The Texas runoff and Trump's messaging on Iran

In 2025, Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. That's why so many people are turning to Aura. Aura helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. And if you become a victim, Aura's 24-7 U.S.-based support team is there to help. Don't wait until your identity is stolen. Start your free trial today at Aura.com slash safe. That's Aura.com slash safe. welcome to today's podcast sponsored by hillsdale college all things hillsdale at hillsdale dot edu i encourage you to take advantage of the many free online courses there and of course to listen to the hillsdale dialogues all of them at hugh for hillsdale dot com or just google apple itunes and hillsdale All right evening, Grace, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Welcome to Tuesday. I hope you had a great Memorial Day weekend. We begin with a member of the president's cabinet, Kelly Loeffler, who is the administrator at the Small Business Administration. She's been my guest before. What a wild time to be in the cabinet administrator. What's it like in the middle of a war to be in the cabinet with Donald Trump? Well, Hugh, great to be with you again. Look, there has never been a more important time for not just resolving so many national security issues, but economic security issues in this country. And President Trump is moving so quickly to do it on so many fronts. It's a great honor. It's very humbling every day to serve this great president, to serve our nation, particularly just coming out of Memorial Day, a tribute to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. And to be able to give a little something back to our great nation is incredibly humbling, especially for our job creators, many whom are veterans. So it's incredible. to be part of this administration and part of the cabinet. You know, yesterday I did my Memorial Day show with the Fund, and they have an apprenticeship program to get wounded veterans into small businesses. And I've been doing that show for 22 years. And you're right. Veterans come back after their service, especially those who are wounded, and they find their niche. They start their businesses. How many of them do that with help from the SBA? Well, Hugh, about 10% of our loans go to veterans who are starting out or growing. And I am the product of a veteran. My dad, the year I was born, along with our farm, started a small trucking company based on what he learned in the military. So I know firsthand what it means to be able to get that veteran support. financing, access to capital, job training, skills training, all that. It's generational. It's so vital. And it's a great honor. And we've got some exciting announcements coming up for our work with veterans. So I want to go back to last month because I think small business month or week was last month. Am I right about that?

That's right. First week of May. Okay. So what do you do in small business? Look, the war is sucking up all the oxygen. I'm glad to talk a little bit about this because nine out of ten people listening to this show or in business are in small business. What do you do during Small Business Week? Small Business Week has been celebrated since the 1960s, and we kicked it off with President Trump at the White House. We had over 100 small businesses. This president knows that small business is big business. And it was such an incredible way to start the week to celebrate our job creators. Most businesses in America are small businesses. They work hard. They show up every single day. They should know that there is... The commander-in-chief, President Trump, there's no bigger fan of small business than President Trump. And what I saw is I traveled around the country that week, which I do every single week. This week later, I'll be in Arizona and New Mexico. What I saw is what this administration is bringing back, which is strength to Main Street through tax cuts. Deregulation, fair trade. I mean, just look what fair trade alone is doing, reshoring our manufacturing. Most manufacturers in America are small businesses. You know, you look at skilled trades coming back. Small business week, I met with a welder who now owns the welding business that he apprenticed at several years ago. So that is the American dream, and we're making sure it stays alive and well. So I talked to Doug Burgum in the last couple of weeks and Chris Wright, a couple of your colleagues in the cabinet, and they both remark upon the president's energy and the fact that you have to keep up with true social pretty closely. Do you begin your morning by running over what happened overnight on true social? Well, this is a 24-7 administration. So day, dabbler's in tonight, and, you know, we keep focus on, you know, what President Trump has asked us to do in our respective agencies and certainly keep up with current events. And I also do that by being out on Main Street every week. I'm not sitting here in Washington, which I am today, getting ready for tomorrow's cabinet meeting, but importantly, listening to those on Main Street, bringing. the ideas back to Washington. And that's what's great because this president really cares about what's going on. As you know, he takes feedback from everyone. I look forward to updating the president on small business at the cabinet meeting and making sure that the small business owners and entrepreneurs who are becoming small business owners in record numbers know that we are focused on them. And in fact, Hugh, I want to mention we're at all-time highs for small business formation right now in this country. About half a million small businesses now, we've surpassed that mark in a month. And so what we're seeing is the confidence on Main Street knowing that they have tax cuts, fair trade, deregulation, and the list goes on. Now, I'll talk to you about the vice president's effort on fraud, but before I do, I'm just curious. When there's a cabinet meeting coming, he just calls on people, right?

Do you know what the order is at all? Do you get any kind of a rundown like I get for my show? Well, look, this is the most transparent administration in American history. The American people get to see cabinet meetings and, you know, it rolls out in real time. So we all have active discussions and the president is very engaging and conversational. He's listening actively to us. And so who knows where the conversation is going to go? We all just come prepared as we do every single day and excited. to share with the president. In between, though, we're in ongoing conversations with the president. So this isn't a one-off moment. This is the continuation of an ongoing conversation. In the cabinet meeting, it's like a baseball lineup. There's a lead-off hitter. It's Travis Bazana for the Guardians and different. Do you know if you're leading off or bat in the three-hole or down in the seven-hole? Do you know when you're going to bat? No, this is up to the president. This is his meeting for the American people, and he keeps it engaging and spontaneous. And it's great that Americans at home get to see what's going on. All right. Just be honest. Do you want to go early or late in the cabinet meeting? Because, I mean, all these other people are off doing their thing. I would think I'd want to go first or second. How about Administrator Kelly Loeffler? I will go at any moment the president calls on me. I am ready to go. So I don't have a preference. I'm just excited to share it to be that voice for small business. All right. Now, I do want to finish by talking about the vice president, JD Vance, who started the fraud effort. SBA has no doubt been, I don't know if people have conned you or not, but you've got to be a mark for. everybody who wants to get money, especially during the COVID years, how do you combat that and are you working with the Vice President's Task Force? Well, Hugh, we've combated it from day one with zero tolerance policy, not just on fraud, but on waste and abuse. And our agency, in the last year, we've reduced headcount by 53% while generating record small business loan volume that was legitimate because we implemented a fraud risk framework based on what we saw during COVID. And you're exactly right. PPP, we all remember during COVID and the economic injury disaster loans came out to the tune of $1.2 trillion during COVID. The Biden OIG said 200 billion of it was fraudulent, and the Biden administration attempted to forgive all the fraudulent loans and just hide it under the rug.

Well, we're a key member of Vice President JD Vance's task force because this is not going to be business as usual. We are going to make sure there's accountability that people are arrested in jail. We already have that. You can go to the SBA website and see people are serving. jail terms for this. There's restitution, not just from people, but from banks who knowingly defrauded the federal government. So thanks to the task force, we are moving very quickly. And we just announced $22 billion. In SBA, fraudulent PPP loans are being prosecuted not just through IRS, but through the DOJ. That's 562,000 borrowers who are going to have their files turned over to the Department of Justice for prosecution. That would have never been possible without this president and vice president's efforts. I am going to put a line under that, and we're going to end there because that's a big number and that's a headline. Administrator Kelly Loeffler, always good to talk to you, come back anytime. Have a good cabinet meeting tomorrow. I'll be watching, as I always do on C-SPAN. I'll see when you get called. Thank you very much for joining me. Four sharply dressed podcasters with perfectly parted hair to the right. Take on the left. We own the lips. And serve justice the way it should be. Neat. DC, this is your wake-up call. I am vengeance. It's a podcast. Sorry. It's time. To save the world. Again. The roofless podcast. Streaming wherever. Welcome back, America. I saw that this weekend. And I heard the fellas talking about it this morning. I thought I would share my audience on the Salem News Channel so they would know what I was talking about. Duncan joins us, Michael Duncan, one of the fellas. And I want to know, Michael, if you're proud of your work there. Yeah, I'm proud of it. It just felt very weird. You know, we've worked our whole careers being behind the camera, helping politicians make ads. So it's very strange to see an ad featuring yours truly. But we had a lot of fun making it. It was a blast. Yeah. You noted on the show today that Smug appears to actually be blind. He does. And so he does. Why did he change? We've heard. Well, it's a running joke on the show, you know, whenever new viewers watch on YouTube, they're like, what's what's with the blind guy? Of course, you know, the sunglasses are just kind of part of his persona. But if you check the end of the ad, he's sort of looking off camera.

And so you might actually think the guy's blind. We had a great time on today's podcast. It was a fabulous podcast. I thought it was like the Daredevil ad for a trailer for the Daredevil was released. And instead of the D, they've got the R up there. So, Duncan, let's talk a little politics. I'm a John Corning guy. They're voting in Texas. I want John to win. He's a layup in November. Prediction? Yeah, I think it's going to be close. You know, I'd probably give the edge to Ken Paxton, considering, you know, that late endorsement from the president. And then you also got to think about, you know, what does a runoff electorate look like? You know, we're coming up into summer here after Memorial Day weekend. It's going to be people who are highly motivated to vote. And so I think the shape of the electorate is going to be more fit for... You know, Ken Paxton, who's, you know, built a career off of winning these statewide runoffs in the state of Texas. So I'd have to give them the edge. I wouldn't count corn and out. I mean, there are teams from preparing for this for over a year. You've got a lot of seasoned hands on that campaign, and they're going to get out the vote. I do expect it to be close, but I would give the edge probably to Ken Paxton as far as, like, just the... the situation on the ground. In your day jobs, when you're not playing superheroes and Fox promos, you're actually campaign consultants. So I'm curious, there's a primary electorate, and then there's a runoff electorate, and it drops. How do you find out who's going to turn out for a runoff? Well, you're looking at a number of things. You're looking at vote history, right? So you're looking for people who voted in three or four or four or four of the last primaries, whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. And those are going to be your highly engaged, high propensity to vote. runoff targets. And so those people are the people who you really need to persuade and make sure, because you know they're showing up and you want them to vote for your guy or gal, right? And so that's going to be a subset of the larger. you know, primary universe of voters. So they tend to be extremely motivated, plugged into politics. And so, you know, I think that probably favors Ken Paxton rather than a more casual voter who has their eyes already on the general election. If, you know, you want Republicans to win, John Cornyn's probably a safer pick, obviously. He's got a lot of money and obviously name ID, and he's polling a little bit better in a general election environment. Tax is going to have to raise, you know, $100 million is going to be a very expensive race. And money is fungible, right? And if we have to spend more money as a Republican in Texas, it means less money for North Carolina, Michigan, Maine, all of those places that Republicans are also hoping to win so they can keep the majority. Now, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I'm going to put you on the spot. You've got major markets down there all over the place. We're on right now in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, you name it, McAllen, up in the panhandle, we're on.

When you have to spend money in a lot of place, in a place with that many markets, how do you do it? Is this points, just wherever they are? Well, I mean, if you're talking about traditional television, yeah, I mean, you're talking gross ratings points. And, you know, Houston DMA or the Dallas DMA ain't cheap. You know, we know that. And not to mention the other places you were mentioning where, you know, you've got some inefficient DMAs. So it's a ton of money for television. You know, obviously with the advent of digital campaigning, social media, and connected TV and all of those sorts of things, you can be more efficient than buying just Lanier television, but it's still going to be, you know, over a $100 million race. All right. Now, I'm going to switch to the war, but first I have to ask you a sports question. You're my resident sports guy, even though you're from Indiana. You do know something about basketball. Cavs get swept. By the Knicks. Four games in a row. Blown out. Kenny Atkinson get fired? Yeah, I think it's probably time to turn the page. Although the Knicks, you know, you got to hand it to the Knicks. The Knicks are a great team, high-scoring team, fun to watch. You know, so I, you know. I don't know. I would think it would be time to turn the page. But, you know, the Knicks aren't a slouch. The reason I think it's a yes is they were 22 points ahead. The Cavaliers were 22 points ahead in game one with eight minutes to go. Win that game and it's completely different. Fall apart and collapse and it's over. All right. I want to go to the Middle East. There is no news. I'm following the news. We don't know anything. What do you think is going on there? Oh, gosh, I wish I knew the answer to that question. I would say it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B. It's we want peace, but we don't want peace at any cost, right? And I think at the end of the day, President Trump, the administration seems to be committed to the thing that we started this conflict with, and that is Iran will never. have a nuclear weapon. There's a lot of ways to get to that, and the specifics are important. But I think that is basically our guiding light in all these negotiations. Now, earlier today, there was a report that Operation Freedom had been resumed, and sent come just put out a press release literally minutes ago. No, it hasn't. So this is an information space where everybody's trying to play with our heads. How are you wending your way through that? Yeah, it's confusing, right? Because you've got negotiations to resolve this conflict. But then you also have Iran, you know, doing things in the Strait of Hormuz that we don't like. And I think, you know, The United States always reserves at a time and a place that they're choosing to take action if they think they have to. And so I think we're going to continue to see that unless Iran decides they actually want peace. It's always tough to figure out here. Hugh, you know this. You know, we're dealing with the Iranians whether it's actually in good faith, you know. Time will tell here, but we have to be clear-eyed about getting out of this deal what we want.

Amen. Michael Duncan of the fellas, when they put that R up in the sky, Duncan scrambles. They all scramble to the fella cave. Wherever the fellicate is, they scramble for it. Thank you. Mr. I still can't believe that ad. Don't go anywhere, America. If you haven't seen that, you should watch the Salem News channel. Stay tuned. Welcome back, America. So much happened over the Memorial Day weekend, and we've got so many guests today. I'm leaving it to Lilix to explain to you what happened in the Middle East. James, as in James Lilix.com? What was that all about? I have the faintest idea. Here I sit in the epicenter of World Command in Adina, Minnesota, not exactly knowing what you're talking about. If you're talking about the fact that we made a deal or did we make a deal and then stuff blew up and then maybe we didn't make a deal because stuff blew up and then Abraham Accords were talked about and maybe Saudi Arabia joined, but they actually probably didn't and now the mullahs are still in charge, but they're not. I don't know. I have never, I mean, I don't exactly say that I should be knowing everything that's going on because I assume government's key. things close to the vest but the whole fog of war it's interesting how I've never really been as in a position like this one observing an international conflict where it's just like I've been the faintest idea and in a way it's almost liberating the way the war sort of gradually faded off the front page and out of the national consciousness to the point where you don't even are we are we having one is something I've never quite experienced before. Usually you get reports from the front. You get battlefield reports. Oh, a torpedo was shot. A ship was sunk. War, that's how we know it. This just seems to be like some people are arguing backstage while a cherry bomb goes off in a balcony. So don't ask me. I have the faintest idea. I'm going to ask you another question. Here in Minnesota. The guys they got to drive the Iranian speedboats yesterday. and they didn't make it back. Do you think they had any idea what they were being asked? Do you think someone told them, Joe, don't worry, we got to deal with the Americans, you can drop these minds? I really, if so, I don't know who you would take that to. Your superior, who would probably say, look, I got my orders. Go ahead. It's going to be fine. But then again, aren't we told constantly that martyrdom is the highest thing to which they aspire? For all we know, the guys were just pushing each other out of the way, saying, no, it's my turn. I must be the glorious martyr at this point. But somehow that doesn't seem to fit the characteristic of these particular guys. Yeah, not a wise idea. It's been my experience on the lakes of Minnesota that when you get in the Evan Rood and power it up and go out there to troll for some lunkers, that you probably think you're going to come back at the day and not be irrigated 100 times by some automatic weapon fire. So you and I have been doing this for 25 years. And you read James at jameslylilocks.substack.com. And that's been three and a half wars. Maybe four. It depends on how you count.

Has there ever been a more confused, and by the way, the fog of war is exactly right, and it's purposeful, I think, on our part. Has there ever been this foggy? No, never so, never so. I actually know more about what's going on in Ukraine, I think, because I follow a bunch of mill bloggers and Ukrainian bloggers who recirculate the panic remarks of the Russian mill bloggers and the rest of it. There are maps, there are arrows. I've got a basic idea of how the line goes back and forth and back and forth, and if Keeb's going to be hit, what the response is going to be in the fractional, fictional, fractious nature of the Russian government, which could topple at any time, which we've been hearing for four years now. I got a better idea than that than I do what's actually the United States is doing. What we have in the region, what we're doing. I don't. But again, I hate to say I'm content to be ignorant. But if I thought that I knew everything, I would be suspicious because there's absolutely no way that I would. So we'll have to wait for the book to be written or the final deal. Okay. I'll ask question. Your friend and my acquaintance to be you, how's he taking the war in Ukraine? Uh, the crazy yuki mean. Well, you know, it's been hard because it's hard for him because he knows people there because he knows the terrain as the family goes so far back. But. He is confident, as a lot of them are. And there are times when we'll exchange something that just happened and clink glasses and, you know, and Slavic Ukraine. So, yeah, he's hopeful. And I hear a lot of people on the Ukrainian side who are increasingly hopeful this time around. Nobody thought that they would last four days, let alone as long as they have. And I read the other day about an ingenious device they had where they put up a weather balloon. It floats into Russia and then drops a drone, which goes on. That's smart. These guys are... adaptable. And so that's why I think in the end, Ukraine will not be defeated. I read this weekend they're going to produce two million. And yes, you heard that right, America, two million drones in Ukraine. I don't know how long it would take America to get two million drones bought by the Pentagon, but I don't think it would be four years. What do you think? Well, we'll see. I mean, from what I understand, the people that I've talked to, and I actually have, we become a lot more flexible and adaptable about scaling up to these things because we realize what the future requires. But I will tell you this. I woke up this morning and wrote down a dream that I had, a dream where they went to Vladimir Putin, and they said, Vladimir Putin, there is a special sacred, petrified tree in the Kremlin that is leaking oil? And he says, is that bad? And they say, oh, it's happened before. And when he says, well, when has it happened before? They said, oh, 1905 and 1970. Huh. That was the dream that I had. So I wrote it down, and I thought, I hope my dreams were prescient about the strange leaking petrify oil tree in the basement of the Kremlin. That is about the strangest dream, and very date-specific, by the way. Very date-specific, yes. In 2005 and 2017, Lilix, thank you. Follow them on exit lilacs, and follow them at lilacs.substack.com. I'll be right back, America. Stay tuned.

Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. That Music Means. David M. Drucker, Chief Political Writer for the Dispatch joins us. David, it's Election Day in Texas. I'm a John Cornyn fan. I'm a big Chipproy fan. Both of them are underdogs, but with a shot to win. How late do you think we're going to have to wait tonight to get those races called? I just don't anticipate we're going to have to wait too late. Now, for those of us on the East Coast, it'll be a little bit late, but Texas is only an hour behind. Unless this thing were to go to a photo finish. I haven't seen any data that suggests that, but these runoffs sometimes break late, the way primaries can break late. So let's see what happens. You know, X is very anti-Cornan, and I get that. The ex-activists, but that's not the real world. The real world is a primary in which John Cornyn won. He beat Ken Paxton and Wesley Hunt was third. President endorsed. Allegedly because he'd seen polling, I'm not sure why John Cornyn's 100% with the president. And he made himself some enemies in the Senate in doing so. My argument on Friday, on Saturday on Fox or Sunday morning on Fox was, President might be better off if John Cornyn won this thing because he's got trouble in the Senate, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. And John Cornyn beyond, I mean, the president would be a whole lot better for a number of reasons. I mean, if you're looking at it from the point of view of both electoral politics and the midterm elections and Washington politics, right? I mean, John Cornyn has been a loyal foot soldier for Trump. He's been a loyal Republican. One of the sins he's been dealing with with voters in Texas is that he's old school, whether you like this or not, he's old school. So he doesn't spend a lot of time on cable news. He governs, and he governs with what's presented to him. If there's a Democratic president, he does the best to achieve legislative outcomes that are possible with that Democrat in the White House. When there's a Republican in the White House, which has been Trump, you know, two of the last three terms, then his accomplishments are a little bit more favorable. You know, the Republican voters said to like that more. But what he does is he governs, then he goes home every six years and he says, here's why you should rehire me. I talked to a lot of Republican voters in Texas who took that as a sign that he wasn't paying attention to them except when he needed to get reelected. And it's just his way of doing things is, I'll do the work, then I'll come to you when it's time to re-interview. What about Chip Roy, who is the opposite? I mean, Chip Roy is never not on TV. He lives on the fiery guy. I've endorsed him. I like Chip. I've known him a while. Why is he not favored? I don't totally understand that, race to you, just because I have not covered it that closely. You know, what I will tell you is,

And this doesn't totally, I mean, there's no really clean cut way to understand this, but there's a lot of anti-incumbent fervor going on in Republican circles. And, you know, that's why John Cornyn, in part why he was having some trouble. Chip Roy could be suffering from some of that. He's had to work hard in his congressional races. And people have been looking for something fresh for the office they're voting for. I mean, Ken Paxton's been in office quite a long time. So it's not like they're replacing, you know, they'd be replacing John Cornyn with a fresh face, but they would be replacing a sitting senator with a new senator. And, you know, obviously with the attorney general's race, either of them will be new. But it just could be a case of. People that are itchy trigger fingers. And of course, you know, Chip Roy didn't go along with all that stolen election stuff. And that's been difficult for some Republicans to live down in primaries. Now, Mr. James Talarico is weird. I want to quote the president. He's right. He's weird. but Act Blue is going to raise $3 billion. I don't know what they're going to raise for him if it's Ken Paxton. I don't think they'll try very hard if it's John Cornyn, but I think they're going to find that he's a money machine. What say you on that prediction? Yeah, well, you know, obviously, just like when Red, Act Blue is a fundraising conduit, and I think that James Talarico is going to excite a lot of small dollar donors on the Democratic side who will give through Act Blue, and particularly if Ken Paxton's nominee, I don't think. that James Talarico will raise as much money if John Cornyn's the nominee, but he'll still raise a lot. But with Ken Paxton as the nominee in the belief that it's possible to defeat a flawed candidate in an otherwise very difficult state for Democrats, he's going to raise money hand over fist. That's not going to be an issue. I think the issue, the question will be, can Ken Paxton do something he's never done before because he's never had to, but he's not been good at it, and that has raised money. He'll get some small dollar. Trump-style donations for sure. I think the low propensity Trump voter might, you know, warm to him. And I'm sure the president will encourage donations to him, at least theoretically. But I do know that a lot of Republican groups that traditionally give in a race like this won't give in a race like this if it's Ken Paxton. I want to switch now over to Graham Platner. I have never seen. a stack of bad stories pile up this. The Nazi tattoos like a month ago. So we've had just day after day of this guy is not merely violent and extreme and bigoted and sexes. He's sadistic. And he's going after veterans. He's going after Medal of Honor recipients. Their loved ones and they're dead. And their loved ones are not putting up with it. Does he?

Do you think there are two Democrats on there? The governor didn't drop out. I mean, her name's on the ballot. I told David Costello. Graham Platner might have Bernie Sanders on his side, but what about that drip, drip, drip of the worst stories I've seen? I don't know how you survived that much lead. Yeah, well, I mean, I suppose the same way Ken Paxton's been surviving that much lead, right? I mean, this is a little bit of a different thing. But, you know, Democratic voters are hungry for change. They're hungry for somebody who fights. And a lot of times the way voters look at these imperfections and flaws and downright bad behavior and things of that nature, right? Just downright bad, not good stuff, Hugh, is, well, you're a normal person who hasn't lived a perfect life. It's about time we have somebody like you rather than these perfect cookie cutter politicians. You know, but prostitutes in South America, stuff I can't even say on the air about portable toilets, it's the kind of stuff where you wouldn't want the guy living next door to you much less as your senator. Yeah, well, I mean, look, I'm just pointing this out to say that Democratic voters at Majorna are a lot like Republican voters in that there's a lot they can stomach if you're the right kind of candidate at the right time. I am not defending Graham Platner. Everything you've mentioned about him is absolutely true, and I'll be writing about it. And I think Democrats who have been very critical of Republicans and their support for Trump as they see it have a lot to answer for if they're going to put up a grand platinum, but so far they are. It will be an interesting article. I look forward to reading that in the dispatch. David M. Drucker, follow him on X. Follow me the next segment. Stay tuned to the Hugh Hewitt's America. I'm Hugh Hewitt, joined by the one and only Brett Baer, Chief Political Correspondent for Fox News, host of Special Report, which tonight will be airing from the Nixon Library in Your Belinda. where Brett will be doing a talk and book signing about the case for an America. The case for America and arguing on behalf of our nation is number one New York Times bestseller. Brett, congratulations on that. Number one is kind of hard to do. So that's a nice surprise. First week out, yeah. Thanks for being a part of it, Hugh. Obviously, we used a lot of contemporary voices, including yours, as well as voices of the founders and other presidents. But when history becomes number one in the New York Times, the seller list, I think that's a decent sign as we head to America 250. I'm psyched to be here at the Nixon Library and Museum. And I'm actually staged in your old office. getting ready for this book event. I'll do the show from out here. And I think I've done pretty much every book to a great, great crowd that fills the East Room here at the library. And the overflow room. I want people to know if they're listening in L.A. right now. You'll be done at 4 o'clock Pacific Coast time. What time is the event going to get underway tonight, Brett?

The event's at 7 Pacific Time. Oh, perfect. You got plenty of time, and we'll do a big event in the East Room, Q&A, about the book, and I'll speak for a little bit, and then we'll do a big signing. out front. And so, you know, I'll stay for sign as many books as I can. I want people to know. It's a great venue. And Brett gets right up there close to the people. There are usually 700, 800 people there for Brett. And I think especially this year, the case for America and on behalf of our nation, you'll get the Patriots out. You'll get some youngsters out, I hope. And I hope people... Don't forget. Memorial Day does screw up every schedule in the world, and they're thinking, I'm going to go Brett Bear, and he's tomorrow, and they think it's Monday, but it's Tuesday. It's tonight in your Belinda at 7 p.m. Brett, what do you make of my theory? I think your book is clicking because it's the 250th. You think you're getting back, wind at your back because of that? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I think there is also this hunger to talk about something bigger, you know, 30,000 feet. A lot of back and forth with politics. But we, as a country, have a lot of great things that we've not only overcome and been past things. We've been in dark places before. But there is a lot to look at and say, we are lucky to be here as we get ready for July. And you're a great supporter of the presidential library, not just the Nixon Library, but all of them. And they are all committed. to civics. As you know, Jim Byron was back there helping Marco Rubio as the deputy archivist for a year and a half for President Trump, but he's back now at the Nixon Library. And all of them are throwing in big time on the civics thing. So you'll get the benefit of that as well. And I think the presidential libraries serve a great purpose that way. They really do. I mean, they're treasure troves. Each one of these books that I've done. of the six presidents, you know, which we've uncovered these nuggets of history, and that made the quilts of the stories that we told in those books. This book combines all of that as well as contemporary voices. You know, I'm here at the library, and there's an America 250 exhibit that I've just been walking around, amazing stuff, including a copy of the Declaration of Independence that was used to send to the colonies as it was done. So, I mean, it just ties into everything as we get ready for this anniversary. Well, let's turn to the headlines, Brett, because I know you've been covering the war as close as well as anyone with sources that are the equal of anyone. I'm in the fog of war. I have no idea what's going on. What's your assessment of what's going on?

Listen, I've talked to the president a few times. There are some days where he feels optimistic. Other days he feels like he's dealing with negotiators from the mafia. I think that the biggest thing that we know to be true is that the communication and command and control in Iran is haphazard. And there is a very public debate between the IRGC and the president of Iran just yesterday opening up. Internet access and the IRGC said he doesn't have the authority to do that. I think that that's what we're seeing, this push and pull, this tug. And, you know, if the IRGC wins out, I don't think there's going to be a deal. But, you know, Marco Rubio and others suggest, you know, there's still time and it may take days. Well, the Internet got back up to 35% operability day. I don't know if it's dropped down again in the hour since I began my program, but it got up to 35% of their standard usage. So some people are getting on, so we should be able to get some reports about the dire conditions in Iran. Let me ask you about the incident yesterday. In the middle of the negotiation... The IRGC sends out two boats, two speedboats, and they're trying to drop mines, and we destroy them. Then they try and shoot down one of our airplanes, and we destroy their missile site. That's not, like, ideal. That might be the command and control problem you're talking about. Yeah, I mean, if you have some portion of that leadership saying death to America still stands for us, that's not exactly a negotiating ploy. And I think that there is a definite split here. You know, I don't know, you know, they called the U.S. military, obviously called that a defensive action with the mines and with what happened with the shot at the plane. But they're not, they're only hours away from pulling the trigger on a more offensive operation taking out of other targets. And I think that the real question is, will the straight open and what happens with the nuclear material? Those two things are kind of cut and dry. Now, meanwhile, Times of Israel is reporting tonight that the Israeli defense forces have pushed north of their previous boundary, north of the Lebanon security zone. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying they are seizing strategic positions. But it looks to the casual observer like me, oh, they're going further north than they've gone since the 1982 war. And that's because of the drones and the line of sight and all the different things like that. Do you think those two can be uncoupled in the eyes of the radicals in Iran, the people who are the hardest of the hardcore?

I don't, actually. And that's another, you know, element of this as these negotiations continue. Clearly, Israel has made it clear. And maybe Benjamin Netanyahu was on the phone with President Trump today. And we understand the message was we have to go after Hezbollah because negotiating with Lebanon is not. succeeding in stopping the threat from Hezbollah. And they've had a lot of success, obviously, with the pagers and everything else. But the threat and the incoming is still coming. All right. Now I want to switch over to politics, Brett. I am a big fan of John Cornyn. He's been a guest for every year that I've been on the air. Often, Supreme Court Justice in Texas, man of the law, very senatorial, very, very constructive for Texas. And I think Ken Paxton has his work cut out for him. If he wins the nomination, I think he'd get very well lose, so it was easy for me. Why is that happening, do you think? I don't know the answer to that. Other than the president made a decision, that's where he was putting his weight on the scale. You know, there are a couple of dustups with John Cornyn and, you know, he's old school Republican of the mold of Mitch McConnell, but he has supported the president a lot. You know, it depends on what percentage you look at on the voting. I think this is about, you know, appealing to the base, which feels that Ken Paxton is more in line with where they are. He obviously has vulnerabilities, as we've talked about many times, but so does James Talarico in Texas. And I don't know why he weighed in the way he did. I haven't asked him specifically about that. But I wouldn't be surprised if there's, you know, a tight race here. John Cornyn has a lot of history in Texas. And you never know. I'll be watching tonight. I assume there will be election coverage later in the night on Fox. Yep. Let me finish by talking about Graham Platner because I've never seen a series of negative stories. I mean, really? powerful negative stories stack up, beginning with the Nazi tattoo, but to this weekend, the portable potty story, the American sniper story, the wounded veteran who took to the internet story. He is a ricochet rabbit out of control leftist. Do you think there's a chance that maybe Janet Mills gets back in? She's still on the ballot. Boy, it's tough to imagine because you look at the rally that Bernie Sanders had for him just the other day, yesterday. And, you know, there's passion on the far left of the party, even after all of this. And, you know, there are Democrats weighing me in about some of those posts like the, he should have died, post about the veteran. And I think that's...

That's a problem. It is something Susan Collins is probably going to jump on. And the question is whether the populism on the left can overcome some of that. We will find out tonight. And Brett there, good luck at the Nixon Library. Tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific time. If you're driving around California, there are still tickets available. Go down to Yorba Linda, meet Brett, get a book sign. You'll enjoy the case for America, the case for America, an argument on behalf of our nation. Thank you, Brett. Watch them as well. 6 p.m. Eastern on Special Report. Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt, joined by Bethany Mandel. She, the co-host or the co-author of The Mom Wars.substack.com. Bethany, do I have a book for you? This is called Returning by Nicholas Lehman, and it is a search for home across three centuries. Nick grew up as a reformed, barely, barely Jewish kid. The fifth generation, his great-great-grandfather, Jacob Lehman, came to the country in the mid-1800s. Then Bernard Laman moved back to New Orleans. Montefi-Lean, his grandfather, was on the Harvard Law Review with Felix Frankfurter. His father, Thomas Lemon, did everything he could to assimilate in the New Orleans, but of course he was always a Jew. And then Nick is this great writer for the New Yorker and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia. It's a story about American Jewry that I know, you know, I know nothing about New Orleans and very little about American Jewry. Do you know about the split between German Jewry and East German Jewelry? I mean, Eastern European Jewelry? I don't think so. Well. Apparently, the German Jews like Walter Lipman really did not like the millions of Eastern European Jews come in and reckon their good deal. And they were themselves anti-Semitic. But because of the unusual nature of his family, the archive is fabulous. And so returning, here's the sad part. I want to know if you agree with me. I think it's the best book I've read in many years without even coming close. I don't think he'll win any awards because he's Jewish. What do you think? No, that's a thing. It's a real thing. It's very hard for authors to get book deals and get on the New York Times bestseller list, but I actually have a bone to pick with you about your book recommendations. Uh-oh. You do this to me with a lot of frequency. You tell me to read a book. And then I go and I read the book. I do my homework. Looming Tower, Rachel Goldberg-Polens book. I sobbed through that book. Oh, yes. Expecting you to talk to me about it the next week. I do my homework, and I go and I read the books that you demand. And then you don't quiz me on it afterwards. Well, I don't know that I could. Okay, I will ask you about Rachel's book. As a mom, how much more significantly difficult is it for you to read it than as a dad or a granddad?

It was very painful. I mean, I have four boys. Hirsch was her only son who was taken into Gaza and executed a year into his captivity almost. But I knew a lot of the people that she was talking about, including John and Rachel themselves. And so it was very painful from a personal perspective, which is why I was mad at you for demanding that I read it. And then you never asked me about it afterwards. Until I see you again is one of the most touching books. It's so powerful. It's so sorrow-inducing. That's not returning. Returning is an education. Returning is a fabulous. And Jacob, you're a convert, right? Kind of. My dad was Jewish. My mom was Catholic. Okay. You're a convert. And so his great-great-grandmother is a convert. And there are other converts in here. And the whole meshing of the conservative orthodox reform. I don't know. I don't know any of this stuff. And it's, I think you'll find it fascinating. And it will not be sad. It's not sad. It's difficult. But I'll go there. Now, let me ask you about. Graham Platner because I was talking about John Cornyn and I love John Cornyn. I think he's a great, I hope everyone in Texas goes out and vote for him, but he's an old school Republican like me. You know, he's been around, he's a Reagan Republican. And so I think sometimes people in Texas online are very angry about, I don't know what they're mad about because he's a great senator. But what about Graham Platner? Can you imagine a Democrat voting for him after everything that has come out about him? It's really wild. And it was interesting because over the weekend, there was a Democratic representative who said, like, this should be disqualifying. And, you know, a lot of Democrats scolded Republicans about the fact that a lot of us fell in line behind Trump when they felt like we shouldn't. And to them, I say, here's your moment, y'all, with someone way more. than Donald Trump. Graham Platner is an objectively bad person. And he has the record to prove it on his Reddit. Like, that's all you need is to just go through everything he ever said on Reddit. And it's very clear. And so here you go, Democrats. Here's your moment to, you know, decide if you want to stand behind a guy who knowingly had a Nazi symbol tattooed on his chest for 18 years. And don't give me that. I didn't know it because he was telling people. years and years and years before he decided to run for Senate. This is my Tottenkopf. That I can tell you with certainty. And so it is very frustrating watching Democrats refuse to distance themselves from someone that should not be a defining person for them and for their philosophy and their beliefs or whatever. But this is the problem with the left. They have decided to go the route of the DSA. And these people are radicals. A man running, Adam Hamawi running for the house seat in New Jersey, who's probably going to win his primary and he's definitely going to win the general. He's friends with the blind cheek. He was a character witness for the blind sheik. This is what the Democratic Party has become. You learned about the blind shake and the looming tower, didn't you?

I did, which you told me to read, and it was very educational. And then you never asked me about it. Well, it just said. I just asked you about it. So, check that off. So fetching Mrs. Shewitt is reading the blind shake or the looming tower. And she looks at me and says, why do I have to do that? And I said, you have to do this because you have to know how crazy these people are. And by these people, I mean the radical radicals on both Shia and Sunni extremes. And that's why I don't think the president's going to be able to pull off a deal with Iran. Do you? No, I don't. I don't. I don't think that there's a deal possible. This is a suicidal regime and run by suicidal maniacs. And you really get that picture very clearly when you read the looming tower. And I'm shocked that someone who lives in your home has not been browbeaten into reading it because that was the very first question you asked me the very first time we spoke. Well, I do that with the first time I have guests on. And the reason I have been brawbeater, because I am married to her and she will browbeat back. And I don't want to be browbeaten about vegetables. don't like them. The IDF pushes north of Lebanon security zone. Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel seizing strategic positions. That's at the top of the times of Israel. You know people who live in the north. They're applauding, are they not? Yeah, I mean, I think that they're hoping that this solves the crisis of the fact that drones have been coming over and rockets have been coming over. I used to know people who live in the north. I don't anymore because they moved because it became an untenable place to live. So my view is they have to go as far north as it takes to stop the drones. Agree? I mean, easy for me to say from here in Maryland, but I mean, probably, yeah. Well, if only because he's got to stand for election in three months, he can't stand for election if the people in Galilee can't live in Galilee, right? I guess, but I think he's got far bigger problems than that. Is there? I wish him luck. Are you making a prediction to Mr. Bennett at the next prime minister now? I mean, there's a lot of anger across the board at Benjamin Netanyahu. He is the king of political strategy. I'm not writing him off, but he's got an uphill battle. Okay, Bethany Mandel, we'll continue to talk about that. Don't forget returning. There'll be a quiz next week in addition to when I see you next. When I see you again, thank you, Bethany. Follow on X at Bethany, Sean Dark Reader at the momhors.substack.com.

Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. I hope you check Town Hall every day. If you do, you are up to date on the work of Kyle Olson, my guest right now. He's been doing quite a lot of eye-opening work on what the Department of Homeland Security did and did not do with children and with sex trafficking in Midtown, New York. Kyle, I want to start with that latter story. When I go to New York, I stay on 44th Street. That brothel you were covering was two blocks over, and nobody knew about it. How does that even happen? That's right. Well, that's a very good question. And, yes, if you look at the map of Midtown Manhattan, it was literally between Fox News Channel and NBC News, two of the largest media networks in the world. And also it was right in the Diamond District, which all over the Diamond District, it says it's being monitored by the NYPD by camera. And this was happening right under people's noses. So it's a good question why that was going on. Yeah, I walked down 46 a lot because I stay on 44th, and I've got to cut back and forth between 5th and 6th. And I read that. I just said, How in the world, and then they closed up shop before anyone did anything, right? They moved the brothel somewhere else with underage kids. Yes, yes. So basically what happened was there were investigators that were watching this, cataloging what was going on. They actually, you can find links to the videos in the stories. They were actually cataloging the garbage that was coming out of this building and documenting exactly what was going on. And the federal authorities were alerted. The best they could tell, nothing ever happened. You know, Kyle, it will cause people to lose sleep because they don't want to think about young children being trafficked, but it's happening under our noses across the United States. Good work by you and by town hall. Now, wrap that, if you will, into Xavier Becerra's bid to become governor. I can't imagine. Xavier Becerra gives empty suits a bad name. Why should he be held accountable for what happened with these missing children? Well, so the big picture here, taking a step back from what happened in Midtown, the big picture here is that during the Biden administration, you had hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied alien children coming across the border. Now, obviously, you had Mayarchus, who was incompetent, and he was allowing these kids to come across the border. But once they came across the border, they were essentially under the protection, if you want to call it that, of health and human services, which, of course, was Bicera. And what these videos show, which, as you said, you can find them at town hall.com. Just search my name, Kyle Olson.

But what you can see is agency workers, so agencies that were getting federal money, but then also individuals that were working for the federal government, just saying just plainly that kids were being sold, kids were going to cartels, kids were being prostituted. all sorts of horrible things. And the bottom line was the Trump administration, or the Biden administration, whether it was Biden himself, whether it was Mayorkas, whether it was Xavier Becerra, they knew what was going on and they did nothing to stop it. I don't know if you saw the debate or the interview. It was actually an interview with Channel 9 where Xavier Becerra said, oh, we didn't lose those kids. We knew they went to work in the slaughterhouse. Or we knew that they went to work in the 24th. It was like he really was admitting that they knew that these kids were not being supervised, but he failed. He utterly failed. How could anyone possibly imagine he could be the governor of California? Well, that's a very good question. And they absolutely did fail because what the people who were caught on camera were saying was kids were coming across the border. And some of them, the first thing they did, they didn't go to school. They went to work. There was one story of where a child was actually physically living in the factory, working in the factory in order to pay the debt back to the cartel that got them through the Mexican desert. And there were just countless stories like this. And so, you know, voters will have to decide what they want to do about Xavier Becerra. But if you look at his record when he was at HHS, it's a disaster. It was a disaster for humanity. and for children, and for kids that were coming to America, they were completely vulnerable, they were abused. And that happened on his watch. And as you said in that interview, he dodged, he dismissed. He has not been held accountable for what the Biden administration did. Now, if people vote for him, they should be a shame. You should be very proud of your work, Kyle. It's a fabulous bit of reporting over at Town Hall. Look up Kyle Olson, O-L-S-O-N. and you'll find all of his work on Midtown, sex trafficking, on disappeared children working under terrible condition. Kyle is an investigative reporter in the truest sense of the word. Thank you, Kyle. I'll be right back, America. Stay tuned. Well, look, I think our position is well stated. The president had a very important, I think, historic call just a couple days ago with a number of leaders from the region. I think there's strong alignment and agreement on what a preliminary draft should look like. I think like anything with something like this, and it's going to take a couple days to settle on even down to the disagreements over a word sentence. So we'll have to work through that. If there's going to be a deal, we're going to have to work through that. But this is, you know, it's either going to be a good deal.

isn't going to be one. I would add to that, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. The headline at the Times of Israel is IDF pushes north of Lebanon's security zone. Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel seizing strategic positions. To explain it all for us, we're joined by Byron York, chief political correspondent for the DC Examiner, the Washington Examiner, Fox News contributor, and he'll tell us exactly what I cannot figure out after watching everything for 72 hours. What's going on, Byron? He got me, Hugh. Next question. No, it says here you will answer that. What's going on? Because I don't know. All right. So, okay. Well, let's go through your points of confusion here. Number one. Are we at war with Iran? I think we're in something in the middle between war and peace with Iran. Obviously, the ceasefires lasted longer than the war itself. The president, obviously, does not want to. I mean, we did a little bit just today or yesterday, but the president obviously does not want to resume full-scale hostilities, and there continue to be negotiations, which I think have some serious flaws in them, but there they are. Do you think that there is much of a chance that Iran will, at this point, without further pounding, agree to give us the enriched uranium? Well, I wonder if Iran with further pounding would agree to give us the enriched uranium. So I don't know. I mean, obviously the administration over the weekend coming up with the no dust, no dollars thing, says that there's not going to be any settlement at all unless Iran turns over the enriched uranium. So I don't think we've gotten any indication from the Iranians. I mean, they've always said, well, we don't want to have a nuclear program, okay? We don't believe that. They've always said, we're not doing anything. Well, we don't believe that either because we have proof that they, you know, worked for years on this. And so, you know, I think even if they said they were going to hand over this stuff, the idea of actually affecting the handover and making sure it is everything would be an enormously complex undertaking. They also said they only had. missiles that would go 2,000 kilometers, and then they almost got the Diego Garcia, which is 25% further than that. Let me ask you in terms of the Israelis. They're moving north in Lebanon is to me the most significant thing because the Ayatollah or the IRGC is insisting that there be a parallel peace process in Lebanon. And that ain't happening. That's not happening. Well, I think it was a mistake of the United States to enter into a war with a single ally that had different interests than ours. So I think this Lebanon thing is a very complicating factor. Look, I think Israel can do what it wants to do in Israel in Lebanon, but it's part of, since there are ally in Iran, it's part of this whole deal. So I think that's enormously complicated things in a way that didn't have to be that complicated.

Now, the most impressive thing I saw, and boy, did it set off a bunch of my followers with TDS. The president posted yesterday, by the way, all of our allies have to join the Abraham Accords. And I pointed out, that's kind of brilliant jujitsu for the Gulf states that aren't already in the Abraham Accords to say, you want our help, you're going to join the Abraham Accord. Oh, my goodness, did that set off the TDS? I don't know why, but it did. I thought it was a brilliant stroke. Well, it said it off. Well, it was a brilliant stroke. It set it off because they thought, well, Trump has messed this up. He dug himself into a hole. And now he's trying this, this, you know, Hail Mary play to try to get out of his hole. And we, the resistance, don't want him to get out of this hole. So. I think that's the way they view this. Whether this, you know, look, if it works with any of these countries, then you've increased a number of countries in the Abraham Accords, which is a good thing. Of the countries that are listed, and that would be the key ones would be Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. Those are the big three. Which one do you think? He said one of them might have a problem signing on. Which one do you think that is? Gosh. You know, the biggest and most important is Saudi Arabia. Yep. And I almost think that they would be, I'm not saying any of these would be easy, but that they would be the first one to do it. I hope they are. I don't think they will be because they need the most defense. We can defend Kuwait pretty easily, at least our base there. I'm not sure if we can defend the oil wells. And Qatar, there's no defending Qatar. Cutter's really screwed. I read today that they're down 25% production after one volley of attacks, and they don't have an overland pipeline. Did you know that, Byron? They have no alternative. I think I did know that. There's not a lot of overland pipeline. If there were a lot of easy access to overland pipelines, you wouldn't have this problem in the Persian Gulf. So they're really up against a wall, and they're trying to buy Iranian favors. Do you think we allow them to do that? That I don't know. You would hope not. Obviously, we're very upset by anybody who simply pays the ransom or the fee or the environmental fee to go through the straight. So we'd certainly be upset with that. All right. Last question. We saw the White House bark at Mike Pompeo. Then we saw Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham. sale the outlines of the deal. Then we saw Tom Cotton re-post Lindsey Graham. I don't think there's a lot of support for anything that approaches a weak deal. Do you? Oh, yeah. Absolutely not. That's why that's what had happened was when the president, I think it was on Saturday, came out and said, deals very close.

It's going to happen really soon. And we know now that nothing happens really soon in this. But that's what he said. A deal is really close, just working it out, going to happen very soon. After that, followed a spate of reporting and leaks about what was in it, and it made it look like it was a weak deal like the United States was basically going to end the blockade and start handing over money in terms of sanctions relief and unfrozen assets. start handing over money and the billions of dollars to Iran before they really do anything. So the administration was, you know, very, very upset about that. And on Sunday began a pretty heavy pushback. And so I think that they've made it very, very clear that they would not accept any of those deals. If they did, that would crack the base, wouldn't it? I think it would crack the base. Do you agree? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it's a rock in a hard place, but I'm counting on Trump's experience to get us through that. As of right now, no new news out of the Middle East. Stay tuned. Hi there. Thanks for listening to the highly concentrated Hugh podcast and the Big Weekend Pod. I want to talk to you about prison fellowship and their Angel Tree Summer camping program. You can contribute today over at my website, hughewitt.com, we can call AAA 2062764. AAA 2062764. AAA 206, 2764. Now, my kids went to summer camp. All my grandkids. Some of them aren't old enough yet, but they get to go to summer camp. But I have never been in prison, and the fetching Mrs. Hewitt nor any of my children have been. There are, well, millions of kids who have either one or both parents behind bars. Pretty tough for their family to swing it. They need help. That's where Angel Tree Camp step in to ministry of prison fellowship, and it's a great one. And thousands of my listeners to the podcast and the program over the years have stepped up to contribute. Won't you consider doing that? A full scholarship is $200. That sends a kid to camp for an entire week. AAA 206-2764, AAA 206-2764, or visit the Prison Fellowship Angel Tree Banner at the top of Hugh Hewitt.com. Now, I want to take a moment to tell you about our great sponsor consumer cellular. They have a brand new offer, so I want you to listen carefully to this. You've probably seen the headlines are worth your latest sell bill. Big wireless is raising rates again. Well, you can switch to consumer cellular right now and get $200 off your bill by going to consumercellular.com slash hue and use a promo code, Hugh 200. That's right, Hugh Hewitt, UGH, 200. And when you switch, you'll get the same coverage as big wireless carriers, just not the coverage that's anything other than high quality.

Are you tired of your wireless company telling you have to talk to an AI chat box or even pay 10 bucks to talk to someone when paying your bill? That's happening now, really. With consumer cellular, you'll talk to an actual human being based right here in the United States who will help you every step of the way when you switch. For a limited time, if you're over 50 as well, you can get $200 off your bill when you switch two unlimited lines. That's two lines of unlimited talk, texting data for $60 a month, plus $200 off. Hurry, the extra $200 off your bill will not last long. This offer ends June 14th. Visit consumercellular.com slash you. Use the promo code. Hugh, 200, or call 1-800-4-1-41-44, 1-800-4-1-4-4-44, 1-800-4-1-4-4-4-4-4-54. Thank you, Grace America, as promised. Time to talk about returning the brand new book by Nicholas Lemon. Nick is the Dean Emeritus at the Columbia School of Journalism, Staff Writer at the New Yorker. He's an acquaintance of mine from 20 years ago, and I was just telling him off air, this is really a remarkable book for a lot of reasons. I have seven pages of notes and a two-page outline. I won't get through all of it. But, Nick, welcome back of the hundreds of books I've read in the 20 years since we got to know each other. I would say this one brings me as much joy because it brings me so much knowledge that I did not know. I'll give you an example to start. Walter Lipman, who I've known about for years, of course, I had no idea that he was generally unsympathetic to Jews, and that he never mentioned the Holocaust during his entire, the height of his career, and that he said, my sympathies are with the non-Jews. There's stuff like this throughout the whole book. Was that a surprise to you? Well, some of it I knew. I guess just to start us off, I grew up in a world that's very much like the world Walter Lippmann grew up in, which is...

But for 100 years, there was a huge division in the Jewish world, to use our terminology, the German Jews and the Russian Jews. We were the German Jews. We came here earlier. We were more assimilated. We tried to hold ourselves apart from the other Jews. And we're much resented for that. Walter Limon was also a German Jew. So I was pretty familiar with the way I was raised, which is, never fade in Jewish causes in public. And that's the, you will be accepted if you don't advertise the fact that you're Jewish. It's like passing for black people used to be, I guess. What I found fascinating is that. You can choose an identity and you can choose a secondary identity, but sometimes they can't be merged. And you kind of changed identity going from being a New Orleans southerner to being a New York Jew. And it's not an easy transition. And we'll talk about that as we go along. But I have a very odd question to start with. I hope I don't offend you. Will you be buried with your parents in New Orleans or in New York? You were going right to it. That is a question I am in, what would I say? You know, like the Iran peace talks. That's kind of like my talks with my wife about this subject. So let's go back to the German Jews. So this is typical of our story. In New Orleans, there's a... high society cemetery, used to be called Metery Cemetery, no, it's called Lake Lawn. And there's one little neighborhood that's for the German Jewish elite. So no... When I said before, no Russian Jews can be buried there. No Christians can be buried there. No German Jews can be buried outside of the little German Jewish plot. And that sort of stands for everything about how I was raised in New Orleans. So, you know, by Jewish law, I'm not supposed to be buried there because it's not a Jewish cemetery. There's a space being held for me in a Jewish cemetery. You know, 30 of my relatives are buried there, including my parents, going back to the 19th century. So you went right to a live marital issue for me. Well, it occurred to me as those of us who get our three score and ten down. We begin to think about things like that. And at the end of you're talking about where. your family is and why summer in Cincinnati and why summer in New Orleans and why there might be a random lemon or two in New York, I just occurred to me, you'll have to make that choice. I want to begin in the middle. And for the benefit of the audience, we're talking about five generations of lemons here. Jacob, Benjamin Netanyahu, Montefiore, Mordecai.

Thomas and Nick. And I want to begin in the middle with your grandfather, Montefori Mordecai, born in 1884, who goes by the name Pop, and I'm going to go with Pop because Montefiore is hard for me to say. Not as much of it. All right. I had, A, you've written more about the court packing plan of 1937 to 8 than any other book out there. I think court packing is unconstitutional, by the way. And your dad was friends with Felix Frankfurr and they were, your grandfather, your grandfather. And they were horrified by the court packing plan thinking it was a gesture worthy of Huey Long, a first step in the direction of dictatorship. That's wild. Was that all new to you? No, that wasn't new to me because, you know, so just to sketch it out. My grandfather was lucky enough to have been a classmate at Harvard Law School, class of 1906 with Felix Frankfurter, the future Supreme Court justice. And they were intimate friends for half a century and more after that, living in different cities. So they have this huge correspondence going back and forth. So if listeners don't know, FDR was very frustrated when he was president that the conservative Supreme Court kept batting down his legislation and declaring it unconstitutional. So he said, look, the Constitution doesn't specify how many members the court should have. So let's just expand it. I just want to landslide victory. I'll throw three or four more justices on there and then I won't keep having my laws slap down. So this was the plan that he proposed. Now, Frankfurter, who was very, very close to Roosevelt and was appointed to the court in 1939, desperately wanted to be on the Supreme Court. The entire legal establishment, including the liberal legal establishment, was horrified by the court packing plan. So Frankfurter had to... confront the disapproval of his friends who expected him like them to oppose the court packing plan. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and said absolutely nothing about it. He offered sort of tortured rationales for why he wasn't saying anything. And having said nothing, and the plan died, and FDR then appointed him to the Supreme Court. So there we go. An interesting irony is Frankfurter was considered a radical left appointment to the court, and now in the legal academy is considered sort of right way. He's one of ours. I've got to say, though, your grandfather, Pop, is such an impressive man. He spoke at Cardozo's memorial service.

He went to D.C. in the spring of 1939 to testify before Congress on behalf of an American version of Great Britain's Kinder Transport. Bravo to him didn't work. And his telegram of congratulations to Frank further on page 193, I want to read it. I do not know in what capacity I'm most happy about your nomination. As friend, classmate, lawyer, Jew, American citizen, but is great enough to fill me up in every capacity. How proud you should be in your souls, his wife included here. What a record for an immigrant Jew, unaided, saved by his own extraordinary quality. The Senate approved him unanimously. Did you get to know him really well? I mean, did you have a love of him? Yeah, Pop. No. Well, he died when I was five. So I remember him a little bit, but not very much. But, you know, when you read that letter, it kind of choked me up. It's pretty moving that, you know, that would happen. So here's the story of he died. And... Many years later, there's a guy who's a professor at Georgetown Law School named Brad Snyder who wrote a massive and excellent biography of Frankfurter, and I'd known him. So he got in touch with me and said, You know, I hear there are these private letters between Frankfurt or your grandfather. Can you get me access to them? So I, you know, went to my dad no longer with us and got Brad access. And then afterward, Brad came to me and said, it's crazy for these letters to be sitting in a private law office in New Orleans. You have to put them in a library. So we put them in the library at Tulane. And then when I started working on the book, I read them all. And that's when I really got to know my grandfather. Oh, it's amazing. It's good for the professor for encouraging you that because he's an amazing man. He's a remarkable man. And I want people to understand. Jacob, your great-great-grandfather, came to the United States with nothing and no prospects. and your grandfather ends up being a Frankfurt or confidant testifying before Congress. And, of course, you're now at the New Yorker. When we come back, we're going to talk about the current and the past. You and your great-great-grandfather, Jacob, the man who could speak no English until the end of his life, wrote everything in Hebrew and was fully Jewish. practicing by that, I mean practicing. And you, who have now fully embraced Judaism in a way that is different from your father, don't go anywhere in America, except maybe over to Amazon to order returning. I'll keep my eye on the news. If anything happens in the Middle East, I will let you know. Don't worry about that. Stay tuned.

Welcome back, America Hugh Hewitt with Nick Lemon. His new book is called Returning. It's a fabulous read. I'm not Jewish. You don't have to be Jewish. You might want to live and love American history. Nick, I interviewed Justice Amy Coney Barrett this past summer and then again on the radio show. She wrote a book called Listening of the Law. She grew up in New Orleans. And I asked her, how does it feel to be the first? Southern Justice in like 100 years said, I'm not from the South. I'm from New Orleans. And so I kept thinking about there's a book within a book in returning. It's a book about New Orleans. Why did your father, or I know why, but explain to the audience why your father picked New Orleans penniless and an immigrant leaving the Rhine Valley where German Jews had been sort of unrestricted and almost citizen granted. Well, okay, so it was my great-great-grandfather, Jacob. And he was born in 1809, same year that Abraham Lincoln was born. He left Germany at the age of 27. He was from a little village called Essenheim, very near the Rhine River, and came alone to New Orleans. So he was part of a little migration. You know, a lot of... German Jewish bachelors came to the America, often to the deep south, and they all started an exact same job, which is... backpack peddler. And that's basically what I think my family had been doing for centuries in Germany, partly because that was what Jews were allowed to do. It was about the only thing they were allowed to do. So, you know, you kind of walk up and down the Rhine River Valley, and you sell a few things, and you buy a few things, and you buy a

And I think the reason he came was that it was a booming area. And the reason it was booming, one of the big reasons is it was the capital of sugarcane plantation slavery. The U.S. was becoming what it is now, which is a sugar-addicted country. And the vast majority of American sugar was produced in this very small area in Louisiana. And that's where my family settled in a town called Donaldsonville, Louisiana, where we're coming up on 190 years there. It's an amazing story of the South, of the sugar industry, of the Reconstruction South. Indeed, it's kind of interesting during the Civil War what's going on in Donald's and Bill as well. But I want to ask you about page 51. Ever since I sat in the Ascension Parish clerk's office looking at these records, I can't get them out of these minds. Those records are the records of your great-great-grandfather factoring, borrowing against the enslaved. and trading in slaves. He's not really a slave owner. He's trading in the credit that slavery and slave people do. And it hits you like a hammer in the head. And did you think about stopping the project ever? No. I mean, look. First of all, I want to say my family's preferred mythology, which is not untrue, is this same great-great-grandfather, after the Civil War, bought a series of small plantations around Donaldsonville for pennies on the dollar. And, you know, at this point, slavery had been abolished, and so he was paying wages. to formerly enslaved people. So, you know, by current standards, this is not heroic. It was, you know, overwhelming white supremacy caste system, but it was better than slavery. So, you know. I went to the Ascension Parish, Louisiana Records, and there's this wonderful, all-knowing guy there named Brett Landry. And I said, I want to look up all the records of everything you have about my family going all the way back. And I arrived, and he said, I got a folder for you. And the folder was, as you described, showing my great-great-grandfather engaging in... maybe like a dozen transactions in which he was buying and selling human beings for short periods of time. So that's something that has had a profound effect on me. A lot of this research has had a profound effect on me, but that's one of the things, because it really shows, you know, a long ago but direct connection to slavery of me.

Let me tell you, though, the line that gets me the most in the book, quote, not so long ago in upstate New York, this is you, Nick Lemon writing, I met a Southern expatriate who, after we were introduced, complained bitterly about his family's beloved plantation having been lost to the lemons after the war. And it's hard to imagine that as his family handed down the story are being Jews, moneylenders, ruthless, would have been omitted. Close quote. You bet it wouldn't have been omitted. Number one, was that at Chautauqua, just by chance? Upstate New York. Were you talking at Chautauqua? No. No. It's not. Number two. It's indifferent. Okay. He was proud of the family that was slave owners and ran sugar plantations, which was hell on earth for the enslaved. He was proud of it. So Hugh. You know, look, you and I grew up in very different environments, and I think there's something really useful in life about the experience of growing up in a place and time where the values have very little overlap with the values of the world you live in now. So in the world I grew up in, you know, if you said my family owned an antebellum plantation with a very grand house, you know, a la Django Unchained or something, that would be something you'd be proud of, you know, that wouldn't be something you'd be ashamed of. So it meant you were for, you were an aristocrat or something. So. You know, I think that was, that's a very, very southern thing. I'm sure you've seen the streetcar named Desire that DC Williams play. Yes. And you remember when Todd Blanche says, I sold the plantation Stella? You know, that was the ultimate shame for a southerner of a certain class was to lose your family plantation, not to have a family plantation. Well, this is all news to me. I've had friends from New Orleans, and I've read about New Orleans and other books, but this is all news to me about Louisiana during the war and in the post-Civil War. Your great-grandfather, Benjamin Netanyahu, he... Bernard. Bernard goes to New York. and to Europe during the civil. He negotiated the Civil War pretty deftly, actually. But he ends up going back during the Civil War to Louisiana. He is like the most amazing character in this in terms of his travels and also poignant. He goes to Europe and sees a German Jewish world that is... I think you said at the beginning of the German Renaissance, and he doesn't have four knowledge, of course, it would all be. We got a minute to the break. That's bracing, too. Yeah. No, it's true. There was all this stuff I didn't know. So, you know, basically, real short version of the family, Jacob moves by himself to Louisiana. So you think, okay, he's not going to be Jewish anymore. And he marries a teenage...

Cajun girl named Marie Bertolo. And there he is. Should I wait until after the break to tell you what happened next? Yeah, because people need to hear it to keep it straight. And nothing has happened in Iran that makes me have to break in yet. So returning is the book. It's at Amazon. No matter who you are, the writing is just beautiful. And the story is an epic American story. It's really an American story. Stay tuned. I'll be right back with Nick Lemon after this. Welcome back, America. I'm Hugh Hewitt. Nick Lemon is my guest. His new book is called Returning. It's in bookstores everywhere. It's at Amazon. If you can't remember returning, I don't know how to help you. All right. So Jacob Begets. Bernard, and Bernard begets Pop, and Pop Begets Thomas, and Thomas begets Nick. This is very biblical. Tell us how Bernard... How does Bernard get back and forth to Europe? Jacob's done well, the Dun & Bradstreet books at the Harvard Business School. Tell us that. Yep. Yeah, so what happened is after about 10 or 15 years in America, Jacob had married, done well, and he sent his firstborn son, Bernard, my great-grandfather, to New York. Bernard was... put in a kind of Jewish boarding school that was run by a prominent rabbi. So apparently, Jacob decided I want to rediscover my Jewishness, as I have, by the way. So Bernard goes up there, and he lives in New York. Then his parents relocate to New York and buy a house there. And it seems to end, Marie. My great-great-grandmother converts to Judaism and changes her name to Miriam. And then my great-great-grandparents are remarried in a Jewish ceremony. So the family seems to be all said to be owning property in Louisiana and doing business there, but living in New York in a more religious community. And then the Civil War comes along. So what they did was they first sent their, you know, draft age son and said, go to Europe, get out of this country. And then the parents left the country and went back to the part of Germany they had come from. I think they didn't want to take sides in the war. And I think there was a kind of business reason for that, which is if they... were loyal to the union, all their property would be confiscated by the Confederacy. If they were loyal to the Confederacy, they were not dumb, and they knew they were going to be on the losing side of the war. And then all their property would be confiscated. So they went back to Germany and kind of waited it out. Meanwhile, battles were raging in Donaldsonville, where they were from. And then as the war was ending,

They went back to Donaldsonville and started acquiring plantations, as I said, and reopened a store they had had there. So they, you know, again, I was talking about what it's like to grow up in the South, which you were a little astounded by. I'm sure you've seen Gone with the Wind, right? Yes. Okay, so you know, the vibe in the White South was after the Civil War, a civilization lies in ruins. But apparently for my family, they looked at this and they said, oh, this is a great business opportunity for us. We're moving back and acquiring properties for pennies on the dollar. So that's what they did. And for about 50 years, they had a... pretty good little empire of plantations and a general store in the town of Donaldsonville. Well, there isn't anyone. I think everyone who reads this is going to wish they had an archive in the family like you have. When you write, and when all those years ago I set in my course as a person who investigate things on things that are not immediately visible, that forms an unexcavated structure underlying the life that I live. And then you had to start digging. And when you start digging, you find out all sorts of stuff. It's like addictive, almost. I know. I mean, the strange thing is, um, You know, in journalism terms, I was sitting on a story because I knew there was this huge archive of family material in the library of Tulane that one of my cousins had assembled years ago that you've referred to several times. You know, I can tell you what my relatives were doing almost daily in the 1840s and forward to now. So why didn't I ever look at this material until I was, Let's say I had my social security card, just to put it mildly. And I think maybe I didn't want to know what I would find like a connection to slavery. You know, you get older. And I know you're much younger than me, Hugh, but, you know, there's a feeling of it's time to reckon and settle up accounts and all that. Oh, no, we were at school at the same time, Nick. You might have a year on me. Two years younger than me. Yeah. Okay. So it's, we're going to go to break now. And when we come back, I think the most compelling, well, they're all compelling. Your father, Thomas, really touches me for reasons.

I'll talk about after the break. I think you've done him great justice, and it's a wonderful, beautiful picture. And you've done yourself well by explaining the difficulty in becoming a New Orleans reform Jew. So I don't know if you're Orthodox or conservative in New York now. I'll ask you that after the break. Stay tuned to America. It's an American story. It's called Returning. Welcome back, America. This is my last segment on the air with Nick, but I'm going to keep them for a couple of minutes afterwards, put that on the podcast. There's a little dessert for those of you have listened to this. Father wanted to break into New Orleans High Society. There would be no Jewish debutante. New Orleans had exiled Jews after embracing the first king of the crew. The first big guy was a Jew, and then there's never been another one. You were the first Jew to get invited to the Squire's Ball, which, by the way, I never knew about. I didn't know anything about New Orleans, except what Justice Amy Coney Barrett told me about. And your father's, he was blessed with, lucky with friends. Tommy Lehman sounds like a wonderful man, but his toast at your father's 50th birthday. George is the most Christian man I know, and he is a Jew. That's a weird toast. How'd that go over with your father? He liked it. I mean, my father was very, he was raised in a form of being American Jewish that no longer exists, and it's kind of a distant memory, a very, very, very assimilated form of reform Judaism. And he wanted to be accepted by the New Orleans social elite that, historically had excluded Jews. So he, you know, distanced himself. I guess he never really knew people from the majority Jewish-American experience, but to the extent that he did, he distanced himself from them and wanted to sort of ally himself with the non-Jewish elite, which some of whom accepted him and some of whom never accepted him. He was kind of in this in-between place. where over to one side or the majority of his own group, and he didn't want to be associated with them. And then the other side was this very small group that he wanted to be a full member of, but they were not fully willing to accept him. So we had this kind of slice that we lived in that was quite narrow. And in Jewish America, it just doesn't really exist anymore. I would have loved to have gone to the Christmas parties at Corkas. Nick's family home is Corkas, and they would throw big Christmas parties that are extraordinary. You describe yourself in those years as an advanced shallow Jew. I think that's very, very funny. But you become emotional at bar mitzvahs when the Torah is. Are you now conservative or orthodox, Nick?

Conservative. A member of a conservative synagogue. And so when they carry the scrolls around, you will tear up. It breaks into a deep part of your soul, and I think that's very touching. I'm curious. Have you ever heard of C.S. Lewis's essay, The Inner Ring? Yes, but I haven't read it, unfortunately. I think my wife has read it, but I haven't. She's much better read than me. I would recommend it to you because it's your father's story. I just thought of it over and over. It's not about Christians and Jews. It's about always wanting to be on the inner ring and always discovering that you don't know if you're in or you're out. Tell people a little bit about your modern journey. When did you begin to go from the reform? Very assimilated Jew of New Orleans to practicing conservative Jew. So I had almost no Jewish education. My father was so assimilated that he would take us to the temple on one day a year, and that was Thanksgiving. So we had no celebrations on Jewish holidays. We did celebrate Christmas very elaborately and Easter a little bit. And so I really didn't know what being Jewish meant. You know, around the time that normal Jews would have been bar mitzvahed, my father... I found this to my research. I brought home at the temple. They sent all the kids home with some kind of newsletter. And the newsletter mentioned Israel. And my father kind of blew a gasket and said, you know, Israel must never be mentioned in our temple because that's not part of our religion. So he let me quit my religious education. So I did nothing Jewish from about the age of... 12 on and very little before that. And then I just felt like there was this huge, rich, meaningful world. I had no idea then how all the generations before my father had been very, very engaged with it. And it just seemed to be calling to me. And I didn't know how to enter it, you know, because I would go into services sometimes and I didn't know what was going on because I'd never been to these services. So it took me decades, really. It's like a 40, 50-year journey. And I'm still not all the way there. Well, it's very well described. And it came in my head to think. There's a thick culture in New Orleans, very thick. And to get into the deep middle of it, you have to do what your father did. And then there's a thick Jewish culture.

And you're just getting into the middle of it now having, you can't melbourne, you can't blend those two cultures. They're unblendable, right? That's absolutely right. Yeah, you can't blend them at all. So that's where I am now. I live in New York, and I am a, you know, loyal and regular member of a conservative congregation and involved in various. Jewish activities here. So that's that's kind of my journey and my kids, you know, where Magan David has starved David around their neck on a necklace and, you know, families change over time. The book. There's a line in the book about you were sitting in New York and you were a wreck, but I failed to note if that's after Katrina or after 107. I'm going to talk to you about after 107 after Katrina. So your hometown is destroyed. What was that like? Did you go down there then? It's very thought about that. It was. Yeah, it was terrible. You know, my dad was born, he was like a typical American, right? He lived to age 97 and he was died in the same hospital he was born in, the same hospital. I was born in the same hospital where his mother was a nurse. And, you know, Katrina came along. He said, oh, I've been through so many of these hurricanes. I'm not evacuating, so he didn't evacuate. And so there he was. He was stuck, and I was just completely terrified. And that's why I was sitting on the bench in New York, just panicked. And we had this whole drama of figuring out how to get him out of town because you really had to leave. Oh, it's wonderfully told. That's hard I remember. And the love in the family is very thick. For the audience, I'm going to talk to Nick for five or ten more minutes. It'll be on the YouTube channel as part of the... whole interview. I recommend it to you, but I really recommend, no matter who you are or what you are, Jewish, non-Jewish, Christian, atheists, you're going to love returning if you're an American. And you're going to learn more about the American South than you never knew. Have you ever known? Stay tuned. I'll come back and finish up today's program. So I'm back with Nick for the bonus couple of minutes to talk to him. Thank you for, A, teaching me a lot about the South without being judgmental about people who don't know about it. I've never heard of the last night at Ballyhoo, right? I just didn't know anything about it. You explained that. You explain that there are white parochial schools, which hit me kind of in the chest. I can't imagine all white segregated parochial schools because I went to prokeal schools. And you talk about having a penny rolled down the day school in New Orleans. So there was some anti-Semitism when you were growing up, but how real was it? Did you feel it? Well, yeah, I definitely could feel it because we knew, you know, first of all, it's human nature. You know, people in the whole course of your childhoods, there's six or eight incidents.

The net time they took up isn't a lot, but they really stick with you. And also, we knew there were a lot of clubs we couldn't join and parties we couldn't be invited to. And there was a barrier. And when that happens to you, you're aware of it. It gets your attention. Okay. So what I wanted to ask you, 10-7 comes along. And the phrase 10-7 Jews is out there. That's not you because you're deepening attachment to your Judaism. occurs long before that. But along with 10-7 comes as explosion of anti-Semitism in America. And the theme of this book, The German Jews, it was never going to happen to the German Jews, and then it happened. Do you worry about that in America? I do worry, yeah. I mean, it's definitely, I guess. Let me say in a broad way, I've been out touring and talking about this book, right? I feel like America's Jewish group therapy coach or something. Jewish America is having a big identity crisis right now. And a lot of the reason is, you know, I always grew up thinking, you know, Jews are not fully accepted, but my sort of more normal Jewish friends, people like you would have grown up with in Massachusetts. I think they grew up thinking, you know, those dramas are over. We are accepted now. And so a lot of those people, you know, my generation, generation below me, generation even below that, are in shock right now because suddenly all those assumptions they live by. or seem to be evaporating very rapidly. And being Jewish seems to be a much more charged and endangered status than it has been for decades. And it's very, very upsetting for people. Well, you joined the Columbia anti-Semitism committee, which turned out to be, I won't call it a joke, but a pantomime of a committee. And I'm from Ohio. And so I know Jews from Cleveland and Columbus and Cincinnati. We all came to D.C. Gentiles, too, to march for Israel after 10-7. But I can't remember you for a minute. If I may, go on the website of the Columbia Anti-Semitism Task Force and read the four long reports that we wrote. And then call me back if you really want to talk about whether we were a pantomime. Okay. You weren't. Do you think, I walked away from the book thinking maybe you were unhappy with the experience. I was, but that doesn't mean our work was a pantomime. Oh, okay. That's a different story. I will do that. I did not feel that we were welcomed in the community by all elements of the community. So I went from feeling like a sort of an insider in my university to an outsider. But separately, we produced a lot of good work under difficult circumstances.

Then I will go and find that, and we're going to leave it there, except that I hope Dan Cynor, who's an occasional listener to the podcast and the broadcast on radio, is listening because this story ought to be told on Call Me Back with Amit Segal and Nadaviyal and some of his Israeli friends. And I just want to say it's beautifully written. I don't know if you can top that. The tragedy, I'll get your comment and then we'll be done. The tragedy is I think you would win every book award in America except for the fact that you were Jewish. Has that occurred to you? Oh, Hugh, I only think about things that already have happened, not what would have happened. I'll leave that to you. All right. Well, that's my opinion. That's how highly I think of returning. Nick, good to talk to again after so many years. I look forward to seeing you somewhere down the road. Thank you. In 2025, the FBI reported that Americans lost more than $21 billion to fraud and identity theft. Identity thieves can steal your social security number, open credit accounts in your name, take over online accounts, and create financial headaches that can take months to fix. Most people don't realize they've been targeted until the damage is already done. That's why more families are turning to ARA. Aura helps protect your identity with fraud alerts, credit monitoring, dark web monitoring, and up to $5 million in identity theft protection. If something does happen, R's 24-7 U.S.-based support team can help guide you through the recovery process. You also get a VPN, antivirus protection, password manager, and scam protection, all in one app. Don't wait until you're a victim. Protect yourself and your family today. Start your free trial at aura.com slash safe. That's Aura. A-U-R-A dot com slash safe.