Farms, Universities and Businessmen

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no missed customers. Hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler.
You are here to hear from the star and namesake, Victor Davis Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marsha Buskey Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.
VictorHanson.com is the address. You should go there regularly, and you should even be subscribing.
Later on, I'll tell you why. We are recording on Saturday, the 11th of January.
This particular episode should be up on Thursday, the 16th. Victor and I have talked in our recent episode, and he did talk with the great Sammy Wink prior to that, about the terrible fires in in southern california and the knuckleheads and malicious people whose policies

and inactions have brought that all about. I did want to talk about one or two other things related to that.
And then we have so much about corporate DEI, Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe if we even have, Oh, red state of Ohio, letting their universities just be the epicenters, if you will. So it's so much to talk about.
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We're on Rumble now, by the way. These podcasts, which come from JustTheNews.com, John Solomon's website.
We also now record them, video record them, and I think folks may be enjoying that. Some folks are asking questions about Victor's hat I know Carruthers oh this is Carruthers pump it's I have a bunch of people come up and give me hats all the time uh and they're all lots this is from a very good local irrigation and then I have another one from Gartutellian they're another irrigation company and then i have one from uh compost farms firman compost's farm so i have a lot of them i don't i just wear them i must have 20 of them i just put them on before i come on you know i'm very i'm out of the so-called annex the former manger or barn manger that I grew up in that's now an annex, I call it.
And it's cold. It's been very cold here.
So my skeletor head gets cold. Well, you're also wearing a Hoover jacket.
Yes, I am. And I get this free every year if you're a Hoover fellow and you teach.
We bring in people. It's a wonderful program developed by, I'm glad you asked me about, Scott Atlas, you all know, the czar to Trump on COVID, and then Josh Rao.
And they created this program to bring in undergraduates from all over the country. And they call it boot camp.
And then they're there for about a week. And they get a different view on economics, politics, strategy, history from Hoover Fellows.
And they don't just self-select conservative students. The point is to give a different view to liberal students as well.
So I'm wearing, I have about five of these that I get, and I don't try to wear them in public where I live. Okay.
Because if you wear something that has Stanford on it, somebody will come up to you and say oh you think you're better than everybody huh well on our last recording Victor you were talking about the the idea with that Donald Trump who's being given as we speak the middle finger by the state the legislature uh that he has the of course know-it-all when it comes to construction. Why not ask him, cooperate with him? And he has some, essentially a czar, to help with the cleanup and rebuild of the devastation there.
And it reminded me, while we were talking, I didn't bring it up in the episode, but that the place you work, the Hoover Institution, is named for a man, Herbert Hoover, former president, who was such a person who took on calamity. And actually, there are hundreds of millions of people.
I can't imagine there's someone who has more consequence for people living today than Herbert Hoover. He's a wonderful person.
He was most famous for World War I relief. And I think he was FDR's, I mean, excuse me, Calvin Coolidge's Secretary of Commerce.
He was Commerce Secretary. And he did such a wonderful, he was considered a boy wonder in the 20s.
He went over to Europe. He came up, he was impoverished.
He was an orphan. He was the first student to graduate from Stanford University.
And he married a very brilliant woman. Some of you know his great-granddaughter, Margaret Hoover, who was on Fox and also has the PBS, not PBS, but Firing Line.
It's PBS. But Lou Henry Hoover, of which we used to have a building named at Hoover, translated a lot of Latin text of metallurgy.
And she was quite gifted. But he had nothing.
And he went to Mexico and all over the world as an engineer and geologist, geological engineer. And he made a lot of money.
And then he, at a very young age, volunteered to go over to Europe. And he did two things.
He saved millions of people by organizing food relief in the famine that happened after the Versailles Treaty. And then while he was there, of course, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred, and tens of thousands of so-called white Russians, no, that does not refer to their race.
It refers to their royalist or czarist allegiances. They used white instead of red, communists.
Well, they were fleeing, and many

of them were fleeing from records of czarist Russia. And so he started the Hoover Archives, and then that created a tradition of collecting their papers after World War I.
And then communist

defectors

people who rejected

communists One. And then communist defectors, people who rejected communist social nets.
As they came from Russia, they went to Hoover and donated. Now we've got – I'm on the 11th floor of the tower, but I think it's floors four to ten are just solid archives.
it's the greatest in America, the greatest archival depository of papers about the transition from czarism to communism and later communism. Especially World War II.
When I did the Second World War, it's got a lot of information there. And Herbert Hoover was a wonderful person.

There are great people, great men out there that can take on great tasks. I have a lot of colleagues.
I mean, you have people like John Cogan, John Taylor, John Cochran, Michael Boskin, Josh Rao, who are expert economists that could really offer their services. There are people in education, in political science, and in—Leo Hanian, you know him.
Oh, sure, yeah. He's wonderful.
And people like that that study California's problem and would be—but the left doesn't draw on the Hoover Institution. Well, let's talk a little more about California, Victor.
And then, gosh, we have Joe Biden with, as he's heading out the exits, giving Trump and America the middle finger on immigration. But first, I saw this very interesting headline.
It's in the news. Of course, that relates to water and fire in California.
And it's from the Daily Mail, the pistachio billionaires who guzzle more water than all of fire ravaged Los Angeles, the Resnicks. Victor, any thoughts about this? Is there some there there? They seem to be part of the Democratic establishment.
Well, they own something. It was started as Paramount Farms in the early 80s.
They're not farmers. They weren't originally.
They're very wealthy Beverly Hills investors, he and his wife. They bought Fiji water, you know, and they decided to invest heavily in the west side of California, not where I am, the east side.
Well, there is no water table to speak of. It's down 500, 600, 1,000, and it depends on this water transfer from the aqueduct.
And the long and the short of it is they were very visionary in the sense that they understood the land is worthless unless you have federal water and that federal water in the aqueduct coming from Northern California for agricultural purposes was designed around 1960s and 70s when California was about 15 million people. and as the years grew, San Jose started taking water out of the aqueduct.
San Luis Obispo did, Santa Barbara did, and there was less and less water for farming. And that coincided with not annual row cropping, whether it's cotton or tomatoes or row crops, but people started in the almond boom of the 90s,

started to plant permanent crops.

And that was very important because,

not because as alleged almonds take all this water.

They take about three acre feet.

So does cotton, so does grapes, so does tomato. But the difference was they were permanent crops

with maybe 15 to 20,000 an acre in investment. So if you cut off the water, as they periodically did during droughts, you didn't just lose that year's, you know, cotton crop.
You lost the tree, the investment, and everything. So they began to understand that, and they began not just to buy land, but you can buy water rights.
In other words, the acre feet on an open market, water district to water district trades water. Some water districts have more, and they have less demand.
Some have more demand and less water rights. It's all about the water right you have that's gifted in or written in.
Sometimes it's early 19th, but it's mostly after the Central Valley Project was started. And so they own their water rights, and they began to plant heavily in almonds and pistachios.
And those became, in 2014, the price of almonds had gone from $1.50 all the way up to $4.40 a pound. And the break-even was $2.
So you were making $2.50 a pound, and the production had gone from $2,000 an acre to up to $3,000. So think about it.
You get a 3,000 pounds per acre, and you're netting after all your expenses, say $2 a pound is 6,000 an acre in profit and you have 100,000 acres. So you're making 100,000 an acre, you're making 100 million.
so $600 million in profits if you own 100,000 acres

which they do or you're making $100 million, so $600 million in profits.

If you own 100,000 acres, which they do, I think they're up to about 120,000.

I think they're second only to J.G. Boswell,

but somebody's going to call and say you're wrong or you're right or something.

Boswell is very big in the Tulare Lake Basin.

But the difference is, this is what I'm trying to get at,

the difference why people talk about Paramount Farms, and now it's called, I think, the Wonderful Company, is that of all the Westside agribusiness barons, there's all these third and fourth generation names. You know John Harris, for example, wonderful man, wonderful company, large but not nearly that large, but a philanthropist for 50 years.
And his dear wife Carol just passed away, one of my favorite people in the world. She was a wonderful person.
But people like the Harris family or the Campos family, you know Tony Campos. and a number of them, they used to be, you know, the Peck family or Russell Giffen, Boswell Salyer.
But these were old names. But Resnick was not.
He was an urban person who came in and used off-farm capital to buy farmland at the perfect time, right before they cut off the water. And he bought water rights as well as planted nut trees and pistachios now and commons.
Well, they're not good right now, but until five years ago, as I said, he made billions of dollars out of this. The other difference was not just that he was a newcomer, he was not a San Juan.
He never lived where he farmed. A lot of these guys either live in Fresno or they live out there, but he lived in Beverly Hills, I guess.
The other difference was he was on the political left. These guys were pretty conservative.
I have to be very careful because I'm not trying to disparage anybody.

But for there was a time that anywhere I was asked to speak on agricultural matters between Bakersfield and Fresno, I still am.

Whether it was on water policy or democratic politics and cutting off water or I appeared with Devin Nunes a couple of, or on farming, there was always a Resnick representative in the audience. And they always, I felt, asked hostile questions.
And so I don't have any innate dislike of them. They're the biggest nut grower in the world, the biggest almond

grower in the world. They have a million square foot almond processing plant.
They have absorbed, I think it's a pomegranate juice. They have Fiji water.
And they're a big stalwart of the Los angeles democratic donor class But if you Google Resnick or Paramount Farms are wonderful, you will see all of these left-wing attacks on them because they have control of what you're referencing. Millions of acres.
They have as much right to water as, say, two or three million people in Los Angeles do. That is a little bit misleading, though, and unfair to them because the land itself, the water they have originally is based on the acreage they have.
So they're allowed to sell it, but if they sell it, they won't be able to farm, is what I'm saying. And so the land and the water outlast all of us.
If you believe that it's in California's interest to be the world's leader in pistachios and almonds, both domestic and exporting, and that those are very healthy crops. In the case of almonds,

you can have milk and butter and oil, almost anything, and to a lesser degree pistachios. Then it's good to have that type of industry in California, and the industry comes with rights to grow it out of the aqueduct, and therefore they were the most astute in buying excess water for farming, and now they have banked it.
But I'm not sure that there's just anybody for non-agricultural purposes. They may be, but I'm not aware of it.
Well, there's water to be had in other ways, and the taxpayers prove money to build reservoirs, etc. So I don't know whether these folks are left or not.
We wouldn't have any of these discussions. As I said, they had just built the Temperance Flat and the sites in the Los Banos Grandes Reservoir and gave us 5 million acre feet.
It's all been funded.

They've all done the environmental studies. It's not high Sierra.
It's kind of scrubbed low land, you know, 500 to 1,000 feet, maybe even less. It could be easily done.
You could easily expand Millerton Lake and do it. You could do the sites reservoir.
You could get another San Luis Reservoir right down the aqueduct from it.

Just requires skill, the imagination. The only thing I'd like to say, and this applies to California, but I am starting to worry that even if we had the will, we don't have the expertise.
And by that I mean our schools of engineering and the people that are admitted. I'm not sure they're admitted on always meritocratic grounds.
I think the curriculum of DEI has permeated the sciences now. And I think people are evaluated on criteria other than engineering.
And I think when you're hired and you're an engineer, there are criteria that are not meritocratic that govern your tenure and your advancement and promotions. And I think they're also just so dependent on computers that somebody else has done that they don't have the skill.
They don't have the skill to do the engineering to craft such a sophisticated water system. It's kind of like medicine, too.
I'm not sure that some of our new doctors have the skill of the old people. Yeah.
We don't want brain surgery at all, but we certainly don't want it 10 years from now. We haven't been able to go to the moon.
I guess we decided it wasn't worth but i'm not sure if we if something happened to elon musk i don't think we could go back to the moon i don't think nasa could do it well victor we're going to talk about uh joey biden but first i want to take a moment for our sponsor open phone open phone is the number one business phone system they'll help you separate your personal life from your growing business for just $15 a month. The cost of a few coffees, or may just be the cost of one coffee in New York City, you get complete transparency and visibility into everything happening with your business phone system.
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Victor, a little more me talking, which I know is like fingernails on a blackboard for some listeners but somebody what are you gonna do here's a headline from politico biden extends temporary status of nearly one million immigrants ahead of trump deportations the biden administration announced friday that would be january 10th it would extend temporary deportation relief to nearly one million people from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela just days before Donald Trump enters the White House with a vow to restrict the program. Victor this is a big big middle finger your thoughts.
Well he's trying to destroy the plan of Donald Trump oil and gas by putting the largest acreage in history in one fell swoop off the development of rare earth minerals, which are valuable for our electric vehicle industry, for oil, for gas. I thought he liked Europe.
He's tried to stop the liquid natural gas terminal. I thought he really liked Europe and he would like to help them.
But he's making it very hard to develop more natural gas and then to liquefy it and ship it to Europe. He doesn't want that.
When these presidents do that, nobody's ever done it quite like he has. Why didn't they just do it when they were president? So the natural assumption, the logic is they didn't do it because the people didn't want it and they wouldn't get elected.
Or if they were a one-term president and their second one term left to go, they didn't do it because they thought that it would create a backlash where they would either lose

the midterms in the second term or they would lose their chosen candidate to follow would lose. But he doesn't care and he's out.
So his whole idea is I cannot stand Donald Trump and I hate Donald Trump more than I like the American people. So I'm going to sell

off the wall. That'll screw him.
Let in more illegal aliens. I'm going to put people who already have been adjudicated, they should be deported.
I'm going to stay that deportion. That'll kind of like throw sand in the gears.
That'll take him another six months to unravel. I'll put all this land off.
That'll take more time for him to go to court. All my liberal appointees will sandbag him in the

judiciary. I'll sell

off all the wall. That'll take more time for him to go to court.
All my liberal appointees will sandbag him in the judiciary. I'll sell off all the wall.
That means he'll have to buy it at three times, four times the price given inflation. And we can then get my left-wing media to show how expensive and wasteful it is.
So that's how it's, and we've got a pardon. Now I pardoned 1,500 people.
A lot of them are killers. Maybe some of them will have crime during his tenure, and it will embarrass him.
I've got a lot of people off death row. I pardoned Hunter.
And I will guarantee you, Jack, there are more pardons to come. And he didn't rule that out.
He was asked that the other day, and he wouldn't rule it out. But just ask yourself this, if you were Liz Cheney right now, and you had been appointed to a special select committee on January 6th, and usually you would have one less member than the Democrats, and they had deliberately, for the first time in the history of the House of Representatives, denied the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, at this point, representation, partly because Liz Cheney was the consultant as a senior Republican with Benny Thompson.
And you only had two people, she and Kinsinger. And they were there

as they had voted to vote, just voted to impeach Trump, and they had no political futures. And they knew that a lot of the records that they acquired, the phone records, the interviews, the tapes, the videos, the transcripts were very embarrassing and were not used in the investigations because some people testified in a way that confounded their intent that they would testify.
And that stuff is reportedly missing right now. or if you were Liz Cheney and you did call up Cassie Hutchinson and you did try to coach her testimonies in a way that her lawyer would not have allowed had he known that you were stealthily contacting her, and that could in theory theory, be used by your opponents to suggest you

were witness tampering, I think you would want a pardon. I really do.
And if you were Jim Biden, or Joe Biden's sister, or Joe Biden's niece, and for these years, that $20 million was not all swallowed up by Joe Biden. It was dispersed to grandkids, to all of them, Ashley Biden.
And therefore, they were either in a conspiracy or racketeering, a federal prosecutor might suggest, to hide the nature of that income and not to pay federal income tax on it. Because to declare it would mean it existed.
And we saw that with Hunter. They got Hunter on the floor originally, and they got him on the tax, and they were going to let him go, but they still had the tax that he was pardoned for.
He'd be in jail. So I think they're going to want pardons for them.
Whether Joe Biden himself would want a pardon, I don't know. But he has criminal culpability, too.
And what's ironic about all of this, he is setting the stage for himself. So if you're a local or state prosecutor, and you've seen what local or state prosecutors have done to Donald Trump, and Joe Biden leaves office, and he has been arrogant, trying to destroy Trump, and you're a Trump partisan, there might be some people who would, what, say tit for tat and wage lawfare against Joe Biden.
Not that they would necessarily win, given Supreme Court rules and etc.,

but Joe Biden's going to be a private citizen.

He's not going to be running for office.

And he's got a lot of, I think, criminal exposure.

And he's going to be 83 years old.

And does he really want to spend the next four or five years

spending his ill-gotten millions of dollars from China in legal fees like Trump had to do? So I think there will be people around him, if not him himself. The other thing I think is he's worried about, and this came up during that reckless period of Joe's first year where Hunter's lawyers, when they cut the sweetheart deal, got it in part by threatening to call Joe Biden, the president, to testify and to put him on the spot to either lie under oath for his son or not to testify.
And then there was the paint with your nose and blow the paint on the canvas and sell it to... He was acting in such a reckless manner.
It was almost broadcasting, as I said earlier. I am reckless.
I was the bag man. I took all the blame for the family consortia.
You all made fun of me. You all got a good laugh about me being naked and showing my genitals on the laptop.
You all got all my discussions of sex. We get that.
But you took the money from my dirty hands and you think you're all going to be better than I am. And that's in the laptop, that attitude when he says, I pay dad's power, you know, Mr.
Big Guy and 10% and nobody always doesn't appreciate what I'm doing. So I think there's a sense there that when Joe Biden has to be very careful that if he comes out of office and prosecutors look at some of this stuff, he might just want to pardon people around him, the family.
So I think there'll be pardons for the family, at least some members.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we'll take a little change of direction here.

We'll talk about DEI and whatever, some other corporate activism, corporate ideology.

We'll do all that when we come back from these important messages. We'll be back to our show in just a moment, but first an important message for anyone concerned about their financial future.
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We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on January 11th, Saturday. This episode is up on Thursday the 16th.
A lot of stuff may have happened in the intervening period victor i forget when

biden's giving his farewell address maybe that will have happened between these dates of course you'll cover it with the great sammy wink may be sponsored by jello i i understand uh victor has a website the blade of perseus you should check it out folks and you You should more than do more than that.

You should subscribe.

Excuse me, Victor's, you'll find his weekly essays for American Greatness, a syndicated column, archives of these podcasts, Victor's other appearances, Victor's books. Some of Victor's just, I don't know, he's a kaleidoscope of just so much activity.
It's

mind-boggling, but he does write two pieces a week for The Blade of Perseus. Their ultra articles

are exclusive to the website. He also does a video every week, so if you would like to be part of

that, do. It's five bucks a month, $50 for the year discounted.
That's thebladeofperseusvictorhanson.com. Victor, I'll put these both together.
Here's a headline, Meta, which is the old Facebook, an Amazon ditch, ditch DEI programs as tech giants move away from quote-unquote woke agenda. And then, kind of related, BlackRock, which I think has more money than any other entity in the world, BlackRock exits climate activist group after pressure from Republicans.
BlackRock was being tormented, rightly so, I think, by 11 Republican state attorneys.

General BlackRock, Victor, as far as I could, in my opinion, was it was trying to blackmail the rest of the corporate community into following the green agenda. I think they're going to have some legal exposure because when you give your money to an investment concern, there's all sorts of statutes and that their purpose is to try to return a reasonable profit on your money.
But if they're using their money for their own social welfare agenda, whether it's green or DEI or whatever, and the return is not what others have been getting. And in the case of BlackRock, it hasn't.
But more importantly, in a way to mask their lack of competitiveness, they are trying to push through contributions or pressures on legislature, legislators, federal and state, to require other people to be as incompetent as you are with mandates about investment, then yeah, then it seems to me that racketeering or conspiracy, they're going to be looking at it. The whole thing about the whole DI and DSG and all that stuff, it's a race now because now everybody's liberated because of what you see every single day, whether it's a police chief in New Orleans or you see the DEI crap and what happens.
They see the real results of DEI. And then they saw it, you know, you saw Mr.
Mayorkas, They saw Mr. Buttigieg.
They looked at that cabinet. They were all incompetent, every single one of them.
The energy secretary, what's her, Jennifer Graham. She didn't even know how many barrels of oil we pumped.
They were put there for their race and gender. And so there's this anger now at it.
There's another thing that's going on, that the upper middle class Asian and white communities that are highly educated professionals and who are left-wing liberals, they have been sending their kids to get branded with these names, Harvard, Sanford, Yale, Duke, da-da samperdale and they have not been getting in under repertory admissions there's not enough room for you to get your kid into stanford when they're taking nine percent of white males as they had been doing so you get angry you and there i talked to some of you it's that if i could sum up their attitude it's i am so liberal, and I've supported all these DEI, and then they DEI me, me of all people, me, my children. I did not have a child to be on the altar of DEI.
That's not going to be sacrificed. And they're starting to turn off.
So now it's just a race. And DEI, and you look at the salaries they've gotten, so it's now merged with a lot of scandalous questions.
One of them is the rate of tuition increases has accelerated higher than the rate of inflation. And when Stanford has 15,000 staffers and 16,000 students, graduate and undergraduate, people start looking at this administrative bloat.
And so far, they can't talk about it because a lot of it is DEI. Hundreds of these people who, as I said, they're not just expensive, they retard efficiency by putting their everybody's syllabus or research or hiring or promotion.
So it's a race now. And the race is between people who say, you've got to stop this.
It's destroying the country. It's creating cynicism.
It's destroying meritocracy. It's racist.
We're a multiracial society. You cannot possibly favor this group, that group against each other versus, you're a racist.
You're a racist. You're a racist, you're homophobic, you're sexist.
The old fallback is a monology argument to intimidate people. So as I said earlier with Karen Bass, as soon as there was a member of Congress, so this is directed to her because she's a proud black woman.
I don't think that that argument is going to prevail,

that the majority has now seen so many problems with DEI and suffered directly from it that they have no constituency. And you know what the irony is? It's going to be the best thing for the beneficiaries of the program.
I mean, it won't be for the careerist and the untalented. But for people who are really skilled, who made it entirely of merit and are brilliant legislators, and I'm thinking of people like Byron Donalds, you know, of Florida, or an actor like Denzel Washington.
For people like, I think Clarence Thomas is a great judge. I really do.
and for people like that, it's wonderful because then it takes away any suggestion that their race mattered when it really didn't because they were as good or superior to people of other races and genders. So I think it'll restore the idea that whoever is occupying a position made it on merit.
And you won't have that tinge. I mean, I read Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis.
Christopher Hitchens, the late Christopher Hitchens, said, Victor, I'm going to write a column about that, and I have a copy. I'm going to send it online, and it's written in a language other than English.
So you're a philologist, and you know Greek and Latin come back and see if you any of your

classical or modern languages you could decipher and I read it and it was all about forming communities of resistance and support among alumni to help black students at Princeton and it was just incomprehensible the vocabulary the syntax it was just And so I don't think that anybody who wrote that under normal circumstances would have been admitted to Princeton. I don't think Claudine Gay, given her plagiarism, would have been admitted.
I don't think anybody in their right mind in the Democratic Party would have picked Kamala Harris, who was a plagiarist. We forget that, Jack.
She was a plagiarist. She plagiarized.

I don't think anybody would have picked her if Joe Biden terrified after George Floyd when their usual suspect, Representative Claiborne, threatened, you know, after George Floyd, we want this and this and this if you want our support in the primary.

He promised to pick a black woman.

And then he found out it was basically Karen Bass.

I'm serious.

Karen Bass, he considered.

Or Kamala Harris.

That's a toss-up, actually.

Actually, Marxist, though she is incompetent, Stacey Abram.

Yeah, right.

The election denial is param. Yeah, right.
The election denial is par excellence.

Yeah, yeah.

So I hope it dies for everybody's sake.

We're a very dynamic society, and there's 335 million of us, and there's about 50 million that are the smartest, most capable people in the world.

I'm not one of them. But 50 million I see.
These are scientists, doctors, and they are the size

of a major European country. Geniuses.
And these people keep us competitive. And the other thing

is I'm against illegal immigration. I have big problems with H1 visas.
But when you

Thank you. People keep us competitive.
And the other thing is I'm against illegal immigration. I have big problems with H-1 visas.
But when you start to get the top people like Elon Musk, I spent this whole week interviewing junior fellows for where I work at Hoover. These are people who were offered five or ten years.
You know what I've discovered after looking over 900 applications?

What? The United States is draining the talent of Europe at the very high levels. I have been looking at the files and interviewing people in artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, sophisticated history, national security, education.
I would say 50 to 60 percent of the people that I look at are all from Europe. In other words, they're people that were trained in Europe, Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Munich, Sorbonne, the top of the top.
They feel that there's no chance for advancement or enrichment or upward mobility in these socialist stagnant failing states. So they've come over here for a postdoc at Harvard, Stanford, John Hopkins, something, and now they want to stay here and they're applying for these jobs.
And they are as good or better than are Americans. I would say not better, but as good.
But my point is the Americans that are in this pool are brilliant. And when I talk, when I've been interviewing these historians about to see people, we had, I just interviewed a person, he has 10 languages, 10.
Another person from Germany, fluent in French, fluent in German, fluent in English, fluent in Russian, and then a very sophisticated analysis of grain markets. It was just brilliant is what I'm saying.
So we are a very dynamic society. And as long as we get meritocracy and people know that there's not going to be a Gavin Newsom over your shoulder or Kamala Harris incompetent, and you can come here and make money and be recognized for your talent like Elon Musk, everybody in the world is going to come here.
And as long as they come legally and they're at the very elite and they don't take a job away from, I don't think they should take it away from the American working classes at all. But at the very elite, I think it benefits the country.
Well, there is that visa we've talked about in the past. We shouldn't go down this rabbit hole, but invest in America.
You get a visa of some sort, but your investment has to create jobs. So, yeah, if you come here and you're brilliant and you add to America and part of that increases.
You've got to add to America. You've got to like America.
These people that I've interviewed seem to love America. What's not to love? I'll tell you what's not to love, Victor.
So we continue on DEI. A little paused.
I have a little paused. A low-hanging fruit of DEI targets.
We've talked about this in the past. Let me just preface this by saying governor of of florida ron desantis who got quite attention two years ago when he replaced the board of new college florida has done that again with the i think it's the the college of west western florida it's in the panhandle and, and he's replaced the board there significantly to turn this, I don't want to call it a hellhole, but anyway, to turn it into a good institution.
So we have a governor in a red state with an opportunity to do something that is going to upset the left, but he's doing it anyway. Okay, great.
Now, we have other red states. One of them is Ohio, and here's a headline from the Daily Mail.
The public college in a deep red state that blows 13 million on DEI and fighting whiteness. Let me just read the first three little sentences from this article.
The top U.S. public university in a deep red state blows through $13 million a year on its huge diversity team.
A shocking study shows auditors say Ohio State University's diversity, equity, and inclusion team is so bloated its salaries alone would cover tuition costs for 1,000 in-state students at the main campus in Columbus. OpenTheBooks.com, which tracks public funds, lifted the lid on how such college DEI chiefs as James L.
Moore and Keisha Mitchell earn an eye-popping $300,000 each year, about five times a typical Ohio salary. Victor, there are these states, governors, legislatures are in control of Republicans, and yet this crap still goes on.
Yeah, and it's much more than the 13 million you pay out in their salaries, their secretaries, their centers. You see, because if you're, say, a professor of classics or history or English or computer science, then this person calls you up and says, we've noticed that you didn't have a diversity hiring statement.
So when you run your searches, you have to insist on every candidate explaining. I thought we went over with it.
I thought we were done with the McCarthy loyalty oaths of the 1950s. But these are basically McCarthyite loyalty oaths.
Only it's not fair to McCarthy, actually. They're worse.
And you have to demonstrate in your statement, not your expertise in teaching or scholarship, but how you and your own personal life have furthered diversity, equity, and inclusion. And then your syllabus shall reflect that commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
And that slows down and screws up and causes so much anger and bitterness that you have somebody over your shoulder who's an incompetent. So if you're teaching Renaissance history and this DEI guy doesn't know what the word Renaissance is and he says, Hey, by the way, I think you need to have more Native American Renaissance figures in your class.
It's driving people crazy. And I don't think, you know, Ohio State is a one, it's, I think it's the second largest university in the world.
Not the system, I think UC system in California is, but single campus. Ohio State, maybe the University of Texas.
But it's a very important, it's an excellent university. J.D.
Vance, you think that, you know, he's right there. So that they're doing that there is a travesty.
There's one other thing that I think everybody should keep in mind about all of these administrative positions. They're all growing too much.
People don't want to teach, and they get more money. I think they should get less.
So if you're a full professor of computer science, you should get more than the assistant provost. But there is no school that gives you EDD as a doctorate in education, but you're not going to be an administrator in the arts and sciences with that degree, maybe education.
But still, there is no degree called provost. I'm a PhD in being a provost.
I am a doctorate of deanship. I have a master's in school administration.
Those are different, not major, but there is in DEI. So what I'm getting at is this.
I don't like administrators in general because I've done for 40 years. But when I dealt with a dean of humanities, the dean of humanities had a Ph.D.
in English literature or Spanish literature. When I dealt with the provost, the provost had a Ph.D.
in mathematics. If I dealt with the president, at one time she had written a book about the reformation that's not true of dei so all of these administrators that faculty have to deal with have taken time off from scholarship and teaching and gone what we call gone into administration sometimes they come back out rarely they rotate but not dei they DEI.
They have no other skills. They have no other skills.
Their degrees are in either, if they are in a legitimate subject like history or English, it's something like the diversity of this or the equity of that. So they have no other purpose on that university other than to be a commissar.
And so that's why it's going to be so hard to get rid of them. Because if you say that you're going to go into the UC system and cut by 20% all of the assistant deans, and you're going to only have a dean and one assistant and not five, then those people will go back to the classroom and they will teach science and biology.
You can't do that with DEI. When you cut those people, they have no reason to exist in the university because they have no marketable skills.
They have no scholarship. They have no...
I mean, even Claudine Gay, if you look at her thesis, and you look at her plagiarism, once she was fired from Harvard, had she not been a black woman, I don't think anybody would hire her as an academic, even though she was tenured at Stanford and went to Harvard. She has a political science degree, but the political science degree was a joke.
But even she had a political science degree, and she wasn't a DEI administrator. But I just don't think there's any, I don't know what's going to, what are you going to do with, I don't know how many of them there are now after George Floyd.
I would imagine there's 300,000 of them, and they're all making $200,000. And there's no reason to have them is what I'm saying.
Every campus has an office of civil rights. There's discrimination, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
And under the new Supreme Court rulings that you cannot use race as a criterion for admissions or hiring or tenure

or retention, then they really have no, because they can be sued. They can cost the university a lot of money, and they already are costing universities a lot of money when they try to inject racism into the hiring process when it's illegal to do so.
Well, they stink in the K-12 system also Victor Victor. And some of them will find jobs if they can be booted in the world of leftist philanthropy, which has billions and billions of dollars.
If I was head of the Rockefeller board or the Ford board, I wouldn't have any, I mean, they have no

respect for the donor intent. They all know that that's what they're doing at the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, is not what people wanted them to do.
They have hijacked those foundations and are using the money that was made through capitalism for anti-capitalists and DEI purposes. Yeah.
But even that, would you hire a DEI person that had been let go because there was no room in a university? And what expertise would they have? Accounting? Investment? Development? I don't think so. Because their purpose is— Go to a retraining program and get a job some of the people.
Yeah, you'd have to say, I no longer am going to question and bully people to determine whether they're systematically racist or not, or insidiously racist, or implicitly racist. We have to always have adverbs and adjectives, remember, because they can't say that because there's very few racists around.

So that has to be systematic everywhere like error that you can't see or insidious. Implicit, something like that.
let's

take a little break

final break and when we come back

Victor will talk about one of your

favorite pieces let's um let's take a little break a final break and when we come back victor will talk about one of your favorite people tim walls and maybe one of my favorite people if we have time michael man we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages this episode is brought to you by progressive insurance do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it at Progressive.com.
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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. Victor, here's a headline from the College Fix, which I love the College Fix, which is overseen, I must say this, by the Student Free Press Association, which is run by and founded by John Miller, our buddy.
And John runs the journalism program at Hillsdale. He's just a great, great guy.
Anyway, check that website out, folks, the College Fix. Minnesota may deny licenses if teachers don't affirm LGBT identities.
Here's the story. Current and aspiring teachers will need to ensure they are sufficiently in support of LGBT agenda in order to have a license to teach in Minnesota under rules set to go into effect this July.
Minnesota's new standards of effective practice

require teachers to foster an environment

that ensures student identities,

including sexual orientation,

that they are historically and socially contextualized,

affirmed, and incorporated into...

Oh my gosh, this is such freaking...

Please, please.

What did I do to you?

Why are you torturing me?

These have been, of course, supported by... This is worse than Barry Manilow.
Please, please. What did I do to you? Why are you torturing me? These are, of course, supported by Governor Walz.

Remember the Panamania Noriega, and they wanted to torture him?

He barricaded him in his house, and they couldn't get him out,

and they didn't want to kill him, and it was kind of controversial,

so they blared Barry Manilow music into it. Well, this is what you should read to Noriega.
I surrender. I'll do anything.
Just stop it. Please.
Uncle. Yeah, uncle.
Our favorite uncle. Tim Walls.
Your thoughts about this? I don't think there's anything necessarily surprising about this. He is the, I think in my lifetime, I'm trying to think, I can remember major candidates.
I was seven years old when Richard Nixon, and I think Henry Cabot Lodge was his running mate, Nixon Lodge. And then there was JFK and Lyndon Johnson.
And then there was Johnson and Humphrey, and I can go off as vice president. I still do if I'm impressed.
None have been as bad as that guy. He was a complete buffoon.
He had ruined Minnesota. Everything about his career, he lied about, his military record, everything.
He couldn't speak. He had this kind of, what, herky-jerky, almost adrenaline overload that he'd go out there with.
He's the kind of endomorph that shouldn't wear tight clothes. And he did.
And it was kind of embarrassing. Then he would swing his hands and do everything.
And you saw the look on Kamala Harris was like, oh my God, I know that I couldn't get Josh Shapiro because we're all anti-Semites in this party. But this guy, it's not that he was going to insure us Minnesota.

We didn't need him to get Minnesota.

Now that I picked him and the world's seen him, we might lose Minnesota.

And they almost did.

So everything about him was an ungodly disaster.

And, you know, when Trump addressed the mayors the other day, and then they attacked DeSantis, as you implied, and he said, you know, if a Republican mayor had gone to Africa or a Republican mayor who had governor had done that, you people, and he really dressed them down. But you think a minute.
If you look at just three to three, I'm just doing it from big states, or maybe three or four. So you take Tim Waltz in Minnesota, Governor, Pitzer in Illinois, Hochul in New York, and Newsom in California.
You could argue that all of them had, at one point, richer states, more investment money, and you can pair them with their counterparts, let's say DeSantis in Florida, Abbott in Texas, Youngkin in Virginia.

Does anybody on the planet really believe that that left-wing blue model has enriched and helped the lives of millions of people compared to the alternative? And why don't people just say to themselves, Why are people leaving the blue former union states, highly industrialized, where all the great universities were, Massachusetts, New York, Michigan. And why are they going to the old Confederacy that had struggled with segregation, Jim Crow, lack of internal development, deindustrialization, the bitterness of the Civil War in Florida, in Tennessee.
If you had said 50 years ago, 50 years ago, say in 1970, hey, Victor, I'll tell you what, 1965 when I was a kid, I'm heading out. I got to leave California for Tennessee, man.
I can't wait to get to Kentucky. I've got to go to the Panhandle.
And there was a million people left from Oklahoma to California. When I grew up, almost the whole town, if you were white, had a southern accent.
But if you'd said then, hey, you guys, we got to all head back to Oklahoma where there's a land of freedom and promise. We got to get out of this awful color.
Nobody would have believed you. Right.
So they took paradise and they made it into purgatory. And the people in the south had a lot of things against them.
And they made it paradise. And people, what? They made the necessary adjustment.
How can you argue with U-Haul figures? How can you argue with influx and exodus? You can't. The people vote with their feet, and they're leaving this paradigm.
We're going to get a lot of people, I think, that'll leave from Los Angeles. They already had a housing shortage where are you going to put a 200 000 people i don't understand maybe they're going to move in with friends i don't know and who's going to build the build the uh rebuild it it's not going to work i think it's going to be sort of like watts yeah or the inner city it's just gonna it's not going to recover for a long time.

They have that on the internet. I was watching.
If you look at the grid of Pacific Palisades, Dresden, Hiroshima, right next to each other, they're indistinguishable. They look almost indistinguishable.
It's Gavin Newsom. Yeah, Gavin Newsom.
It turns out that Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass and Miss Keonez and Kristen Crowley, they are more dangerous than a B-17 full of napalm. They really are.
They have done more damage or as much damage. One night's work.
Victor, I meant to ring up before about while we were talking about DEI and Meta and all these companies backing off. And I know you talked with Sammy about Mark Zuckerberg, but I just want a quick thought from you.
And maybe we have a little time left to talk about Michael Mann. But Zuckerberg, this thing that came out.
Okay, we all saw him, you know, we're changing our ways with the content adjudication, et cetera, et cetera, and going down to Mar-a-Lago. But this thing, this story that what motivated him to be concerned by the editing process within then Facebook was that he had a picture of himself having knee surgery and it didn't get enough shares.
I mean, the ego of somebody that that motivates me in a hospital bed and nobody's really sharing it a lot. Something's wrong with this.
Yeah. Now he tells us, I wonder why, Mark, can I ask you, Mark, why all of a sudden, now, moment in history, you go on the Joe Rogan show and you tell the United States public, the largest audience, Rogan, that the Biden administration was calling you and threatening you and screaming at you not to report the news and to censor the news before the election? And why are you telling us now that the FBI intrusively came into your company and part were poor, Mark, without resources? I was forced to do it.
And if you're going to be, give us what in the Nixon era we call the modified hangout?

What? Without resources, I was forced to do it. And if you're going to give us what, in the Nixon era, we call the modified hangout, why don't you tell us the whole hangout? Why don't you, on Joe Rogan's set, I wish Joe Rogan had said, well, Mark, now that we're coming clean, why don't you give $419 million in 2020 to absorb the work of registrars in these key states? Just tell us why.
And why now are you telling me all this? And the answer is, well, I guess it's because the Google guys and Musk and Peter Till and Andreessen and Horowitz and Jeff Bezos, they've all gone down to Mori Lago. And I'm odd man out.
And I have another worry. And that worry is this, that I know that when Andreessen went to a meeting, he walked out of it because the Biden administration announced, these are the winners of the AI that we have approved.
and these are the losers in the startups. And I know that's true because they did it with me.
And therefore, I know that they set a precedent of government threatening Silicon Valley magnets like myself to be left-wing. And they went after the threat.
All the pressure from Washington was directed for one purpose, to destroy Donald Trump in the 2020 election and afterward. And therefore, Donald Trump is in power now.
And he knows that. So I know that he's going to act in the way, if not like Biden, maybe in the way that I would if I were he.
Therefore, I'm going to traipse down in humiliated fashion and put my head on the guillotine platform and say, please don't chop it off. And that's what they're doing, all of them.
And the other thing they're appealing to, it's very brilliant what they do. Everybody should remember what Silicon Valley people do.
They have it down perfect. When there is a Republican president, like a Bush or first Trump, they go over to Washington and they say, look, we are free market Milton Friedman types.
You've got to help us. Don't regulate us.
It's exactly what you want. Up from the bootstraps, entrepreneurs.

We can hamper with this wonderful capitalist system.

And then when they get a Democrat, they say, we are for the people.

We want higher taxes than them.

It won't hurt us. As long as you don't hurt our ability to make money,

we don't care how much taxes we have.

It's the regulation we're worried about.

And they play both sides of the fence.

And now they've got even a better tactic.

They're going to to Donald Trump, and they're saying, those damn commie Europeans, they're trying to destroy an American company and try to put speech codes on us and sue us and saying that we're divisive, and they're going to tax us. And you know Donald Trump, you're a patriot like we are, and you've got to protect your American brand.
And I think Trump will be very receptive to that. And he'll say, okay, what do you need? They have social media, they have telecommunications, and they're screwing my guys, I'll screw with them.
And they know, what's the irony about, getting back to irony,

they know that if they went to Joe Biden and said that,

he'd say, screw you unless you help me.

And they will go to Donald Trump and they know that for all the blunder,

all of the bluster, all of that braggadocio,

when it comes to it, he will help them.

Not because he wants anything, because they're Americans.

And he wants to make sure that Americans are treated preeminently. And they know that.
And he's not going to call them into the room and say, Donald Trump is not going to call Mr. Andreessen in the room and say, there's only going to be seven AI companies that are going to be allowed to make it.
Or he's not going to call, Kash Patel is not going to call Zuckerberg up and said, look, I'm sending over 20 agents. I want you to monitor anything that's opposed to Donald Trump.
And they know that. That's what's weird about the left.
They know what they've done and they project. They know they've adopted fascistic tactics, so they call other people fascists.
It's kind of amusing, though. I have a personal history with Zuckerberg.
You do? I do. Why? Well, I won't mention her first name, but his sister got a Ph.D.
in classics. And, of course, she wrote a dissertation on isms and ologies, feminist this, feminist that, very hard left.
And of course, if you're the sister of the fourth richest man in the world, you're not going to need to get a job. But she attached herself to classics at Stanford.
And then with her huge amount of money, she bought an online classics magazine. And she hired her own staff to publish her stuff and people like her.
Can I just ask, like, what kind of classics, what kind of material essays would be in this magazine? Like something, I'm just making up the titles that would reflect what I read when I would do it. The systematic racism in the Greek vase painting in the 4th century or the transgressive, transsexual nature of the statuary of the goddess Artemis, or manly Artemis, a profile in divine sexual non-binaryism, things like that.
But in the course of her online rants, she published either she herself or Attack Me a Lot. She was a co-author of Who Killed Homer, which 57 years ago made the following argument, that most research narrow, nobody cared about teaching, they didn't care about students, they were indecipherable, and they were now woke, and they were going to destroy the field of classics.
And at one point, they would rename the field, and they wouldn't require Greek anymore. And everybody said, this was crazy.
These people are nuts. John Heath and Victor Hansen are insane.
They're racist. And she was one of those people.
So she used to attack me for writing that book. And at one point I had to reply.
I replied to it and I said, if you're such a leftist and if you're such a progressive and if you're so used to the other, I got a proposal for you. I came to Cal State Fresno in 1984 and there was no classics program.
There was just one class of Latin. So I spent 20 years of my life trying to introduce the ancient world, grammar, syntax, and not just the ancient world, but using the ancient world to ensure that poor whites, but especially because the majority of students were a minority, mostly Mexican-American and Southeast Asian, to make sure they were competitive and had the same opportunities that people who went to prep school had.
So I taught four to five courses a semester, no TAs, and I gave anywhere from three to ten independent studies. So in a typical year, I would teach introductory to Latin, Aeschylus in Greek, or Sophocles maybe, third one, survey of Greek history, 75 students, and introduction to the humanities, 70 students.
So I'd have 200 students. And I corrected all the papers, and then I would have classic students.
So I'd give a class in independent study in Lysias, independent study in Greek composition, independent study in Latin composition, independent study in the New Testament, independent study in comparative grammar, Greek and Latin. So whatever.
So I said, I wrote this, and I said, you know, if you could really help people that are

under, if you really are a classicist and you really believe in the ancient world, you could help things. And I have a little blueprint for you.
You could go to Cal State Bakersfield. Please relocate.
You don't have to live in Menlo Park and a big mansion. Go to Bakersfield.
It's a beautiful city. It's outperforming Fresno now.
And start a classics program at Cal State Bakersfield, and they would fund it.

But if you would all, why don't you give a few million dollars and you're working for free now. Work for free.
Bring your team down there and start tutoring minority kids and give them a leg up so that when they graduate with a bachelor's or master's, they can give lectures without notes. Their grammar is superb.
They have wonderful vocabularies. That's what I taught students to do, give lectures without notes, everything.
And you know what happened? Like, after hijacking this, I won't even, I won't give her first name or the name of the... She destroyed it.
She just said, well, I'm done with that. That was my funny little thing for a couple of years.
And now I'm having kids. I don't have to work.
And my brother's got this big thing. And I'm going to just go be a consultant with Facebook.
And by the way, all of you people that I hired, you're fired.

You are fired. And I'm going to, I saved the magazine and now I blew it up.
Bye. Wouldn't want to be you.
I wouldn't want to see you. Wouldn't want to be you.
And that was it. Wow.
The consequence of dealing with Victor in this way. I don't think I had a hand in it.

I don't think I had a hand in it.

The scalp on the wall.

I don't think I had a hand in seeing it,

but I do think that she realized that people thought she was full of it.

And from what I understand,

she didn't treat her employees very well,

and they were really upset

because they had gone to work for her,

and they thought they were building this hyper-funded magazine that would be on the cutting edge of letters in America.

And it just destroyed it.

But who knows?

Maybe she's resurfaced.

Well, Victor, that was a great, more than an anecdote.

I should say one last thing is when John Heath and I wrote Who wrote who killed homer 27 years ago it got so many people angry and she was still angry 23 years i think that one classist this is really funny posted to all the classists in the united states that she was so angry. But the reason that she was so angry is she had a theory that the scent, because she was a philologist like we were, and she was an expert in writing styles, that John Heath and Victor Hansen were the Unabomber.
And she published that.

Yes, that we were the Unabombers. We were the same incendiary type people.
And classical philology was just as important as Unabombing stories. And that, that she had read the manifesto.
And the manifesto, this is before we knew who, they had published it, I think, before. The manifesto was exactly like our style.
So we must have written it. The Wall Street Journal, I think Jody Bottom, remember Jody Bottom? Yeah, sure.
He wrote an article about how irrelevant the whole thing was. But I got, the only thing, I never sued anybody in my life, but I had so many, you know, people, lawyers that were just eager to sue her for defamation.
And they had this chat list. And, of course, I think we were the only two conservative classicists that were outed or were not apologetic about it.
Not that John was conservative, but he was principled. Did you know David Galerner at all? I did.
Yeah, I mean, one of the victims. I don't think he likes to call himself a victim, by the way.
I corresponded. I really liked him.
But the point I'm making is that then it came out and they said, classicist, somebody pointed out. Well, we wrote the second edition.
And John Heath had one of the funniest wits I've ever heard. And he wrote part of our reply.
And he said, we are so impressed. Not only is she a philologist and an expert at deciphering writing styles, she's also clairvoyant.
Because she was able to say that we wrote who killed homer under the influence of the of the manifesto before the manifesto was even available to the public so we had either been communicating with mr whatever his name was or we yeah sasinski or we had imagined what he would write, and therefore we were influenced spiritually or psychically. And it was really funny.
And then she said she had called the FBI and reported us. And then everybody said, you know, there were all these people that were reminding her that might have been a felony to call and deliberately give a false.
So then what do you do? So then she went back on and said, well, maybe I forgot. I didn't really remember.
Maybe I didn't really call the FBI and report you as a uniform. Is she the kind of person, if you've met her, you didn't know who she was

or that you would think that something's off with this lady? Or was she a nasty blankety blank who was... Since I'm not mentioning her name, I would say both.
But you've got to remember that I I mean, that was a very tiny field of 5,000 professors, and it was dying. It was dying, and the people who were killing it, the field, were not going to stop killing it.
So then this guy from Fresno State comes along, and a guy from Santa Clara, and they don't give a crap about, you know what I mean Them. And they just look at the field and say, I'm from outer space and I'm looking at you people and you're killing the Greek and Latin languages as they're taught.
You're writing in a language that no one can understand. You're trendy.
You've forsaken this great tradition of famous historians and classicists and archaeologists. You destroyed empiricism.
You've taken it over with racist that. And who cares about whether some goddess was transgendered or all that stuff? So they didn't like it.
And we were funny. I mean, we weren't like dead serious.
We were serious, but the way that we presented the argument was kind of funny. We would quote them, you know.
John had a good part about Homer. We said, this is sexist Homer.
This is transphobic Homer. This is homophobic.
And then we would quote from their interpretation of the Odyssey. Deep down inside, Penelope is the victim of a sexist mindset that makes her act the, quote, loom all the time, why he gets to philander around with Circe and Calypso, why she dutifully is not yet emancipated to see that her real all that crowd.
It was funny. Who killed Homer? I assume it's still in print, is it? I'm very lucky that all, I think every book I wrote, 26 of them except two are still in print.
Mexifornia is still in print. Yeah.
A lot of them are. I could see a revised edition with an update.
But you need another project, Victor. Like you need a hole in your head.
Well, there was a guy who wrote a book not too long ago. I won't mention his name, but it was about the status of classics.
And he interviewed John and I. And he was actually, even though he was of the left, I thought he was very fair, and he has a chapter in, and it's not laudatory, but it's not critical either.
It was more or less, they tried to give an honest appraisal, and everybody squashed him and went insane and revealed. it was on one hand on the other hand but But it was, we were trying to say that 5,000 classicists need all the help they can get.
And enrollments are going down. We have to be populist and we have to do this and that.
And when we said things like they're going to eliminate Greek, nobody thought they would, but they did it. They did it at Princeton just recently as a classics.
You can be a classics major at Princeton and know no Greek. Yeah, well, the suicide of the West happens in many, many ways.
Every year when I would hire, I had at one time six people full time. And when we had hire for these positions, I just noticed by 19, I got a PhD in 79, 80, and we had to be able to write in Latin and Greek.
And you had to be able to sight read. That means you can read it without a dictionary, some authors.
But I noticed these students couldn't, and they were coming out of the best graduate schools. So at one case, I just asked a student, I said, you're going to have to teach Latin, and I know that we have students that are not prepared, but I would like you to read.
So I handed the person in question a page from Cicero's Civil Wars, and a page from a classical orator called Lysias, and he has a famous speech called On the Cripple, a guy who's a welfare cheat. So I asked him, could you just read one paragraph of Latin and Greek and then read it out loud, translate it, and then tell me how you would explain this to the class.
And he couldn't do it. And they got angry.
And then they filed, they wrote me an email and said, we're going to file a complaint with the American Philological Association that you're not allowed to ask, you're not allowed to quiz students in a formal manner like that. So I apologized.
I said, okay, I'm sorry. I just needed to know if you knew Latin or Greek because you're from one of the top four classics departments in the United States.
You're so mean, Victor. And there was no Play-Doh or Safe Space or puppy dogs to recover from your meanness.
Those are ancient. That's all ancient history.
That was almost 30 years ago when I was young and I had energy and it's kind of naive and stupid. Well, we will talk about Michael Mann and other things another time.
I got off track on that. No, Victor, it's not off track.
Many people listen to this show for many different reasons. I do love the classical world.

That was the best thing that ever happened to me,

to learn Latin and Greek and be a classics major, undergraduate, and PhD.

I love the feel.

I wrote extensively.

I'm going to write a history of my next project after.

I have two books I'm signed up for right now.

But the third one, if I can get these two done in a year or two, is I'm going to write a biography of a Paminondas, my hero. Well, we'll be around to discuss it.
It might be a bestseller, Jack. Everybody's saying, oh, my God, when is the first biography of a Paminondas coming out? I can't wait to get to the bookstore.
I don't know any book. Since we've been doing this podcast, Victor, I don't think any book you've done hasn't been a bestseller, so you're on a streak.
Okay. I want to thank everyone who does take the time.
Whatever reason brings you here. You love the classics.
You love military history, Victor's analysis of California. Whatever.
Thank you. The audience is big and getting bigger.
Some people who listen on Apple take the time to rate the show, which you can do, zero to five stars. Practically, everyone gives Victor five to 4.9 plus average.
Over 7,000 people have done such. Some people leave people leave comments too one is i don't know who wrote this one it's short and it's titled my favorite conservative voice and he writes or she writes years ago my favorite conservative voice was bob novak then he died so was my favorite so my favorite became charles krauthammer then he died there was rush Rush Limbaugh.
Then he died. Now Victor is my favorite.
And then he died. I don't know about that.
I guess I'm going to, if I die this year. No, no.
It ends up with hang in there, Victor. I hope the person is not saying hocus pocus.
You are my favorite conservative culminator. I must say I have say, God's been very good to me.
I knew Bob Novak at Charles Grant. I met Bob Novak once.
I liked him. He was a prince of darkness.
That's what they called him. They called him the prince of darkness.
Chris Caldwell. I like Chris Caldwell, too.
That's his son. Bob was his father-in-law.
I didn't know that. He was a Catholic convert, wasn't he? He was.
And he... He had a brain tumor.
It was very unfair. He got in an auto accident, and people had suggested he was reckless.
But he actually had a stoma that was undiagnosed, I think. I bumped into him a few times.
He came on a National Review cruise, and he couldn't have been better. His wife was lovely.
And then I bumped into him a few times in Washington. All those guys, I met all those guys.
I used to, on two occasions, I had lunch with Charles Kuthammer. He was on the Bradley Prize Committee twice.
And he was the most humble guy, and his wife was just a delightful, wonderful person. And I really liked him.
And then I got to know Rush in the last four years really well. We texted almost every night the last two years.
I liked Rush Limbaugh. I really did.
Amen. I liked it.
I couldn't believe sometimes he'd write me. I'm like, why is Rush Limbaugh writing this? I know, at 2 in the morning.
How about at West Coast time? I would be asleep, and I'd get a text at 11 o'clock, 2 o'clock in the East. I said to him once, hey, Rush, have against white people he said what do you mean i said i you just everybody around you is black or hispanic and he said i never thought of that they're just people and are the best people i could ever ever they were wonderful he just He just loved everybody.
He really did. Yeah.
And they liked him, too. Good guy.
Went out fighting. God bless him.
Well, Victor, we're going to go out right now, except that I'm going to say please go to civilthoughts.com and sign up there for the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society that shares 14 recommended readings and doesn't charge. It's free.
We're not selling your name. I know you're going to like it.
A lot of people who listen to this show have subscribed and they enjoy getting it. So that's civilthoughts.com.
Victor's website, thebladeofperseus, vict VictorHanson.com. Victor, you've been terrific as ever.
Thanks, folks, for listening. We will be back soon with another episode of The Victor Davis Hanson Show.
Bye-bye. Thank you, everyone, for listening.
I'd very much appreciate it. If you've been with us at all over the last six months or so,

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