Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Sami Winc: Victor, let’s go ahead and get to the memorandum of understanding. It was a very short two-page document, easy to read through, dealt largely with the peace agreement.   You know what I thought was really interesting? They emphasized Lebanon, Lebanon, Lebanon. It must have been written in there three times that they’re making a peace deal, but also for Lebanon.   And the Strait of Hormuz will be open, and the Iranians will give up their nuclear material and not build any more nukes.   And then the sanctions. And I thought that it seemed kind of light on the sanctions, was the only thing that I noticed. Although there’s lots of criticism out there, I was wondering your thoughts.  Victor Davis Hanson: I think a lot of people are missing a couple of premises. Number one, we don’t know the extent of damage in Iran. No ground troops, no embedded reporters, no news, no internet there.   Trump said a trillion dollars or two trillion. Maybe even if it’s a half trillion, it’s a fifty-year investment in the military nuclear industrial complex, and a lot of it’s ruined.   And they have been embargoed, and they’ve been sanctioned. Their assets are frozen. They’re losing four hundred million dollars a day in revenue. So they’re in bad shape. We don’t know how bad they are. That’s number one  Number two, Iran is not a protectorate of the United States. It’s ninety-three million people. It’s one and a half times the size of Texas. And we don’t have a good record of going in on the ground and managing a country.  We saw that in Afghanistan. We saw that in Iraq. Seventy-five hundred dead, $2 trillion, and look at it, the Taliban is still in control. So we’re not going to go in there and manage it. If you’re not going to go in there and  manage it, then your control over that regime is limited, especially when it has patrons that are nuclear like Russia and China, and they want to get back in.  So my point is simply this: Can you stop them from enriching? Yes. You can say we’re going to bomb the moment we see you tamper with Pickaxe Mountain or any of those areas.   And can we stop them from closing the straits? Yes. You have to open the straits or we’re not going to lift the blockade.   The key to all this memorandum of understanding is, will he use force when they inevitably cheat? So a week from now, if they think, “Well, we got a lot of concessions. We’re going to send three missiles into the hated UAE, and we’re going to send a couple more into Kuwait and have a big Shia restive population.”   And if Trump says, “Oh, that was just a love tap,” it won’t work. He’s got to say, “Okay, you sent three, you’re going to lose 10 bridges. You sent three against Kuwait, you’re going to lose a power grid.” He hasn’t done that yet.  People forget there’s a whole list of targets that [Barack] Obama went after in Libya and a whole typology that [Bill] Clinton went after. We were in the same place in Serbia in 1999. It was not working after 60 days. We limited, and then all of a sudden Clinton went wild. All the bridges gone in the Danube, the grid.  I wouldn’t do it. He hits museums. He hits hospitals. He hit everything. Anytime he heard they were using something that he thought he wouldn’t hit, they hit, and that stopped him after 78 days.  My point is, they have a whole list of targets that we haven’t even touched, but you can shut down that entire economy in two days if you hit them. You take out two big power plants in Tehran, and you’re in trouble. And you take out the power—where’s all these missile factories and everything? Where are they getting their power? It’s on the grid. You hit them, and they’re in trouble. So we can do that.   And if he’s going to do it, it doesn’t really matter. All he has to say is, “We can’t control what you do, but if we decide you’re funding terrorists that attack us, if we find that you’re building missiles that are shoot launching…”   He doesn’t have to have them in the memorandum of understanding. He should have the nuclear enrichment, and he should have the straits.  Meanwhile, he’s telling the UAE and the Israelis and the Turks, “Hey, you guys, you all have avenues for pipelines. Get to it. So double your capacity, Saudi, to ship out the Red Sea. Double your, triple your capacity, UAE—you’re on the right side of the Strait of Hormuz—go straight into the Persian Gulf and double that. And then Turkey, get a long pipeline into the oil fields. You can do it.   And Israel, cut a deal and go right out of Haifa and do it now so the next time they do it, we’re not over a barrel,” and I think they’re doing that.  Final thing is we don’t care what the Left says because one day he’s Hitler and the next day he’s Neville Chamberlain. Hakeem Jeffries can’t figure that out. Oh, he’s just—he’s a chicken. He tacoed out. Trump always chickens out. The next day he’s Neville Chamberlain.   Oh, this is not— we didn’t get anything. This was a useless preemptive war that was too— you know, we’re striking a school, you know, all this stuff. It’s just whatever Trump’s for, that you don’t pay any attention to it.  But on the Right, what they’re doing is they’re getting attacked in two places. So there’s Steve Bannon, Tucker [Carlson], Candace [Owens], Megyn Kelly, podcasters, and some politicians are angry that they did anything at all.   So now it’s like, we didn’t want you to do anything, but now you haven’t done anything. They’ve done a lot. They keep thinking that this is like the Obama deal when Iran was ascendant, convinced that Obama wouldn’t lift a finger militarily, and they had all this infrastructure. They’re devastated. It’s not this— they’re not in 2016, and Trump isn’t Obama. He’s got a lot more assets at his disposal.  He doesn’t have some crazy idea that he’s going to champion a Shia alternate crescent to rival the moderate Arab regimes and Israel and empower Damascus, Tehran, Gaza, Beirut. That was Obama, Valerie Jarrett’s, Ben Rhodes’ idea.   So there’s a lot of assets, but people have to realize that he’s under a lot of pressure. If he loses the House—and the history says 38 out of the last 41 midterms, the in-party lost seats. If he loses the House, number one, they’re going to impeach him on day one. I don’t mean that literally, but it’s going to start.   Number two, they’re going to call in the entire Trump family, and they have the power of subpoena, and they’re going to tie him up.  So he’s getting House members, and they’re saying to him, “Believe it or not, Mr. President, given our redistricting, we’re going to beat these guys. The redistricting is going to help, and given that racial gerrymandering is going to stop some of that, and given that no one likes this socialist agenda that their radical candidates are promoting, and given that the price of oil is going down, seventy-five dollars a barrel, sixty-five is break-even. They’re down to below four dollars a gallon. It was only, I think, three thirty.”  They’re saying to the president, “We can win. We have a chance of doing the incredible. We can win. But you can’t stay in there too long. If you stay in there too long and the price of oil goes up, we’re dead. So cut a deal, and then if you have to do something, just do it a day or two at a time and keep the strait open.”  So he’s under that pressure.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced more than $700 million in federal funding Wednesday aimed at addressing addiction, mental illness, and homelessness, advancing President Donald Trump’s Great American Recovery Initiative. This investment from the Trump administration draws a sharp contrast from the counter drug addiction initiatives made by former President Joe Biden and some Democrat state administrations, like that of Gov. Gavin Newson, who directed millions in taxpayer dollars in housing for drug addicted homeless, free syringes (needles) and “crack kits” for withdrawing addicts. The goal of these programs was to provide homeless a place to stay, in order for them to focus on combatting their addiction and prevent deaths from withdrawing. Despite the hopes, drug related deaths still surpassed 100,000 annually under Biden, for the first time ever. Under Trump’s administration however, those numbers have already fallen to the lowest ever, while the number of recovering drug addicts in America has increased. “These investments will help move people from the streets into treatment and recovery, strengthen families, save lives, and make communities safer,” Kennedy wrote in a press release. Kennedy unveiled the funding during a visit to a Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic operated by Easterseals MORC. The package includes a $96 million opportunity for a new program called Safety Through Recovery, Engagement, and Evidence-based Treatment and Support, or STREETS, along with $612 million for additional behavioral health initiatives. The Great American Recovery Initiative, launched by Trump earlier this year, seeks to coordinate a nationwide response to addiction through prevention, treatment, and long-term recovery efforts across federal agencies and local partners. The STREETS program, administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is central to the new funding. STREETS will provide up to $24 million annually over four years, awarding eight communities as much as $3 million each per year to develop coordinated systems of care for homeless individuals battling substance use disorders or serious mental illness. As stated by the agency, the initiative, fueled by the investment, emphasizes and encourages a street-based outreach and coordination among local governments, health providers, housing services, law enforcement, and courts to move individuals into treatment and recovery. Of the $700 million in the funding package, $223.1 million will be used to expand and strengthen Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, which provide comprehensive, community-based mental health and addiction care. Another $238.6 million of that sum will support the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline to improve state and local response capacity and enhance services for high-risk populations. The investment also allocates $80 million for substance use prevention, treatment, and recovery programs, including rural emergency medical services training and youth-focused prevention efforts. The remaining $70+ million will go toward mental health services, including programs addressing childhood trauma, mobile crisis care, and diversion from the criminal justice system into community-based treatment, which has been proven to be effective in overturning addiction. In the press release, Christopher D. Carroll, principal deputy assistant secretary at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said community-based clinics are central to the administration’s approach. “Every community deserves access to effective behavioral health services that help people prevent addiction, achieve recovery, address mental health challenges, and respond to crises,” Carroll said. “Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics are a cornerstone of this effort, providing comprehensive, community-based care that helps people sustain recovery and rebuild their lives.”

LONDON, June 22 (Reuters) – Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Monday he was quitting, paving the way for what is expected to be an orderly transfer of power to frontrunner Andy Burnham, who could become Britain’s seventh leader in 10 years as early as next month. In an emotional speech, Starmer said he had listened to his governing Labour Party and realized that he was no longer the man who should lead it into a national election due in 2029. After making his announcement on the steps of his Downing Street office and London residence, Starmer’s move to stand down could have triggered a divisive leadership contest, but several Labour lawmakers said they now expected more of a coronation. Burnham, a 56-year-old career politician, quickly won the support of another potential leadership rival, former health minister Wes Streeting, with one Labour lawmaker saying it was more likely the former mayor would now be installed as leader. Political Churn in Britain By appointing Britain’s seventh prime minister since the Brexit vote to leave the European Union 10 years ago, the Labour government is the latest to fall foul of voter anger over politicians’ failure to deliver on their promises of change. Starmer said he would ask the Labour Party’s organizing committee to set out a timeline for a leadership contest to find his replacement. Nominations would open on July 9, close by mid-July, and if there is a contest, a new leader will be in place by September. A coronation could mean a new leader would enter office by mid-July. “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election. I have heard the answer from my parliamentary party to that question and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. After describing the achievements his government had secured in his two years of power, a man who was often criticised for being robotic became visibly emotional, his voice cracking when he thanked his family for their support. “When I leave the biggest job in the country I will spend more time on the most important job, being the best husband I can to my fantastic wife Vic who has been a rock by my side through good times and bad, and being the best dad I can to my beautiful children who are my pride and my joy.” Pressure Had Been Building for Months Starmer spent the weekend with his wife, Victoria, at his country residence to consider his future. With support draining away, he realised the political reality of his position. There was some sadness in the Labour ranks, with industry minister Chris McDonald saying his speech underlined the fact “he’s a really decent man”. However, others said he had been treated the way he treated others as prime minister, being “royally done over”. The threat to Starmer, which had been building for months, increased sharply on Friday when Burnham decisively won a parliamentary election to return to Westminster, beating a candidate from Nigel Farage‘s Reform UK party, which has led opinion polls for more than a year. That victory gave hope to Labour lawmakers that Burnham, known for his strong communication skills, could transform the fortunes of a party that has lost support under Starmer. The pound rose against other currencies and British government bonds rallied after Streeting’s announcement, as investors welcomed a more certain path to Burnham’s premiership. Despite hoping for a smooth handover, the change is not without risk. Burnham, who is expected to arrive in London on Monday to take up his newly won seat for the northwestern English area of Makerfield, has yet to flesh out a full policy agenda and Reform’s Farage immediately called for a national election. “I’ve had enough of waiting around. Britain needs change – real change, not another washed-up has-been shoved into place by the uniparty,” Farage said in a statement. No Clear Approach Yet Beyond saying that Britain needs fundamental change and that he wants to bring down the cost of living, Burnham has yet to make clear his approach to foreign affairs, the economy and defence. Like Starmer, he could find he has little room to manoeuvre, hemmed in by bond market investors opposed to any additional borrowing, and confronted by an angry electorate which believes the country is not working properly. Britain already has the highest borrowing costs in the Group of Seven wealthy nations due to its high debt and interest payments, years of anaemic economic growth, its struggles to cut spending and the need to invest in areas like defence. (Additional reporting by Andrew MacAskill, Alistair Smout, David Milliken, Sam Tabahriti, William James and Sarah Young; editing by Barbara Lewis, Kate Holton and Sharon Singleton)

Maine fathers are standing up for their daughters, challenging the secretary of state’s decision to invalidate their ballot initiative that aims to protect women’s sports from men claiming to be transgender. “Maine is far too progressive to continue allowing sexist, regressive, and illegal sex-based discrimination in our schools, and the daily violation of the civil rights of our state’s most vulnerable population: its children,” Leyland Streiff, leader of Maine Girl Dads, told the Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “Yet shockingly, we have watched this violation of sex-based civil rights happen every day in Maine’s schools,” he added. “Just this past April, young female schoolchildren (and their mothers, coaches, and advocates) testified to the State Judiciary Committee in Augusta about voyeurism, masturbation, violence, and mental trauma from males in female bathrooms and locker rooms.” He also noted that a male athlete won a state women’s pole vault competition last year. Streiff’s group acquired more than enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot. The initiative would prevent boy students from competing on girls’ teams and protect girls locker rooms and bathrooms from boys, even if they claim to identify as transgender. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows announced in March that her office found the initiative, formally titled “An Act to Designate School Sports Participation and Facilities by Sex,” valid, with 71,033 signatures—far more than the 67,682 signatures required. Yet Streiff noted that the Maine Women’s Lobby and EqualityMaine opposed his effort. He said the groups recruited three citizens to file a legal challenge against the effort. He claimed the legal challenge is headed by the Elias Law Group, the firm of Democrat lawyer Marc Elias. “We believe democracy should be protected and exercised, and this referendum should be debated by Mainers at the ballot box—not by a bunch of out-of-state lawyers,” Streiff said. The Daily Signal reached out to the Women’s Lobby, EqualityMaine, and Elias Law Group for comment, and none of them responded by publication time. The Daily Signal asked them who is funding the efforts against the initiative. A coalition of groups led by EqualityMaine, GLAD Law, and the Maine Women’s Lobby condemned the initiative in February as an “attack on public education.” The coalition condemned the campaign’s financial backing, referring to an $800,000 contribution from conservative megadonor Richard Uihlein. Last month, Bellows announced that, after reviewing the signatures again, the ballot initiative fell short. Her office found 67,150 signatures valid, slightly more than 500 below the threshold. Bellows’ office, when reached for comment, referred the Daily Signal to the May press release finding the signatures insufficient. “We have appealed to the Maine Supreme Judicial Court and remain very confident in the challenges we’ve raised to the Secretary of State’s reasoning and decisioning,” the Maine Girl Dads leader said. “Oral arguments have been scheduled for July 1st, and we anticipate a ruling by mid-July. A successful appeal will keep us on the November 2026 ballot.” Streiff described his position as “progressive” and the transgender activist position as regressive. “Everyone has a sex, sex is not gender, and there is no right or wrong way to be a male or female (dress, feel, present, even identify however you want – we believe that’s fantastic),” he told the Daily Signal. “Sex is big enough for everyone, and does not require anyone to conform to regressive stereotypes.” He also noted that Maine Girl Dads is “non-partisan by design, as our daughters’ rights shouldn’t be a political ploy or a party-line issue.” The Maine Girl Dads say their position is “purely paternal, never political, and based on common sense.” Streiff said the group has “tons of Democrats and independents alongside Republicans in our midst.” “The elected bureaucrats in Augusta have taken radical positions that are simply at odds with the beliefs of those who voted them in,” he argued. “The truth is the majority of Mainers—of all walks of life and political persuasions—believe in sex-designated sports and spaces in schools. To them, to us, and to our daughters, this is not a political stance but a common sense approach to fairness, dignity, and the protection of long-held federal civil rights.” “We dads are simply doing what dads do—showing our kids that we’re willing to do the right thing, especially when it’s hard, because our example will shape them and shape their world,” Streiff concluded.

John Quincy Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address has had a long legacy. It has become a touchstone in debates about foreign policy to this day, thanks to Adams’ ringing assertion that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”   Adams was the U.S. secretary of state at the time, and he would soon help President James Monroe draft what we now call the Monroe Doctrine. Adams was expected to be a presidential contender in 1824—and he not only was a candidate, he won, following his father’s footsteps to the highest office in the land.  When a committee of citizens in Washington, D.C., invited Adams to give an Independence Day speech in 1821, they knew his remarks would be significant for the whole country. Like the Declaration of Independence itself, however, Adams’ comments were directed to the world as well as his fellow Americans.   The Napoleonic Wars had ended only a few years earlier, and they had been, in effect, a world war. Even America had become involved—the War of 1812 was part of the wider conflict. And as happened after World War II, in the early 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars were followed by a kind of Cold War. The French Revolution and Napoleon had tried to plunge all of Europe into revolution for liberté, égalité, and fraternité.   France was defeated, but the revolution’s ideals were not, and the victorious traditional powers of Europe now struggled to prevent revolution from erupting anew. Prussia, Russia, and Austria formed the Holy Alliance against revolutionary movements, and many of Europe’s Christian powers even feared the rebellion of Greeks against the rule of the Ottoman Empire would inflame radical causes elsewhere.  Wasn’t America also a revolutionary republic that had fought to win its independence from the British Empire? In Britain itself, there was divided opinion about revolutionary movements, with liberal Whigs tending to sympathize with independence efforts everywhere. They saw the Holy Alliance as an ideological, geopolitical, and indeed spiritual enemy to be defeated in a cold war to advance liberalism, democracy, human rights, and enlightenment. The Catholic Church and hereditary monarchy were evils that held back human progress, they firmly believed.  British liberals accused Americans of hypocrisy. Our nation was founded in a revolution, and the Declaration of Independence set out universal ideals that we now stood accused of doing nothing to support. The Whigs who sympathized with the French Revolution’s ideals wanted the U.S. and Britain to work together in the 19th century to promote movements for liberalism and independence. This, they insisted, was America’s duty to its own ideals, as they had been set out in the Declaration. Many Americans agreed with this—just as many had been supportive of the French Revolution.  John Quincy Adams was the descendant of Massachusetts Puritans. He had no love for the Catholic Church. His father had been a driving force behind American independence. When other leaders in the Continental Congress still sought reconciliation with the king, John Adams insisted that independence was the right and necessary path. And despite what his sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, Thomas Jefferson would later say, John Adams was no monarchist. Neither was his son.   John Quincy Adams’ 1821 speech on the Declaration makes his principles clear: Traditional monarchy was founded in unjust conquest, and only after the Protestant Reformation did a proper understanding of liberty in matters of conscience and religion arise, which subsequently led to a reformation in the moral principles of politics as well.   For Secretary Adams, that was the enduring significance of the Declaration of Independence: “It was the first solemn declaration by a nation of the only legitimate foundation of civil government.  … It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the unalterable sovereignty of the people. It proved that the social compact was no figment of the imagination; but a real, solid, and sacred bond of the social union.”   Adams even appropriated the language of Europe’s counterrevolutionaries in support of the declaration: “In the reperusal and hearing of this instrument,” Adams said, referring to the declaration, we “renew the genuine Holy Alliance of its principles.”  John Quincy Adams was unwilling to yield an inch to America’s liberal critics overseas—his speech asserted that America was indeed the champion of an idea, and even an idea of freedom the critics might recognize. Yet they were wrong to think they understood that idea better than Americans themselves did.   Adams knew that what rightly followed from the declaration’s principles of self-government was not endless intervention in the affairs of other nations but rather the opposite. For Adams, history was a tale of the opposition between “liberty and force,” and America was the first nation in history to show that liberty could be the basis of political order. To get involved in the inveterate ideological and territorial wars of Europe and the rest of the world would transform America from a free and peaceful country into just another instrument of force.   “By once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence,” Adams warned, America “would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.”   What is most important, according to Adams, is not whether there is a good cause at stake in a foreign conflict, but rather the principle that a free nation like America is not preoccupied with the use of force. Wars and armies were what gave rise to kings and servitude. Adams was no pacifist, nor even a strict non-interventionist. He had no illusions about removing force from statecraft and the nature of the state itself. But he was vigilant lest the attempt to use force for good but not strictly necessary ends should lead back to the conditions of the past.   His concern was not only about practical effects but above all about losing the moral object of our independence. That would be a loss to humanity, as the example of a state not defined by war and power was sacrificed to the dream of doing good through the instruments of empire.  There is much more in Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address that speaks to questions of our time and of all time. Adams combines ideas from Cicero, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith to explore how natural sympathies bind political societies together.   “It is a common Government,” says Adams, meaning common justice and political association, “that constitutes our Country. But in THAT association, all the sympathies of domestic life and kindred blood, all the moral ligatures of friendship and of neighborhood, are combined with that instinctive and mysterious context between man and physical nature, which binds the first perceptions of childhood in a chain of sympathy with the last gasp of expiring age, to the spot of our nativity.”   America was more than just an idea—the idea had to be given substance by a people naturally joined together as families, friends, and inhabitants of a shared land. In the presence of such bonds, even a lack of freedom might be tolerable, as Americans tolerated more than a century of existence as Britain’s colonists. Yet the very distance between Britain and America attenuated those natural connections to the mother country, while Americans formed closer bonds with one another in that land that was their own:   Long before the Declaration of Independence, the great mass of the people of America and the people of Britain had become total strangers to each other. The people of America were known to the people of Britain only through the transactions of trade. … The sympathies most essential to the communion of country were, between the British and the American people, extinct.  There is a lesson here for those who today think a nation can be merely an economy, a regulatory domain within which strangers buy and sell from one another.   John Quincy Adams’ 1821 Fourth of July address is an American classic for all the reasons it’s well-remembered, but for more many more, too. It deserves to be read and revisited as often as the Declaration of Independence itself is.