC Berkeley/The Los Angeles Times.

Iran, China, immigration, elite institutions, and the future direction of the Democratic Party all point back to a broader debate over power, nationalism, and the stability of the Western world. Growing tensions in the Middle East, questions surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, and fears of conflict with China continue shaping American foreign policy, while political and cultural battles at home are increasingly centered around institutional control, media influence, and ideological conformity.

Israel is condemned for surviving a massacre while regimes guilty of actual ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter escape outrage and scrutiny. Since October 7, we have been lectured nonstop about the supposedly singular sins of Israel. The campuses, the left-wing media, and the new Democratic Socialist officials, both federal and state, following the cue of student activists and professors from the Middle East, have painted Israel and their Jewish supporters as Nazis, fascists, and among the worst murderers in today’s bloody world. This is nonsensical. The medieval-style massacre of 1,200 Jews in their homes on October 7, during a time...

America has repeatedly been declared a dying empire, yet every rival—from Nazi Germany to the Soviet Union to China—has ultimately fallen short of US power and resilience. One American view of China—now increasingly popular on the Left and the Right alike, especially among the hate-Trump crowd—is that the communist colossus will be forever ascendant, with continued astonishing levels of food production, ship construction, and industrial output. In this pessimistic view, China will soon replace America as the world’s predominant power. We are, supposedly, like an exhausted British Empire circa 1945, and China is the new version of the postwar American...

Given that we spent over a trillion dollars in Iraq and maybe more in Afghanistan, and Joe Biden left $50 billion in equipment in the latter, the idea that you would spend less than $30 billion and have a chance to overthrow the worst government in the world—one that’s caused most of the problems we’ve had in the Middle East—is a bargain, if it works, and I think it will, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words.”

Demographic change, DEI ideology, anti-Israel radicalism, and political cowardice have mainstreamed hostility toward Jews. Few predicted that blaming Israel and the Jews who support it would flare up in the early 21st century—and in America of all places, where there are nearly as many Jews as there are in Israel. After all, Israel is the only consensual society in the Middle East. It holds regular elections and maintains tripartite judicial, executive, and legislative checks and balances. Free speech is found in the Middle East only in Israel, where religious apostasy, criticism of one’s own country, gender equity, and tolerance of...

Today’s Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional working-class, patriotic roots and embraced a radical Jacobin ideology built on division, coercion, and political extremism. For the past century, the agendas of the Democratic Party were predictable. They professed concern for working Americans and supported blue-collar unions. Unemployment insurance, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, and Social Security were their trademarks—often rapidly achieved by growing government bureaucracies and continually raising taxes. Still, many Democrats were socially conservative. By the 1970s, Democrats still deplored antisemitism. Party officials had rejected their own segregationists to champion civil rights. Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and...

The Iran war didn’t just break Tehran—it shattered old alliances, exposed Europe’s weakness, checked China and Russia, and accelerated an American-led geopolitical realignment. No one ever quite knows the nature of the aftermath of any war in the Middle East. The current effort to disarm and neuter the Iranian theocracy is no exception. But contrary to European and American left-wing consensus, the ripples of the Iran war are already remaking the postwar world as we knew it—and in ways that are all bad. For more than half a century, OPEC has terrorized the industrial world with threats of oil shortages...

For decades, Iran survived by staying just below the threshold of direct confrontation. It relied on shadow oil shipments, asymmetric attacks, and strategic disruption. That formula worked against sanctions. It is now colliding with something it was never built to handle: a sustained, enforced blockade.And markets are only beginning to understand what that means.How a Shipping War Turned Into Economic ContainmentThe escalation did not begin with the blockade. It began with Iran attempting to weaponize uncertainty.Early in the conflict, Tehran targeted commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, effectively freezing traffic through one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints....

Trump’s assassination attempts underscore how rhetoric that casts political opponents as existential threats can move from language to violence. Same Old, Same Old: Target Trump.At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Donald Trump was the target of yet a third assassination attempt—this time in full view of the Washington press corps. The event was presented as a spirited night with Trump. After 11 years of avoiding the predominantly left-wing media event, he decided to revisit the dinner. He anticipated that he would be the object of ridicule inside the hall—and that he might see possible violence outside it. Indeed, protesters ringed...

Iran’s decades-long bluff—built on terror proxies, nuclear brinkmanship, and Western appeasement—collapsed the moment it faced direct force and a changed geopolitical landscape. How does the supposedly most fearsome regime in the violent Middle East now find itself on the verge of an utter economic and military collapse? Iran’s half-century-long deadly terrorist reputation peaked with the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel that it helped fund and coordinate. Iran’s terrorist ambitions of running the Middle East had accelerated after witnessing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and his administration’s distancing itself from Israel. Biden’s humiliation by a series of Chinese slights and the...

The Left’s political imagination builds heroes, villains, and entire histories untethered from reality, substituting narrative for fact until it collapses under scrutiny. Pseudo-HeroesIt is difficult to determine whether the bizarro worldview of the current Democrat-media nexus can simply be attributed to either its generic Trump Derangement Syndrome or the attendant Wile E. Coyote/Roadrunner obsessive/compulsive disorder. But the crazy world of the Left increasingly bears scant resemblance to reality. In this alternate universe, Eric Swalwell was a liberal icon and invaluable asset for years, though admittedly a bit randy and occasionally a serial sexual predator—a fact that the man himself made...

“It is one thing for the people (of Iran) to be ruled by globally feared autocrats armed to the teeth, but quite another to be governed by humiliated, now impotent incompetents and buffoons.” —VDH Wednesday the US / Iran ceasefire expires. It has been an interesting two weeks. The US used it to negotiate an end to hostilities, resupply our ships in the Arabian Sea, do maintenance on our ships and warplanes, dismantle Iran’s banking conduits, and blockade Hormuz to shut down the regime’s remaining income flow. The Iranians used it to jump up and down and go woo-woo-woo. They...

<p>Here are Victor Davis Hanson's own words from the discussion, cleaned up and formatted for clarity (removing timestamps, interviewer prompts, and host commentary):On Iran's regime and internal humiliation:“As I said in this article, it’s one thing to tell the population, ‘Well, you don’t like us, but we restored the Iranian credibility. Everybody’s afraid of us. We’re the terror master.’ And now the people are saying, ‘No, you’re not the terror masters of the Middle East. You’re a paper tiger. You’re buffoons. They’ve wiped you out. We’re going down the toilet with you.</p>

America’s leverage in the Strait exposes Iran’s weakness—turning its greatest asset into a liability and reshaping the balance of power without a ground war. The prognosis of the Iran War is now so couched in politics and so warped by the American Left that the public has grown tired and wants it all to go away. But in truth, the situation is so fluid that any accurate prediction is impossible. Yet there is good reason to believe in an eventual outcome quite favorable to the U.S. and one far better than the status quo ante bellum. The Strait of HormuzPrior...