← The Victor Davis Hanson Show
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- [00:00]
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- [01:48]
Jack Fowler
Hello ladies. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host. You are here to listen to vdh. Victor Davis Hansen, the star and namesake. He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Duane and Marsha Busky, Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College and the possessor of a very important website, the blade of Perseus. VictorHansen.com is the address. You should be going there. You should be subscribing. I'll tell you why later in this episode. What why you should. And we are recording on the Ides of March, Saturday, March 15th. And this particular episode will be up on March 20th, Thursday, March 20th. We hope while this, when this airs, that Victor is alive and well in.
- [02:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
I'm going to write a will before I leave Monday. Oh, well, I have one, but I'll have to update it.
- [02:42]
Jack Fowler
Okay.
- [02:42]
Victor Davis Hanson
I don't want to end up. You know what we were saying? My wife and I were here. So we were saying that we were the Hackmans. We're out in an isolated thing together, right? And no one's been checking on us. So.
- [03:03]
Jack Fowler
Well, have your. Have your children. No one lives particularly close.
- [03:08]
Victor Davis Hanson
My daughter calls me every day.
- [03:10]
Jack Fowler
Maybe. Maybe your brother in the area can come by.
- [03:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, I don't think my siblings are worried about me.
- [03:16]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, anyway, Victor, we're going to do a lot of higher ed analysis today from you. We've got some interesting articles I've come across. One is by JP Degan. He's writing this for World, which is the big Protestant magazine and it's about what he calls the self inflicted academic crisis. And we'll get your, we'll read a little bit about that. We'll get your thoughts on that and plenty other things including say this, this Hamas loving woke professor at Columbia University taxing college endowments, the staggering number of Chinese Communist Chinese students in America. And maybe we'll have some time to get off colleges. Talk about Gavin Newsom then, who's competing with us with podcasts with conservative conservative leaders.
- [04:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
And he's doing it with the help of Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon.
- [04:15]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, it's kind of, kind of interesting. Well, we'll get your thoughts on all these things, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.
- [04:26]
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- [07:20]
Jack Fowler
We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor? Yeah, J.P. de Gans, who runs a very important nonprofit, it's called Communio, but he wrote this piece for World and it's titled A Self Inflicted Academic Crisis. Our universities, career first, family last Ideology fuels their own collapse. And here's how it begins. Our collapsing fertility rate has become a matter of increasing interest to the elite thinkers such as Elon Musk and many others. A key intellectual source of this fertility collapse is academia. Secular liberal universities and colleges have incubated anti family, anti marriage and anti child rearing thought thought. Ironically, these ideas are now leading to the destruction of the very institutions that advance them as them first as admission officials begin to reach the demographic cliff. The demographic cliff, Victor, by the way, is starting this year, the free fall in, shall we call it, reproduction, that stems from 2008, that lack of students, that this would be their freshman year in college. And many colleges are scrambling. Where are they going to get students layered on top of that? Victor, as you know, many people are like, why do I have to go to college anymore? Et cetera. So anyway, very interesting article. Your thoughts?
- [08:50]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, I mean, they're absolutely right for all practical purposes, the universities, especially the elite ones, and that can be private and public, but they tend to be private. I'm talking about the Ivy League or the seven Sisters undergraduate or Stanford, Duke, things like that. They're all, I mean, when you look at political donations, they usually go up 90 to 95% to Democrats. If you look at the zip codes at Stanford on voting, it's usually 90% to the Democratic candidate. Then when you look at the Bill of Rights, there is really no First Amendment. They keep what I don't understand is there's all these people that are complaining that Mr. Khalil has been denied his First Amendment rights. He can say whatever he wants. That's not the problem. The problem is he's distributing, promoting a terrorist entity, and he is negotiating on the part. And. And he is one of the spokesmans for this apartheid group at Columbia that has taken over two halls and has committed $30,000 in damage. And when you have the president of Barnard blasting his group and there's going to be suspensions. But my point is, why don't they talk about freedom of speech if they really believe in it? When a speaker is shouted down, why didn't they come out and say Judge Duncan had a perfect right to speak his mind at Stan Law School rather than to be shouted down and people yell at him, we hope your daughter is raped? Or why, when Ben Shapiro came to Stanford, why were people plastering the university with these posters that said, ben be gone with a picture of a raid can, as if he was a Jew to be sprayed away in Zyklon B or something? So they don't protect freedom of speech. They don't honor the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendment. So if you're on a campus and you go out on a date and you are a male and a young woman in a he said, she said environment says that you took advantage of her sexually and you say, no, I didn't. Maybe he was a cat. He didn't reciprocate with kind talk in the next week or so after sexual Congress, I don't know. But the point is, he will not be allowed an attorney. He will not be allowed cross examination. He will not be allowed to see his accuser in a court. He doesn't have any constitutional protections. Ask Joe Lonsdale what happened to him at Stanford. And then they violate the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. Jack, how did. How in the world did we get to a point where you could have an auxiliary subsidiary graduation ceremony based on race? I remember when it happened at Cal State Fresno, the Chicano graduation. What was the purpose of that? What was the purpose of it? And only people of a particular race there. There was the Asian graduation, there was the gay, there was a black. If they had a white graduation people, and that was the minority. When I was at Cal State Fresno, people would have gone crazy. And they should go crazy. But the point I'm thinking is they have racially separate dorms and they call them theme houses. They have racially separated safe spaces where people of particular races can't go on campus. Just like Jim Crow, only they think they're liberal. So you can't use that simile. And at particular universities you can pick the racial profile of your potential roommate in a university dorm. This is all in addition to the fact that they are been charging, not the Bill Gates foundation, not private vacations, 50, 60% overhead on individual faculty grants or team grants. I'm talking about 55 to 60% charging the national Science foundation or the National Institutes of Health and skimming that money off. And that is in addition to these multi billion dollar endowments that give you 6, 7% multimillion dollar tax free income when they're not nonpartisan. And so now they're looking at a crisis and they are in crisis mode. They're anti Semitic. We just had a 900 page investigative report at Stanford University by mostly liberal professors and they found systemic, if I could use that term, antise across the board at Stanford University. And we are going to lose about $200 million if we have to abide by what we charge private foundation, just 15% overhead and can't gouge the government anymore. And should the House and Senate reconcile on somewhere between 15, 10 or 20% tax on endowments and Stanford would lose another 3 or $300 million. And so at a time when people are saying this is a dangerous, if I'm a Jewish student, this is a dangerous place to be on a elite campus because they will not or will not or cannot discipline radical, pro Hamas, pro Hezbollah, pro Palestinian protesters who think they have a perfect right. They just did it yesterday at Cornell, I mean Friday they went into a Cornell seminar on the Middle East. Former Ambassador Crocker was there, he was moderating and they disrupted it and they've done it. They just did it to Larry Summers at Stanford. A group came in and disrupted him. But they feel that they alone can do that and there's no consequences and the university won't enforce their own rules. And then the other thing very quickly, Jack, is that in the hysteria post George Floyd most of the major universities suspended the SAT or ACT exam and they suspended the comparative ranking of high school GPAs. So they let in people who were not according to their own prior standards, qualified at Stanford University. They put on their website, I have no way of knowing, they let in about 9% of white males who make up about 30 to 35% of the population. So they were saying to themselves, we demanded the SAT of you and we ranked you, Victor. So if you were applying from Selma High school with your 4.0, it wasn't the same as Palo Alto's 4.0. Okay, I get it. It probably wasn't. But the reason they were doing that all these years is because they said the following. I'm just taking Stanford, I'm not picking on it. As an example, we have a rigorous, rigorous general education program. Science, math, Western civil philosophy, seminal text, exegesis required and deep thought papers. And the only people who can do this rigorous work are those with a certain SAT or GPA from an accredited, top ranked high school. Now our curriculum is necessary and we're not going to have great inflation because we have to have to impress law school, Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Duke Medical School, I don't know, Ford Motor Company, DuPont. All of these hires have to know if you get branded with a Stanford BA or you're going to graduate program, it reflects the top notch quality aptitude that you had. And we're not Cal State Fresno, where Victor's from, this is. And so then they threw it all away. And within four years you would get employers saying, hey, I got this guy from Stanford and we hired him. He's not only obnoxious, but he doesn't know anything. He's not analytical, he can't write very well, he speaks poorly. How did he get through? And so that's happening right now. So what do they do? They just quietly started. Well, you know, kind of sort of. We're going to quietly reinstate the racist act and the ultra racist sat and the ultra, ultra racist comparative examination of GPAs by the quality of their high school. So that's what, that's who they are. And we saw Claudine Gaine and the rest of them that knew that they were institutionalized anti Semitism and they thought nobody would care because the Jewish community puts a high price elite education. They'd always give money, they would always support them, they could always lie to them. There's no anti Semitism on campus. And also foreign students. It was, the idea is that the United States has no standards. The universities hate the United States as much as we do. We're just going to come over from Gaza or Syria or Morocco or Algeria. We're going to enroll and then we're going to start protesting and supporting terrorist causes. And if you don't like it, we'll say, you're depriving me of my first Amendment rights. Get used to it. That was their attitude. Now people are saying it's non sustainable. When you get people like Elon Musk or Bill Ackman or Mark Andreessen and they all say, you know what these places are Toxic. And they teach a certain creed that does not lead people to happy lives. And it attacks the nuclear family, it attacks fertility, it attacks traditions, that attacks patriotism. And we don't want to put up with it anymore. So if they, if, you know, they said to Hillsdale College, you're too conservative, you're too patriotic, you're too traditional, you're too analytical, don't take money from us. And they said, fine, we're not going to take money from you. Why don't they do the same thing? They just said, you know what? We don't take your stupid dollars. We at Stanford want to be Stanford. We don't want any federal money. We have a 9, we have a 30 billion dollar endowment. Harvard can say we have over 50 billion dollar endowment. Take your stupid cash. We don't need no badges, just that's it. And they don't do that. So they want, they want the money, but they don't want to abide by any basic standards of decency. And I've been at a lot of universities. I've probably spoken at over 2 or 300 in the last 50 years. I've traveled on university lecture series, I've been given honorary degrees, I've given graduation talks. And I come to the conclusion at 71 that I'm not sure that on a plus minus evaluation, cost benefit analysis, that they are a force for good. I think the engineering and the science and the math is critical. But when I look at the ge, I don't see that very many of them, the professors are teaching Shakespeare or Hegel or Socrates, Plato. I don't see that at all. I just don't see it happening to the degree they are. It's always negative and people are just tired of it. They don't want to send their kid off to college at 18 and pay 100 grand and have them come back at Thanksgiving and say, I didn't know you were a white settler oppressor. They don't need that in their lives. Especially from this neurotic bunch of academics.
- [21:04]
Jack Fowler
In this piece by JD JP De Gans, he, he said that as of now, there are 900 feminist studies programs at, in colleges in America. You take the, how many kids are in them now? Times every year go back 30, 40 years. There's an army of, of feminists out there who are, who are part of his article, obviously the point of his article are populating America.
- [21:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
I dealt with them my entire life. I once had a student who, I mean, I won't tell you very much about her, but I was very young and she was a very nice student. She had three children and she wanted to come back and get a minor in classics. And I think she was separated or divorced, so she approached me at class and said, I have no money, is there any. She came into my office to tell me this with her three children. So she said, is there any way I could leave my three children in your office while you're teaching? And I said no. And she said, just give me a week or two. So I did. And she was a very nice person. I come back, my office was full of kids. I talked to them and then she did get something. And she was very bright and gosh, she was working a full time job, single mom and very bright and. And then she got into women's studies, so I forgot all about her. About five, no, maybe eight years later, this person comes into my office with her women's studies advisor. She has a. Almost a butch haircut. And she tells me that she felt that my classes were sexist and she felt that I was part of a paradigm and she felt that I said things in class about Western civilization that were. And she got. And this other woman was beaming, you know, her advisor, who between you and me, seemed very gay and was trying to tell this woman that she might be ambiguous. And I listened to about five minutes and I looked at my watch and I said, are you done? And she said, no. And I said, I'm done. And I just have a polite recommendation. Do not ever come into my office again. Do not see me. Do not say hello, do not say goodbye. You are an ingrate. I tutored you. I let your children stay in my office. And I've had that about four or five times with the university people. And it's always the same thing, Jack. When I look back at 21 years in the CSU system, it was always somebody who was very earnest and very bright and very idealistic. And they were coming back to school and there were two typologies. One was what I would call the DEI type. That was, they were Hispanic, Hmong or African American. American. And they would come in and they were so excited about Homer's Iliad or the Spartans at Thermopylae or Dante's Inferno, all these classes that I would teach. And they were wonderful kids. And then they would either one of two things would happen. They would get their minor in Classics or they would gravitate to another psych major, sociology major, or they would stay in Classics and we would really make them competitive we'd say, if you want to go get a law degree, we might want to get an MA For a year. You might want to learn French and German, you might want to learn how to write Latin and Greek. We did all of this. Our team did. Four professors. And I would say in 50% of the cases, the longer these students went to graduate school after their BA Or MA or the people who had minored and went into other programs, I would bump into them and they would come back and want a recommendation for graduate school or a fellowship. And they were completely unrecognizable, Completely unrecognizable. They would come back and say, you know, I was thinking about Achilles, and you were just so tied into the patriarchy, and these are people who didn't even know who Achilles was five years ago or four years ago. Or would you please give me a recommendation? Because I'm applying for the Diversity Action Officer at Cal State. Such and such and I. And they had all this lingo, and in every case, there was no sense of gratitude that they had come out of the non and that we were not political. We were trying to give them this broad educational background. I had one kid who was really brilliant. He dropped out three times. I tutored him, tutored him, tutored him, tutored him, got him into graduate school twice. He dropped out once, got him in again. And he. Next time I saw him, he was giving me an indictment about my Western civilization. Racist, sexist stuff. So at that point, I just. That was one of the reasons I retired at 50 49. Actually. I just from teaching, I went to the Hoover Institution. I thought, you know what? There is such institutional bias. And these young, impressionable minds, once they figure out where the power, the money, the influence, the heft is in these university campuses, they understand that the path of least resistance is to be very left wing, left wing, left wing, left wing, and mouth, all of these shibboleths. And I just said, you know what? It's not worth it anymore.
- [27:04]
Jack Fowler
I had enough.
- [27:06]
Victor Davis Hanson
I hate to say it, but every once in a while, I'll be in Fresno. You know, I must have had four or five. I had eight classes with. I had to average 200 students a semester for a semester for 20 years. Yeah, 400 for 8,000 students. And I remember most of them. And I tutored. I probably gave every semester I was teaching four. And then Bruce Thornton and I, my colleague, would teach an overload five preps, separate preps, 200 students, and then four or five or six independent studies for students so they could get their major or their individual minor or whatever. But the point is, in the years that followed, a lot of those people that I would write recommendations for, help, get public, you name it, I would bump into and I would say 50% were completely flipped over to be hard left and had the whole, especially after the dei. And they were, because most of my students were minority students, women, either women or minority students, or they were very poor whites from the Oklahoma diaspora. But my point is this, is that this university is insidious and they would sell them on this bill of goods. They would say, you know, I'm teaching now Latin in high school or I'm teaching this in junior high. And I, and I have a curriculum where I'm talking about the theft of the American Southwest. And I'd say, from whom? Well, the United States stole it from Mexico. And I said, well, where did Mexico get it from indigenous people and which indigenous people got it from the other indigenous people? And is this tragedy or you're teaching them or. So I just got to the point that I said now at that point, the last 30 years, you know, you just kind of, you're not in academia anymore. You're just, you don't want anything to do with it. And I just dropped out. It's a negative force in American life. I really believe that. And I hate to say that because I was a big proponent of higher education.
- [29:17]
Jack Fowler
Well, you're a big proponent of good higher education. But Victor, I want to press on that a little bit first, but I just want to take a moment first for our sponsor, Open Phone. Open Phone is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. It works through an app on your phone or computer. So no more carrying two phones or using a landline. With OpenPhone, your team can share one number and collaborate on customer calls and texts like a shared inbox. Plus, with AI powered call transcripts and summaries, you'll be able to automate follow ups, ensuring you'll never miss a customer interaction again. OpenPhone is offering our listeners 20% off your first six months@openphone.com Victor that's O-P E N P H O N E. I'll spell that again. Mid coughless spell again. O P E N P-H-O-N-E.com Victor and if you have existing numbers with another service, Open Phone, we'll port them over at no extra charge. Open Phone. No missed calls, no missed customers. We thank Open Phone for once again sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show Victor a couple of things about what you. Your exegesis. I'm also going to call it a rant this time. Segregation. You didn't use that word, but that's essentially you're talking about things at college that are segregation. It's funny how that word has kind of disappeared from.
- [30:54]
Victor Davis Hanson
I use it a lot. It's segregationist. I mean, if you can have a dorm and only one particular race is allowed to be in it, or you can allow students to say, I don't want that student to be my roommate because of his or her race, or I can't go to this graduation ceremony because I'm not a particular of that particular race, or I can't go to that section of the library. What is it? It's segregation. And they understand that and they've turned the world upside down. So if you want to, and you're reading, I don't know, Catcher in the Rye or Kill a Mockingbird, then you say, we're going to have a trigger warning and you attack the dead author and say, this was illiberal. Basically. What's the biggest problem that academia has is that it's not training people in math, science, literature, history, analytical thought, inductive thought. So the students are not very well educated, but at the same time occurring, they're arrogant because they've been told that the therapeutic through therapeutic curricula, that their job is to use the standards of the present affluent leisured societies and go back and trash the very university that is hosting them and make fun of their traditions. They're racists or sexist prior professors their courses to tear down statues, rename things. But they never say to themselves, well, history is kind of ironic. So what are people going to say about us in 50 years? That we aborted a million fetuses a year, many of us, maybe 20,000 who were viable in the ninth month, more so in the last three months. Are they going to say that you had a million people defecating, urinating, fornicating and injecting on the streets of your major cities? Is that what they're going to say? So the thing I'm making, the point I'm making is they're very arrogant and they think that their own standards won't not apply to them. And they will. So that's, that's my biggest beef with them. And it's very sad to see arrogance and ignorance at a young age to be so strident like all these Palestinian people. This is a true story. When I was walking in October, November of 2023, we had this encampment at Stanford, and it was violating all the rules. You were not allowed to be sleeping out in the quad for 24 hours. They even had a sign as you walked by, Jack, and said, be quiet. Don't disturb sleeping protesters in their tents. And so these people would come out and hand you things. And they were saying, river to the sea. River to the sea. And this is kind of a stereotype, of course, they didn't know which river, in most cases, Jordan River. I don't think they'd ever knew where the Jordan river is, if you ask them. I said to one of them, so the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free. How are you going to free up the Red Sea? And she said, the Red Sea? And I said, yeah, the Red Sea. And she says, what do you mean? I said, well, you said the river to the sea. What sea did you mean? I thought she was going to say, idiot, the Mediterranean Sea. But of course she didn't. She had no idea about which river, which sea. And when you. They don't know anything about the partition or they don't know anything about what is Transjordan. They don't know anything about the 6773 Yom Kippur. They know nothing about any of that. And yet they get there and on those soapboxes they scream and yell and say all of these things. And it's really sad to see these students that are so unimpressive. And I'm not just saying as an error, I love students, but oh, my gosh, it's a waste of time almost to talk to them these days because they don't read and they don't think for themselves, and they're taking courses.
- [35:12]
Jack Fowler
Dan, our mutual friend, my great friend Dan Mahoney, who taught a lot long, you know, more to. More recently than you did. And Dan, I think he stopped teaching at assumption in about 20. 20, 2021. And the decline in the knowledge base of this, of the students was very obvious from what he was teaching at the end to what he was teaching 20 years earlier. And the arrogance, as you say, just up was. And he had enough. Just had enough. I mean, who needs this crap if you can do other things?
- [35:43]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's just. I was 21, I went to Stanford University in the Classics PhD program, and I walked in to see a German. They were all. First of all, they were all Europeans. And she said. I said, I'd like to take your philosophy. And she pulled out a random book from her thing and said, read this, it was Lysias's on the cripple. I did it pretty well. And then she said, I'm teaching a composition class. I want you to take it. And the next thing I knew, she whipped out a paragraph in English. She said, write. And that was what everybody did. And the idea that you'd eliminate that from the classics curriculum as undergraduate, how would you ever be able to study the ancient world? And that was just in this tiny, irrelevant little field. And think about what they have done throughout. A whole group of English majors that doesn't know much about the Shakespearean plays. They don't know who Alexander Pope is. They don't have ever read a word of Milton, and they don't know anything. And they don't know about the inductive method. And yet they're so loud and yet they're so poorly educated. And when you do meet people like the Hillsdale students or some of the Pepperdine students, or you meet some of the conservative students at Stanford that deliberately take the few traditional classes, they have an alarm about them and you talk to them and it's kind of like, shh. Victor, please don't tell anybody how easy these courses are, because it's just a joke. We study Stanford gave almost 80% of all of their courses A's.
- [37:23]
Jack Fowler
Same thing at Harvard. Same, you know.
- [37:25]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah. Who wants to die on the altar of standards? Because if you do, I don't know what'll happen now with the dei, auditors are out, supposedly. But they did check to see if there was a systemic racist pattern in faculty grading that meant if you were teaching a class and the university had changed the entrance requirements and suddenly you got students that weren't able to do the work that you yourself thought was commiserate with Yale or Harvard or Princeton or Duke or whatever, and you had to grade accordingly. And you did that enough, then you were going to be in big trouble. So then you gave people A's.
- [38:02]
Jack Fowler
Well, we're going to talk about one of these woke Black Lives Matter type of professors at Columbia, where we've got some other academic related topics. Gavin Newsom. And we're going to get to some of these things when we come back from these important messages.
- [38:22]
Unknown Speaker (Advertiser)
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- [40:02]
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- [42:05]
Jack Fowler
We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show recording on March 15th. This episode is up on Thursday, March 20th. Victor has a website, the Blade of Perseus. If you're a fan of Victor's writings, go there and you'll find tons of free stuff. Links to Victor's articles, American greatness, essays, weekly syndicated column, archives of these books, links to his various appearances. Then there will be ultra items three times a week, twice as articles, once as a video. Victor does things exclusively for the Blade of Perseus. You should subscribe. It's 65 a year, discounted from 650amonth. The web address again is Victor Hansen.com and by the way, if you're on X, Victor's Victor rights. Maybe every week, every 10 days or so. Kind of a screed, a rant, a great one. And that's Dhanson is his handle there. We have the Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook. Good friends, good people. Victor, what did I want? Oh, gratitude. Just quickly, before we move on to other topics. It's interesting. I mean, you mix with all people, all things always in your life, various social institutions, etc. But ingratitude is the mark of academia.
- [43:29]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yes, that is the worst trait of all time. Yeah, I think it is ingratitude. I know it's different than loyalty, disloyalty. It's an inability to see how has helped you who a didn't need to help you and necessarily might not even have liked you, but felt the principle was important. And I was. I would say that the people I owe the most to as professors were all left wing, but they were disinterested and they were fair. And I owe so much to people like John lynch, you know, or Mary Kay Gammell or Gary Miles or all these professors I had at UC Santa Cruz who are all people of the left. But I never heard any bias from them as far as students went. They love students. They had really strict standards. That was really amazing. I mean, gosh, I turned in a paper and John lynch once wrote and said, if you don't stop splitting infinities, I'm gonna. You, Victor.
- [44:39]
Jack Fowler
So that is a conqueror. That's a conquerable habit. Splitting infinitives.
- [44:46]
Victor Davis Hanson
I know.
- [44:47]
Jack Fowler
Hey, Victor, I want to bring up this Columbia teacher, but just first you mentioned Khalil before the pinup boy. Now for the left. There's a story in today's Post that he worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the infamous UNRWA who had any number of its employees involved in the October 7th massacre of Israelis. So I don't think it's any surprise.
- [45:17]
Victor Davis Hanson
He knows what he did. He was proud of it. Anger is that somebody called him on it and Marco Rubio has been superb. Marco Rubio. He has been absolutely right. He just makes the same argument. If Mr. Khalil had been honest and when he applied for a original student visa and then a converted work visa, had he just said, given us his affiliations and what he intended to do when he got to the United States at his head, the pro Hamas apartheid divest student group that was responsible for thousands of dollars of damage and takeover. If he had just said that, we would have not, we would have not invited him. Has nothing to do with free speech. He just, if he was a guy who just was going to class, he never broke a rule. He just. And every once in a while he went to a protest on behalf of Palestine maybe, and that would. Nobody cares. But being for a pro State Department designated terrorist group and being involved in appeasing or defending people who had used violence and promoting promotion of the October 7th massacres, our Constitution, as proverbially referred to, is not a suicide pact. Because if you take the left's position, Jack, is you have to let in anybody with any views whatsoever to your country. Anybody. But we know that they don't believe that because if they were a apartheid, racist, Ku Klux Klanner version in Europe and they came, we wouldn't let them in. So the left, it's always one way with them. Always one way.
- [47:15]
Jack Fowler
Now, beneath every double standard is a single standard, as the great Joe Sobran used to say. Victor. Columbia University, which was already mentioned, that's where Khalil has done some of his agitating. There's a piece again in today's New York post, Saturday the 15th by Chris Ruffo and Hannah Grossman. I think I'm sure folks know who Chris Ruffo is. He and Hannah Grossman actually now working and writing for the Manhattan Institute, which. Victor. Victor, you're a contributing editor to their magazine City.
- [47:48]
Victor Davis Hanson
I used to write a lot. I haven't written it. I've been too busy my other obligations. But it's a wonderful venue.
- [47:55]
Jack Fowler
Oh, it's City Journal is I come. It's a quarterly and, and Brian Anderson is the editor. Brian's this loveliest man on the planet and I think he's the editor. I think he's the best magazine in America. But anyway, Chris and Hannah write a piece that the Post picks up a woke Prof. Fuels Ivy hate Race studies kook aided in campus chaos. And this race studies kook is a neuropsychologist, Jennifer J. Manley. She took part directly in these anti Israeli protests on Colombia. And she gets federal, she gets a ton of federal money for grants on. Much of her research is based on the so called Social Determinants of Health thesis which posits that racism, sexism and homophobia can cause brain disease in blacks. And I'm not going to say Latinx. Latinx communities. A thesis that critics have described as pseudoscience. So she's a. She's a pseudoscientist. She somehow or other, Victor, she got tenure at an Ivy League college.
- [49:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Ivy League schools have. They have less standards in the CSU system and they know that. And that's what my point is. They're not worth it. You shouldn't send their kid there. They'll become indoctrinated, they will not be educated, they will feel entitled and they will be exposed to some of the more obnoxious people in their entire lives they'll ever meet at the university campus. And then you know the same thing in the National Institute of Health when we talk about a 15% maximum surcharge or we talk about maybe 30% in cuts, she's the type of person we're talking about. It's not just an act of commission that she's doing these things that are self destructive. But we omit other people who have real scientific. They can't get a grant because it's this herd mentality that all of a sudden after George Floyd, if you said the word equity or diversity or inclusion or black or Chicano underserved communities, then you were going to get money for a pseudo project. But that meant that somebody who was trying to find the proper chemotherapy to treat head and neck cancer was not going to get it. So that was the problem. And that's true about everything. Every totalitarian ideology that seeks to be inclusive and holistic, that means all points of our lives, whether it's fa, you know, Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic controllers. You start to superimpose this ideology and look at everything through the lens of race, then you don't have time enough to train and you get exemptions. Exemptions, exemptions. You can't say that I miss that plane because I'm black. I can't say that I'm an underrepresented member of a gay community. I can't. You. It's just a commissar like system and there's no empirical analysis and evaluation. And it's forever. And people forget that it's not just hiring people on the basis of DEI or it's forever. That person feels like they have an exemption. And we saw what happened in the south with white supremacy. If you were white and you were accorded a certain exemption, then it didn't help you at all. You were just. It ended up in mediocrity because you didn't have to be evaluated on the same standards as other people were.
- [51:35]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor mentioned before also taxing endowments. And I'm happy to see that at my old stomping grounds. In the US National Review there was a piece by Henry Olson titled Tax the Ivies. Just read a little bit here, quickly. It's rich that so many professors at these elite institutions argue for higher taxes on the wealthy while they comfortably cash their paychecks from entities that are among the most tax protected of any in the nation. And that's why Republican tax plan should include Texas Representative Troy Nel's Endowment Tax Fairness Act. That bill would raise the marginal tax rate on investment earnings on the endowments at very wealthy colleges and universities to 21%, the same rate paid by for profit corporations. And that would raise a lot of money. The Tax foundation estimates it would raise between 70 billion and 112 billion over 10 years. What's good for the goose ought to be good for the gander. The nation needs more revenue in ways that won't harm the economy if it wants to reduce its gargantuan deficit. Taxing the left's postgraduate clerity is a great place to start. Gang alone is an interesting idea.
- [52:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
It is, it is. And I've been writing about that for a long time. Tax income on endowments. But it will also, it will also shut down a lot of these centers, the center for Diversity, Inclusion, Climate Change, all of these things that were never there 20 years ago. So people have to ask themselves if we go back in time to 1970 or 1975, just to take an example, do people really believe the people who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton in 1975, 65, 55 were less educated than their counterparts today? I think everybody admits they were far better educated. So did all of these centers and these special programs and these dash studies classes that were all political or ideological or therapeutic. Did they help? No. So if you were to cut them back by starving the beast. The universities couldn't afford them. Somebody's going to say, well, Victor, they would just cut out the Shakespeare classes and still fund them. Maybe, maybe not. Another problem is that the donors don't want the money. So they feel they're giving money to their alma mater and it's going to help the prestige of the university and enhance their own degree from it or get their name in a building. But they can't really feed this monster. They have to be much more selective. And I think you're starting to see that. Especially with Jewish American donors to the Ivy League. They're not just going to write a check anymore because they understand how it will be used.
- [54:27]
Jack Fowler
Victor, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Home Title Lock. Let me ask you folks, Dear listeners, when was the last time you checked your Home title? If you're like me, the answer is never. And that's exactly what scammers are counting on. And that's why we trust Home Title Lock. Their million dollar triple lock protection helps keep your home and equity safe. Here's what you get. Immediate 24,7 monitoring of your property, Urgent alerts if there are any changes and if fraud should happen, their US based restoration team will spend up to $1 million to fix the fraud and restore your title at no additional cost. And here's the best part. We've teamed up with Home Title Lock to give you a free title history report so you can find out if you're already a victim and access your personal title expert a250 value. Just for signing up, go to hometitlelock.com use the promo code Victor250 that's V I C T O R250 or click on the link in the description. That's hometitlelock.com promo code Victor250 to get the protection and peace of mind you deserve. And we thank the good people from Home Title Lock for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Victor, before we head into the break for the final question, I just want to note still on education front, I think I read this in Breitbart. Huge number of Chinese in US Colleges. Rep. Riley Moore, who's from, I think West Virginia, Republican West Virginia finds that there are 300,000 Chinese nationals in our university system. And one part of this article says there are 25% of New York, NYU, New York University students are Chinese national. And there is. And his point is that there are some serious national security issues at the very least related to this by the way, if they were all if there was some law passed to ban them, my gosh, that would cripple a lot of schools financially. I mean, they are counting on that money to come in.
- [56:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
Well, if 1% the FBI had said the figure, I think Christopher Wray said it was hot 1% of these Chinese nationals were actively engaged espionage, then you're talking about 3,000 students. And I've had a lot of Chinese students that have kind of admitted that when they go back to China, they're questioned no matter whether they were actually actively spying. But when you look at the Chinese military today and you look at its jets and its artillery, even its uniforms, its military academies, it's all borrowed from Western militaries. So where are they getting that expertise? They're either getting it from two places or both from people in the United States sending them materials about our munitions and our protocols military or we're just educating all of these people that go back with that expertise. It's the same thing that Japan did at the turn of the century. They sent about a quarter million Japanese students to study nautical engineering in Britain and to study land warfare originally in France. And then after that was earlier, after the Franco Prussian War in Germany. And when the Russian fleet, as we showed up in 1905, the Russian, Baltic and Pacific fleets, they were shocked that the Japanese dreadnoughts were so much superior to the Russian because they had used Japanese new expertise in mechanical engineering and fabrication and had studied at British universities and were building carriers, cruisers, destroyers that were as good or better than Western based on Western designs.
- [58:47]
Jack Fowler
Well, Victor, we are we are going to head into the home stretch here. We'll talk about one of your favorite people ever, Gavin Newsom, and we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages. We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson show. My friend there, we've recorded two shows today and unfair we've been given what he's enduring here. But Victor, let's let's close out by. I'm looking at a piece from Hot Air. The Gavin Newsom backlash is still building steam. Now, Newsom can't run for reelection as governor, but he's looking at 20, 28, right? So it's the only reason that everyone isn't talking about what a terrible week Gavin Newsom is having. This is the week that we have just passed is that people are too busy talking about what a terrible week Chuck Schumer is having. Still, almost as many Democrats seem irritated and fed up with Newsom as with Schumer the source of that irritation is Newsom's new podcast where he has so far invited as guests Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage and Steve Bannon. I wonder when he's going to ask Victor Davis Hansen to be a guest.
- [60:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on that. I noticed though he doesn't he, I mean Michael Savage is a, I like Michael Savage. I've been on his show. But he's a controversial, was a controversial talk show. Steve Bannon is, you know, an ultra maga who's at war with many of the Trump musk wing of the MAGA movement. And Charlie Cook is a great guy, but he's a, you know, he's a very, very conservative activist. But what I'm getting at is he's not asking some conservative authors why doesn't he have Larry Orange on there, for example, is an example, or Shelby Steele or somebody like that. And I think he's talking about operational or transactional politics, not, not the philosophy behind what is destroying the state. And well, I listened to some of them. But what I'm getting at is I didn't get these types of questions. Question 1 Gavin, the merit the California people approved a 7.5 billion dollar bond. Three to four billion of it was to build three huge reservoirs. You did not build them at the sites site in the Sacramento river, the Los Banos Grande site, nor the Temperance Flat. But you did use a quarter million dollars to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. Why did you do that when they were providing clean energy, flood control, recreation and irrigation. Question 2. Jerry Brown gave us high speed rail. But what is your plan from the Bakersfield to Merced 170 mile road to no and it's cost probably 15 to 20 billion dollars. It will lose a billion dollars a year. What is the ultimate 700 miles still? Is it 300, 400 billion dollars? What are you propose we do that at the time you're doing this? The 99 lateral, the 101 lateral and the i5 lateral are all in many places just two lanes in either direction. They are some of the most dangerous highways in the United States. In addition to that, parallel to the high speed rail, there is a Santa Fe Amtrak line that in many places only has one track. Why don't you use that money to make three six lane modern freeways north and south or fix the Amtrak so that trains can go on the entire distance in both directions? Gavin, your plan to deal with a half million homeless people. Gavin, you're $3.4 billion short on Medi Cal? Why are you allotting money year after year for people who are here illegally? Do you know that that shortens community tax paying citizens of California? Gavin, can I ask you another question? Gavin, why do we have the highest income taxes at 13.3% and we're rated almost in the bottom 5% of high school and grammar school test scores? Gavin, why are one third of all welfare recipients living in your state? Gavin, why is the. Those below the poverty level are 20% of the population? Gavin, why are 20% of PG&E power users the largest utility in California not paying their bills? Why are those bills 80% higher than most states? Just ask these questions and don't let him just say, well, I think transgender biological males are wrong in women's sports. Okay, what are you going to do about it? Why is your state resisting the ncaa? And the answer is he's not going to do anything about it because he's a captive of an insane legislature that is a result of, on the one hand, dei, people who say they're dei, and the other is wealthy left wing people from San Diego to Berkeley who are fueled by an economy that's medieval based on 9 trillion and Silicon Valley, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc. Navidia. That's where the money comes from. And it's a medieval state. It looks great when you go to Palo Alto. Boy, I mean, that doesn't even look great in Palo Alto. Go. If you go to Los Altos or walk through Menlo park, it still looks pretty good. You come down here to Fowler, Sanger, Fresno, Stockton, Delano. It's a different world. Especially out in the country outside the cities. That's the real California.
- [65:23]
Jack Fowler
Well, you just riffed off a column there, Victor.
- [65:26]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've written too many of them. Yeah, nothing changes because.
- [65:31]
Jack Fowler
Right.
- [65:33]
Victor Davis Hanson
The people vote for these people and they're going to have something in store because the EPA under Lee Zeldin's done a heroic job in clearing the mess out of Pacific Palisades, but they're going to. And then they can talk all they want about waiving Coastal Commission requirements and all that, but they're going to deal with the people they voted in and they have an agenda. And that's. Let's remake this exclusive, largely white and Asian enclave into a community for the people with high rises and bus services and no parking, etc. That's what they. They're going to dream of you Wait.
- [66:15]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, they like making 7, 10 story ghettos. It's part of the left People who.
- [66:23]
Victor Davis Hanson
Like that, remember, are the people who are living in $50 million homes and on the beach about five miles away.
- [66:31]
Jack Fowler
Well, you know, Victor, we, as we conclude here, we have lots of listeners who catch this on Apple. They can rate the show zero to five stars and practically everyone gives you five stars. And leave comments. We read them. People leave comments. Now on Rumble, where we're now appearing. I've got two. One is from interosseter who writes, I love seeing BDH on Rumble. I also love seeing him smile on the show.
- [67:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
Makes me a lot more into his stupid flu.
- [67:06]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, well, it makes me feel like things are going in the right direction. So to remind Eeyore of that. And then there's other interesting Comment by dovey12dovi812 hey, Victor, you mentioned we needed a sheriff to run for governor. You did that A couple of years. Have you heard of Chad Bianco? He's in the race. So I looked up a little. Chad Bianco has announced. He is a LA county sheriff, Riverside County.
- [67:36]
Victor Davis Hanson
Riverside, yeah, I have heard of him.
- [67:38]
Jack Fowler
Yeah, he announced on February 17th he's a Republican. So maybe the cavalry's coming or the sheriff.
- [67:47]
Victor Davis Hanson
Anyway, it's. We need something. We need something so desperately. I see that. I see things. I was driving to town the other day. I see things. I'll just give you before we leave a little synopsis of my drive into town. I won't mention the town. I go into mail, letters at the post office box. I'm. A bicycle is coming the other direction toward me and I, I don't know what, why he would want to stop at the mail in the alleyway, you know, you put. And now they become theft proof so that people can't put the little hangers down in, you know, and pull with gum and pull out letters they had been doing. I had lost a lot of letters that way.
- [68:38]
Jack Fowler
Fishing? Yeah.
- [68:39]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, absolutely. And this guy comes toward me and he has a gold skull mask on, he has long hair and he's riding his bike and it was between a storm and I thought, you know what? I know you're sick, but you're not hallucinating. So he stops and I roll down the window, the other window, and I said, could I help you? But he had a skull. He was a skull riding. So then I get back in and I drive.
- [69:11]
Jack Fowler
He didn't say. He didn't say anything to you?
- [69:14]
Victor Davis Hanson
No, he just stopped. Okay, well, should I stay here and see if he's curious about the five bills I just paid or not and then I go over to a bank, I won't mention the bank, and of course the ATM doesn't work. And then I do the drive in and that is out. So then I think, well, I got to go pick up some groceries. So I go to get my cart that's outside the grocery store and I noticed the first six have napkins, wipe, shopping literature in it, newspapers, debris. Yeah, debris. So I pull out six of them and then I get another one. And then I go in and everybody's. It's very, you know, I'm there and then I get in line and the person ahead of me has everything separated like little separations, like beer here, candy here, and then these are like $20, $30, $40. And then the big huge cart comes. And then it's exasperation that the first two EBT cards are not working, of course. And so I'm waiting, waiting. And then when you're in a world like that, you want to be hyper legal. So I was parked way away from all this. I always park away because I'm. About six months ago I was there and a person who looked like they had a nice car came in and another person claimed that they had hit them and was, you know what I mean, that, that scam and wanted money from this other person. So I just parked my car, which is not the nicest car by any means. So I just park it way distant. So anyway, and I always park my, my laundry, I mean my shopping cart, I take it all the way back and put it in where it's supposed to be. And the poor person was there. He was so nice. He said, thank you so much, I wish everybody did this. But the final thing I said is that when you check out, the checker walks behind the counter with a little code gun and reads the barcode on your shopping cart because I guess you have used a credit card when you paid so they know who you are. And then that barcode is. So then when I drive through the country home, my two mile, I see their carts on the side of the road in a ditch. And so they're trying to stop the theft, but they have to, to record every single one. And then as I was driving this way yesterday, along I won't name the avenue, I noticed this car. I'm going about 45, 50, and there's a car going about 10 miles an hour, about a mile ahead of me. And then it pulls over. So I slowed down and the person is opening the trunk and that means he's going to Unload all of these, you know, trash. But then I slowed down, you know and didn't get next to him parallel. So then he walks out and looks around and then he closes his trunk because I had my phone, I was going to take a picture of his license plate and then he put putz on. And I at that point as I did my duty but as I turned left on my street I looked down the and he was pulled over again. That was just like a typical 20 minute, 30 minute odyssey. I felt like I was dealing with a Lystragonian Cyclops Circe Calypso trying to get home. I really did.
- [73:08]
Jack Fowler
And another day in California.
- [73:10]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, that is California now.
- [73:13]
Jack Fowler
I thought it was where bowers and flowers bloom in the spring.
- [73:16]
Victor Davis Hanson
It's California now. And I really feel for. There was a guy there who, a Mexican American guy who works for a farmer I know he's a genius. He can, he can put a conduit under 50ft of asphalt with a, you know, he knows how to take pipe sections and put water hydraulic and drill a hole right through and thread. It's amazing. And he came up to me and we were talking about everything and how hard it was to farm in California and everything. And people, they all know it's not working. They all know it's completely dysfunctional, dangerous society. And I won't mention one last thing is there's a very famous medical center in California. Not here, but it's one of the most famous. And I had a relative, a former relative son in law went in for a routine procedure sciatica and died in the recovery room. I had another friend from high school who went six months earlier for a heart valve. The surgery was successful. Came back the next day and didn't wake up. I had another person say they just had a medical procedure there. It was the same thing. And what I'm getting at is that when you have. When your educational system is 45th in the nation and your UC and CSU systems have been non merocratic and you have been admitting people at your stellar universities not on meritocratic criteria for a number of years and you are running a huge deficit and 77 billion to start this year, you're starting to see the breakdown of an inherited society which the present generation is not able to sustain. And that can be roads, high speed rail reservoirs, the California Water Project, crime, homelessness, routine petty theft. Oh, by the way, one last thing. I'll shut up. That same place where I went to get food, I was checking out and all Of a sudden, this guy, they have a security area, you know, where you watch the customers, the guys in there with. With TVs and stuff. And all of a sudden this guy is very strange looking ahead of me. Right. And he's got a kind of a trench coat and everything. And this guy bounds out of the security thing and grabs him by the neck.
- [76:09]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [76:09]
Victor Davis Hanson
I thought, wow, this is just some kind of gang fight or something. But the security guy was really good. And he said, empty it.
- [76:16]
Jack Fowler
Yeah. Oh, he had 20 states.
- [76:19]
Victor Davis Hanson
I mean, you should have seen what came out. I mean, there was. There was everything that came out of his coat and pockets. And then he grabbed him by the neck and he said. I said something to the effect, are you going to arrest him? And the checker was watching. He said, no. They just. So he escorted him out. And then the guy wouldn't leave and he started. So he got pretty rough with him and he said, get out of here. And I guess they didn't get the message that it's no longer legal to steal $950.
- [76:49]
Jack Fowler
Right? Yeah.
- [76:51]
Victor Davis Hanson
Merchandise. We repealed that. I thought we did, but that's just a day in the life of stuff. And it's that way. It wasn't like that 40 years ago. 30 years ago.
- [77:00]
Jack Fowler
Sounds like you need. Who's the sheriff from Walking Tall? Bradford Pusser Piercer.
- [77:07]
Victor Davis Hanson
Ideology. It's a nihilist ideology. It destroys everything it touches.
- [77:12]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [77:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
And then the worst thing about all this is that then you go to the university and you read things written and the. The generations that created the state. Multiracial generations who did A one. They built this wonderful airports, freeways, California water. Glen Dunke and the tripartite UC CSU community college plan made the desert bloom.
- [77:40]
Jack Fowler
Yeah.
- [77:41]
Victor Davis Hanson
They did everything. And they were such great people. And all you hear is denigration and that they were polluters. And they were. And they destroy their dams, they destroy their aqueducts. They just. They can't. And yet those people had more intelligence and competence in their little finger than all the Gavin Newsoms in the world.
- [78:02]
Jack Fowler
Well, again, ingratitude.
- [78:03]
Victor Davis Hanson
Child of privilege. Child of privilege. Inherited privilege. Smug boutique left wing politics. Never, Never. Subject to the consequences of his own ideology.
- [78:17]
Jack Fowler
In gratitude, Victor. In gratitude. Hey, I just need to mention I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the center for Civil Society, and it comes out every Friday and it has 14 recommended readings. I know you're going to like it. Go to civil thoughts.com sign up. We're not selling your name. It's not Nothing transactional about it. I really do believe you will enjoy it. Thanks for those who do subscribe and and who write me and thanks everyone who took the time to leave comments Victor's website Rumble Apple, wherever. Victor, you've been terrific. You're indestructible. Keep being indestructible.
- [79:00]
Victor Davis Hanson
I am not indestructible. You.
- [79:03]
Jack Fowler
Well, we. We will all to dust.
- [79:06]
Victor Davis Hanson
You shall enter hours I go on Mr. Toad's great adventure.
- [79:10]
Jack Fowler
Well, yeah. The wild ride again.
- [79:13]
Victor Davis Hanson
I've noticed that one thing happens when you've had the flu and you're trying to get over it. I'm not infectious any, but when I've done this before, one or two things happens. Either you see a different climate that's warmer and you force yourself to think you're perfectly and you get well or you get run down and you get stranded somewhere worse. But you have to have an upbeat, optimistic point of view.
- [79:40]
Jack Fowler
I hope you're playing lands where it's supposed to. You're not rerouted to Gary, Indiana or St. Louis or some happened to me places a lot.
- [79:49]
Victor Davis Hanson
Yeah, or catches fire at the dock.
- [79:51]
Jack Fowler
Like the one in oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, safe travels St. Christopher to go with Victor. Thanks everyone for listening and we will back be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show. Bye bye.
- [80:04]
Victor Davis Hanson
Thank you everybody.
- [80:08]
Unknown Speaker (Advertiser)
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