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. Jack Fowler: Well, you know what’s not a beautiful place to live, Victor, segueing, is Los Angeles. And you talked with Sami about the really terrific, I think, debate between the mayoral candidates, Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt, the Republican who you’ve actually talked to, and you’ve talked about talking to him, and Nithya Raman, who’s a city councilwoman.  Victor Davis Hanson: Yes.  So we won’t re-go over the debate again, but just to let folks know that an online poll from NBC Los Angeles showed that as of Thursday morning, this was right after the debate, 89% of the voters picked Spencer Pratt, when asked who they thought had emerged victorious from the Wednesday night showdown.  Now, two other things, and then please, any opinions you please share. Today, Karen Bass has announced she’s withdrawing from the next mayoral debate. This was being sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs.   She had promised she would come, but I think she got her, you know, her hiney kicked by Pratt the other day. And she’s just gonna ghost them.  And then finally, worth raising about the debate is that Nithya Raman, the city councilwoman who was running, during the debate she backed off her—she had a position change.   Guess what, Victor? She used to be for defunding the police. She’s no longer for defunding the police. So—  Hanson: No longer for now.  She will if she were to be elected. She’s on the city council—once the race is over, she’s a city council member, they’re all Democrats, she will go back to do that. It’s chaos. It’s really tragic, what’s happened to Los Angeles. And Karen Bass was a deer in the headlights at that debate.  Both of them are incumbents. One was an incumbent city council member and one was the mayor. And they all had a hand in the policies of no cash bail, not arresting people for theft under a particular, you know, they eased that. It wasn’t just $950. Even when people did a little bit more, they kind of winked and nodded.   There are homeless parks. If you go to Venice Beach—I used to teach at Pepperdine one day a week, and I would ride my bike through there, and even in 2000—I think the last time I did it was 2020—it was just dystopian. I mean, there’s zombie—it looked like, you know, “The Last of Us” or some TV show with all of these zombies.  And then it was filthy dirty. My bike would get human excrement on the tires. And then you go down the Pacific Coast Highway, people were just crazy, walking around in the middle of traffic. Just total chaos.  And then when he brought all this up, all they could say is he’s Donald Trump or he’s a Right-wing Republican. And he’s apolitical. I think he’s an independent.   All he stuck to was we didn’t have water and the fire burned down. And then you won’t even issue building permits. You wouldn’t let us clean the hills so we could get that flammable brush out. We tried. You didn’t do that. Your fire chief was more interested in DEI than monitoring why all these hundreds of fire hydrants did not work.   Your power and water grandee who was hired, kind of, was a flunky from PG&E. You paid her $700k. She left two critical reservoirs for months dry, right during the Santa Ana wind season, when we had this flare-up.   You went to Ghana for no reason, just for a personal—your vice mayor, as I said to Sami, was under house arrest for phoning in a bomb threat. Of course, it was a feint—he claimed that Israel had phoned in a bomb threat, and it was a complete lie. He’s in jail, I think, now.   And your fire chief was bragging about her DEI hiring. But nobody was saying that we’re in a very fragile landscape where we have to get these reservoirs full, because they had other interests.  And every time you mention that about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the problem with it is it’s not just commission, it’s omission.   When you put so many resources and so much virtue signaling and performance art all about how diverse we are, and you never ask yourself, is that person meritocratically hired? Is that person competent? Because six million people’s lives depend on that job, in the air traffic controller or in the water and power or getting oil. And the answer is, we don’t care.   And that’s why Spencer Pratt’s ads are so effective. He walks through the detritus of Los Angeles, and then he superimposes Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass laughing in very beautiful homes.  And his point is the ramifications, the consequences of these people’s ideology never affects them. For them, it’s all some utopian exercise and we’re all the lab rats. We’re in cages, and we can’t get out, and they experiment on us. And then they go home to nice, happy, secure lives, and they’re well paid. And their pay has nothing to do with their actual performance.  And then when you see Gavin Newsom endorse her and say all these things, and then you see people on the debate stage for the governor’s race, which was really pathetic, they were all praising Gavin Newsom, and you say to yourself, California fell apart around 2008/’06, it started going downhill. People started to leave. Taxes started to get really high.   Who, more than anybody, could have been responsible? Because it was a Bay Area phenomenon where it started. Well, who was city county official? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was mayor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was lieutenant governor? Gavin Newsom, eight years. Who was governor? Gavin Newsom for six years now and counting.   So there’s no person more responsible. And yet when you see him talk, Jack, if you mention high-speed rail, he said, Oh, you know—he just moves his hands and just shakes his head and he says, we’ve got this going. And this.  And you say, you’ve spent $250—it’s gonna be $250 billion. You probably spent $30 billion. There’s no way you can build it. There’s no way you can run it if it was free. And he just ignores it.   And then when you say, after the Paradise Fire or the Aspen Fire or the Palisades Fire, don’t you get it, that you drove out all the lumber companies? They can’t glean the hillsides. You don’t let people go up and harvest wood.   You think it’s natural to let all these dead trees from the drought just sit there, 60 million of them, as kindling? And then you say, you have no margin of error, Gavin.   You drove out two big refineries. You’ve got all of these people on the Air Resources Board that wants the purest gas that doesn’t pollute, and you can only get it in the Caribbean distillery and refineries in Japan.  And you talk about fossil fuels as evil, but then you import it from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Do you think that they pump it more ecologically sound than we could?  Fowler: Right.  Hanson: So you want to use it, but you just don’t want to get your hands dirty. And then when the price goes up, you have a Steven Chu attitude that you don’t express. Well, gas goes up to European levels, we’ll use less.  Well, yeah, if you live in Palo Alto and Santa Monica and Montecito, you don’t care. But if you live in Huron or, I don’t know, Five Points or Parlier, you do care. And $2 can break you if you’ve got to commute. Maybe you can’t afford a Tesla. You have maybe a 2003 Pontiac or something that gets about 16 miles to the gallon, and you can buy it for $1,500 bucks.   But they have no idea. And why, the people who are harmed the most by them, vote for them, I don’t know. But if it’s not sustainable, as I said to Sammy, it won’t go on. And we’re getting to peak dystopia.  That it’s not going—it’s not working.  Fowler: Yeah. The fact that Pratt seemingly has traction here is helpful, Victor. But I think it’s a test here.   Can a city that’s been so committed to such self-inflicted wounds, can the people snap to their senses and say, we’re not gonna do this anymore? I don’t know. It seems like there’s some hope here. But if he loses, I would think all these big cities are just—they’re circling the drain. How much torture can you create and—  Hanson: I think if you go into the LA area now and you go into places in Orange County or communities along the coast, blue-chip places, or you go into Simi Valley, you’re starting to see the breakup of the idea of Los Angeles.  They’re just small communities, and they’re run locally, and they want nothing to do with LA, and they’re very suspicious of anybody coming in anymore. You know what I mean? They’re trying to reestablish local control and they’re saying, we’re gonna be like Augustine in North Africa in the fifth century AD when the whole world was collapsing. They’re gonna have fortified Hippo or something, communities.  And I think that’s what’s—it’s very similar to the late Byzantine Empire and the late Western Empire where as the federal system collapses and the elected officials collapse and you have these huge migrations of people that are antithetical to the system and the people in power are incompetent and corrupt, then people, on their own, they either migrate, which is happening now, or they create cocoons where—  I’ll give you an example. There’s a rural school not too far from here. I grew up with it. It was just a rural school. But some very, you know, concerned people began to move into that district. And then they fixed the school up. And then they began paying much more in that little school district, and they recruited the best teachers in the country. And now that school, a rural school, K-8, I think it is, you have to register when your child is born, to get into it.  But they’re very careful. They moved there. They live in that district. And they said to this wider world, we don’t believe in your schools. We don’t believe in any of this. We’re going to go live near a school. Get our school board. Control it. And then we’re going to have meritocratic hiring only.   And we’re not going to have any DEI. We’re not going to have any teachers union. We’re not going to have any of that weaponized curriculum. Just a classical curriculum. And everybody wants to go there. And they’re very careful.  And where I live, in a 50-mile radius, I’d say there’s three or four communities that have decided, you know, as the Romans say, non hic porcus. Not this pig. We’re not going to do it. And they have reestablished local traditions. They have good restaurants. They’re very careful about zoning.   They don’t have a lot of new housing development. They discourage rentals. And they are throwbacks to the 1950s. It works. And they’re very coveted, to live there. And if you want to go to their schools. It’s very hard to get a transfer.  And so I can see it, where my daughter lives in the foothills, that there’s a whole bunch of people, and they’re not conservative necessarily, from the Bay Area. She lives on a dead-end road. Cul-de-sac. It’s, kind of, about a quarter mile long, and there are homes there.   And they all have one thing in common. They’re all semi-upper-class or middle-class professionals, at one point. But usually the woman is now raising children at home. They have chickens. They’re back to the land.  And they don’t talk politics. And they’re very involved in Little League, local PTAs, schools. And their whole existence is a rejection of the Bay Area. And that’s why they’re there. They voted with their feet, to stay in California for a variety of reasons, but they’re creating an alternative identity. And I think that’s going to happen.  That’s what red-state America is becoming.  Fowler: Right.    Hanson: Parallel polis.  This is funny when you see Gavin Newsom, when he looked at—because he is really the most disingenuous politician of my lifetime. He looks at these red states and now they’re redistricting. Now he calls them the Confederate states.   Gavin, if they’re the Confederate states, after the Civil War, the Confederate states were devastated. They were plagued with racism. They were the home of the Klan. They had Jim Crow, and the northern industrial states and New England were booming.   And you tell me, how that flipped. Because people vote regardless of ideology. And they’re leaving your paradigm for that paradigm. And they’re not going there for Jim Crow. They’re going there for safety, low taxes, good infrastructure, responsible government, police, security.  And then he said, and I’ll end with this, Jack. He said, or he wrote, he was very anguished because he showed the Confederate states, he called them, and he said their legislatures have redistricted, like Louisiana and now Tennessee. And it’s eight-zero, House seats. Even though the Democrats in those states had 45% in the last election. Or 38%. Look at Alabama’s doing it.   And you just stop and take a deep breath and say, my God, this guy really is shameless. He’s shameless because everybody knows that you can take a blue-state paradigm of New England.  Fowler: Right.  Hanson: And you look at Delaware, New Hampshire. They’re the same. Massachusetts, nine-zero.  They have no representation, even though Trump in those states got from 38 to 45%.  And then you look at California, and under his directorship, we’re going to have about, of the 52 or 53 seats, we’re gonna have maybe 9%. I don’t know, seven Republicans.   And so here he is in the most gerrymandered and biggest state in the union calling others Confederates for doing what New England does and what he does in spades.  It’s really—  Fowler: It’s projectionism, which is their power.  Hanson: I don’t understand his career. I never understood his career. I have never understood it. I understand the Gettys launched it. I understand he was under the tutelage of the Pelosis.   I understand that the Bay Area assumed political power after the riches of Silicon Valley were manifest. I understand Willie Brown. I understand Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, Jerry Brown. I understand that was the power, but he was the prodigal son. He was the black sheep of that group. He never distinguished himself, and yet, somehow he became the most influential Californian in the last 30 years.  Yeah, now he’s handing out diapers.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

On May 7, 2026, English voters made a dramatic shift. The upstart right-wing party Reform UK won 1,454 council seats and took full control of 14 local authorities. These victories weren’t in quiet, out-of-the-way places. They happened in areas long considered Labour strongholds. England has 317 main councils, with about 16,000 elected councillors from around 7,000 wards. (A ward is the smallest political boundary. Similar to a U.S. city council district, each ward has two or local councillors representing an average population of 6000 people.) These councils make decisions that affect daily life, like planning, housing, social care, and services such as waste collection and child protection. In this year’s elections, nearly 3,000 wards were up for more than 5,000 seats. Reform’s gain of over 1,440 seats gave them control of Barnsley, Calderdale, Essex County, Gateshead, Havering (their first London borough), Newcastle-under-Lyme, Sandwell, South Tyneside, St Helens, Suffolk County, Sunderland, Thurrock, Wakefield, and Walsall. The size of these wins speaks for itself. Reform took 58 out of 75 seats in Sunderland, ending over 50 years of Labour control. In Sandwell, Labour’s 47-year hold ended in one night. Winning Havering was especially important, showing that even outer London wanted change. Across northern and Midlands towns and some key southern counties, voters showed they were fed up with mass immigration, grooming-gang scandals, and limits on free speech. Labour suffered the most. They had 66 councils and they now control only 28. This is around 10% of the councils in the country despite being the ruling party in Parliament. Many of the councils lost by Labour are now either under Reform or have no clear leadership. The Conservatives didn’t do much better, losing six councils and holding on to about 25. After years of dominance, both parties are seeing their local power break apart. American readers, who are used to a system with 500,000 local officials, might find Britain’s setup much smaller, with one councillor for about every 3,500 people. This means that every ward change is important. Just a few wins in key areas can quickly change policies. Reform’s steady gains show that focused grassroots organizing can beat established parties. For years, working-class communities have dealt with the effects of open-border policies, which put pressure on housing, schools, and the National Health Service. Scandals in places like Rotherham and Rochdale showed how political correctness sometimes took priority over protecting vulnerable girls. At the same time, strict hate speech rules and the closing of bank accounts for dissenters made many feel ignored by those in power. Reform addressed these concerns with a platform focused on controlled immigration, protecting women and girls, and defending free speech. The similarities between the U.K. and U.S. are clear. Britain’s local councils are like America’s county commissions and school boards, which handle issues like education, border security, and parental rights. U.S. conservative activists have already shown what focused organizing can do. Reform’s success shows how quickly things can change when voters feel heard by one party. Some critics may call this just a protest vote, but the facts show otherwise. Reform had already won 10 councils in 2025, and 2026 built on that progress. Now that they have real power, expect early actions like stricter checks on social-care contractors, better protection against grooming risks, and planning rules that prioritize current residents. British voters have made it clear: the old parties no longer have a hold on the working class. For American conservatives looking ahead to the midterms and beyond, the lesson is simple—local power is up for grabs. Issues like immigration, child safety, and free speech are decided at the local level, not just nationally. Reform UK’s win in 14 councils shows that the commonsense movement is real and growing, and it could help Nigel Farage become prime minister in the 2029 general election. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

REUTERS–The Supreme Court on Monday extended a pause on a ruling that would curb the abortion pill mifepristone from being prescribed through telemedicine and dispensed through the mail in a challenge by a Republican-led Louisiana lawsuit to a federal rule that had eased access. Justice Samuel Alito kept the matter on hold until May 14, meaning the pill can continue to be dispensed by mail pending a further order by the court. The nine justices are considering a request by two manufacturers of the medication to lift a decision by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to block a 2023 rule issued by the Food and Drug Administration during Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration. The appeals court ruling on May 1 reinstated an older requirement that patients receive mifepristone only after an in‑person visit with a clinician. Drugmakers Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro appealed the 5th Circuit action restricting access to mifepristone. The Supreme Court in an interim decision on May 4 put the 5th Circuit action on hold to give the justices more time to decide how to proceed. Medication abortion, typically a two-drug regimen consisting of mifepristone followed by misoprostol, accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. abortions, and any restriction on how the pill is dispensed could significantly reduce access nationwide. The case has put the contentious issue of abortion back in front of the justices, with the November midterm congressional elections looming and President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans fighting to retain control of Congress. The Supreme Court in 2024 unanimously rejected a previous attempt by anti-abortion groups and doctors to roll back FDA regulations that had eased access to the drug. Battles over abortion rights follow the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling that overturned its 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent that legalized abortion nationwide, prompting 13 states to enact near-total bans on the procedure, while several others sharply restrict access. Louisiana sued the Food and Drug Administration in 2025 claiming that the 2023 rule that eliminated the in-person dispensing requirement was illegal and has allowed medication abortions to skyrocket despite the state’s near-total ban on abortion. (Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Howard Goller)

The latest slaying in the New York City subway highlights yet again how most violent crime is preventable. On Thursday, “ex-Broadway dancer” Rhamell Burke allegedly shoved 76-year-old retired high school teacher Ross Falzone down the steps at New York City’s 18th Street subway station. Emergency personnel took Falzone to the hospital, but he later died from a traumatic brain injury. The terrible incident was caught on camera. NEW: Repeat offender and Broadway dancer shoves a 76-year-old retired teacher down New York City subway stairs, killing him.32-year-old Rhamell Burke was seen grinning in court after allegedly carrying out the horrific murder.The victim, Ross Falzone, was a social worker for… pic.twitter.com/cBlbscyOOW— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 11, 2026 I have to say, if you are on the New York subway with a former dancer you might want to get off at the next station. Those who knew Falzone are understandably in a state of disbelief at what happened. His next-door-neighbor said that he was “disappointed and shocked, frankly, that somebody could do such a thing.” What makes this story even more outrageous is that Burke had already demonstrated that he could do something violent. In fact, he had been picked up by police just hours before he allegedly pushed the 76-year-old teacher down the stairs. According to ABC 7 Eyewitness News, “officers encountered [Burke] acting erratically outside the 17th Precinct stationhouse on East 51st Street at around 3:30 p.m.” The officers who picked Burke up said he plucked a stick out of the trash and held it up as he approached them. After detaining him, police took Burke to Bellevue Hospital. There he spent a few hours being evaluated in the psychiatric ward. Incredibly, the hospital released this obviously dangerous man just a few hours later. An anonymous “high-ranking NYPD cop” reportedly told the New York Post that this sort of release “happens all the time.” “We brought him in at 3:30 p.m. and he was released just before 5 p.m.,” the officer said, according to the Post. “Meanwhile, if you or I walked into Bellevue for a headache, it would take 8 hours just to be seen. NYPD uses its involuntary removal powers all the time. And they just get right out with an Advil.” As you might suspect, these incidents were far from Burke’s first and second rodeo in the legal system. The New York Post reported that he’d been arrested four times in four months. He was busted three times in February—on Feb. 2 for allegedly assaulting a Port Authority police officer, again on Feb. 14 for burglary, and on Feb. 25 for resisting arrest,” the New York Post reported. “The perp was then hauled in again on April 2 for allegedly assaulting a stranger. He was later granted supervised release at arraignment.” America doesn’t have a crime problem; it has a repeat crime problem. Most crimes, violent and otherwise, are committed by repeat offenders in this country. Burke’s April 2 incident delivers another lesson about why crime is unacceptably high in our cities. This isn’t just about bad policy and rogue judges; it’s about a specific mentality that leads to a broken justice system. In April, Burke allegedly attacked a 23-year-old woman and her friend in the subway after he first aggressively tried to engage them in conversation then pursued them. The New York Post reported that Burke “stalked them closely and allegedly yanked her by the back of her head in an attempt to slam her to the ground and booted her friend in the back.” The two were fortunate that the train came to a stop where they took their chance to escape at the West 4th Street-Washington Square Station in Greenwich Village. Burke apparently kept pursuing them until they found some police officers who arrested him. But instead of helping law enforcement keep this man off the subway and streets, the woman decided not to cooperate with prosecutors. It’s a decision she said she regrets. “Maybe a part of me was just like, I don’t want to put another black man in jail, but, you know, at some point, if you are a criminal, you’re a criminal, and he was scary, he was a scary guy,” she said. This almost perfectly encapsulates how mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, as Adam Smith once put it.   This is social justice in action. A woman decided to be an “anti-racist” rather than pursue justice against a violent criminal who was clearly a danger to people of all races. And you have a justice system prevented from keeping repeat offenders locked away, or mentally unwell people committed to institutions. The result is that an innocent man has had his life randomly snuffed out. If justice had been carried out sooner an innocent man would be alive and a villain would have been stopped from committing evil. It’s a lesson delivered again and again, but too often unheeded.

President Donald Trump’s approval rating continues to climb among Republican voters in Wisconsin, even as support for the Republican Party overall has slightly declined, according to a new League of American Workers poll. The survey also suggests that Trump‑endorsed candidates are well positioned to secure their party’s nominations in key Wisconsin races. According to the poll, Trump’s job approval rating among Badger State Republican voters has risen 5 percentage points since March, while approval of the Republican Party has fallen 1 point. Favorability toward the U.S. war in Iran has also increased by at least 8 points. In Wisconsin’s marquee races this November—including the gubernatorial contest and the 7th Congressional District—the poll shows that candidates backed by Trump hold a significant advantage. Michael Alfonso, who is running to succeed Rep. Tom Tiffany in Wisconsin’s 7th District as Tiffany seeks the governorship, is viewed favorably by 39% of voters, while 45% said they have no opinion. The survey of 504 registered voters, which has a 4‑percentage‑point margin of error, found that when respondents are informed of Trump’s endorsement of Alfonso, 62% say they are “more likely” to support him. Just 7% said they are “less likely,” while 29% said the endorsement makes “no difference.” Voters also responded positively when told about Alfonso’s familial ties. According to the poll, 58% of district voters say they are “more likely” to vote for Alfonso when informed that his in-laws are Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and “Fox and Friends Weekend” host Rachel Campos-Duffy. League of American Workers founder Steve Cortes told The Daily Signal that Trump’s endorsement and Alfonso’s family connections are decisive assets in the race. “By far the biggest two assets are the Trump endorsements and his in‑laws,” Cortes said. “These attributes should be emphasized at every opportunity.” The poll also shows strong support for Tiffany, who received Trump’s endorsement earlier this year in his bid for governor. Tiffany holds a favorable rating with 52% of voters, while 14% remain undecided. “Tom Tiffany is VERY well regarded in his district,” Cortes said. “Additionally, he is very well known, as a repeated winner there. Obviously Tom must focus on his own race, but an endorsement would be very helpful—and any willingness to campaign with Michael even better.” More broadly, the poll found that Republican voters’ views of Democrats continue to deteriorate. Democrat favorability has fallen by 9 percentage points in Wisconsin, according to the survey.