Middle East, Diplomacy and the Worry of Higher Education

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Speaker 2 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I am Jack Fowler, the host.

Speaker 2 You're here to listen to and get wisdom from our namesake, Victor Davis-Hanson, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Barsha

Speaker 2 Marsha, I should say, not Barsha, I don't know who she is, the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Speaker 2 And Victor is, you can see him there if you're watching this on YouTube.

Speaker 2 This is Canadian election.

Speaker 2 Pierre Poulev. Poulebev.

Speaker 2 Pouliev.

Speaker 2 Pouliev.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's what I'm trying to emulate. Well, I hope we'll be able to do that.
Actually, I'm on my seventh week of silas infection.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to take something like apples for my second round of antibiotics.

Speaker 2 Is that true? They have malate in it, right? They kind of stuff you up

Speaker 2 versus the other effect of antibiotics. I thought I was.

Speaker 2 Let's not talk about it. Let's just.

Speaker 2 Okay. Okay.
You were supposed to pray to St. Naso.

Speaker 2 Oh, boy.

Speaker 2 Well, we're going to talk about prayerful things today, Victor, because we're recording on the day after Easter, Monday, the 21st of April. And today, Pope Francis died.
He died this morning.

Speaker 2 And that has some obvious ramifications for Roman Catholicism and broader moral issues, global issues.

Speaker 2 The aforementioned

Speaker 2 apple-eating possible Canadian prime minister. I don't think so.
There's elections a week from today. By the way, this episode will be up on Tuesday the 22nd.

Speaker 2 Scottish women get the British Supreme Court to declare that women are women. You know, women without appendages are women.

Speaker 2 Lady astronauts, Ambassador Wittikoff. So we have all these things to get victors taken.
And we'll do that when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 We are back with the munching and crunching Victor Victor Davis Hansen show. You got to do what you got, Victor.
Do it live.

Speaker 2 I got to do. I got to do it.
I just took an antibiotic and I want to make sure I. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 2 All right. Well,

Speaker 2 let's be nice here, Victor. Don't say bad things about the dead, but Pope Francis.

Speaker 2 Nihil decoré,

Speaker 2 ni si bonum de mortuis. Never say a bad thing.
Never say anything bad, except never say anything except good about the dead.

Speaker 2 The recently dead.

Speaker 2 We can be a little honest here, maybe. Yes.

Speaker 2 He was our first Jesuit pope.

Speaker 2 i believe so uh first jesuit he was from argentin argentina he led the jesuits in that country and when he came to um you know his predecessor benedict resigned first pope ever to resign from office and retire and i think francis bergoglio or excuse me jose bergoglio that was the

Speaker 2 pope francis's name seemed at the very first you know there was some appeal even to people like me traditional catholics uh hardcore catholics And then over the years, boy, oh boy, made it tough to, you know, as a Catholic, you're supposed to pray for the Pope.

Speaker 2 We pray for the Pope, but

Speaker 2 he made things difficult, I think, particularly for American Catholics. He seemed to have unanimous for America.

Speaker 2 I think he was a Perronist, if I could say that. Yeah, you can.

Speaker 2 Which would I think we could define Juanine Perronism as sort of

Speaker 2 coerced socialist redistribution,

Speaker 2 holistically applying to the economic, political, cultural, social life of Argentina, and it more or less wrecked the country,

Speaker 2 which in the 50s and 60s, early 50s, at least was on a trajectory to match the GDP of North America, and then

Speaker 2 Peronism destroyed it. He was the first pope that I think

Speaker 2 really was an

Speaker 2 unabashed, unapologetic man of the left, and thought that that ideology would be

Speaker 2 that the left redistribution

Speaker 2 ideology reflected the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, or things like John, it's easier for a

Speaker 2 camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven. I think that's the part of the New Testament that he focused on, but I could be wrong.

Speaker 2 As compared to, say,

Speaker 2 Pope Paul or Pope John,

Speaker 2 you know, the Polish Pope, he was more,

Speaker 2 he was somewhat political, but he was more open to even opposing views, fought communism.

Speaker 2 He was a pope for this age, though, Jack. This age has gone to the left.

Speaker 2 I don't know why we're more prosperous than we ever have been. We're more free and secure, but

Speaker 2 boy, we're having a, on the left, we're having a mouse cultural revolution or something like that, where

Speaker 2 people are advocating violence. There's a professor today from George Mason that wrote on social media that

Speaker 2 there was no other opposition, there was no other alternative pathway, trajectory for the left other than to kill people. And I think he was a graduate student, excuse me, a teaching assistant.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 we keep talking about that Rutgers poll where people who identified of the left, over half thought that Trump could be killed.

Speaker 2 And it's just a different

Speaker 2 and now we have this revolution within the Democratic Party of the Maoists, if I could use that term, the Jacobins versus the old guard.

Speaker 2 And the old guard had moved pretty hard left to accommodate them. But when you have a guy like David Hogg, who's 25 and really has done nothing in his life,

Speaker 2 I mean, he was a tragic mass shooting at school, but

Speaker 2 I can't think of anything he did himself. There's no record of political acumen or

Speaker 2 getting people elected, maybe raising money for particular causes.

Speaker 2 And if he's the face of the new Democratic Party, at least one of the two faces, and his boss from Minnesota is even more left-wing.

Speaker 2 We'll see. It's a very frightening time because while all this is going on on the left, then you've got Donald Trump waging a counter-left revolution.

Speaker 2 And it's driving them even more and more crazy and more and more to the left. But it's scaring a lot of the independents.
And

Speaker 2 anyway.

Speaker 2 One other thing about the Pope on the lines of what you were saying, leftism, is the embrace of climate change as

Speaker 2 a core

Speaker 2 sacrament almost.

Speaker 2 Yes, climate open borders.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that I think is the big thing. And that's the thing that is for me most troubling Victor.

Speaker 2 Well, the obsession about non-spiritual things, non-doctrinal things.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 what destroys and disrupts a civil society more than just massive. Let me take 10,000 people and plunk them in this little Italian village or 10,000 in this little Irish town.

Speaker 2 Does he not, or the church leaders not, think that civil society is something that deserves to be protected?

Speaker 2 Well, Vatican City, I've been there a lot, and it has

Speaker 2 Renaissance-era formidable fortifications, right, around it.

Speaker 2 So the purpose, because they haven't been dismantled to have an open border, and it is an independent entity, is that it would like to define itself as separate from,

Speaker 2 I guess, governmentally or spiritually from Italy.

Speaker 2 It's an independent entity, and therefore it feels it has a unique culture, and therefore it feels that people should not just be able, for security or other reasons, walk into the Vatican whenever they want.

Speaker 2 And they have barriers to prevent that. And they are pretty successful.
But when you apply that logic to a larger country,

Speaker 2 he seemed to have problems with that. That's the whole problem with all of these people who say, A, walls don't work, and B, they're discriminatory and in the global 21st century we don't need them.

Speaker 2 And then when you look at every aspect of their public and personal ideology, their adherence of walls and separatism, they all, these grandees, you know, Joe Biden kept talking and had an open border, but you couldn't just walk onto the White House grounds.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he had all kinds of security. He was famous even as vice president for,

Speaker 2 you know, he had Secret Service around him and he charged the Secret Service money for their observation post on his property.

Speaker 2 He really did believe, and we saw that with the iconic Martha's Vineyard escapade where people did not want people coming in there. And all this stuff about Mr.

Speaker 2 Garcia and whether he should come back or what, or what was the status, it's all predicated on the idea that

Speaker 2 the arguments are in the abstract, but nobody would want to have him live next to them and have his former associates visit him in their neighborhood or in their home or in their...

Speaker 2 It's just,

Speaker 2 everybody likes security for themselves, but on the global idea, they feel good about themselves without barriers

Speaker 2 or they prefer open borders as long as it doesn't impact themselves.

Speaker 2 And that's a characteristic of the left these days. It's cosmic morality, but I have to have exceptions.

Speaker 2 if I'm AOC or Bernie Sanders to fly private and have this huge carbon footprint and then talk about, and she's been on record changing subject a little bit, AOC, about the evils of private jet, you know, jet travel.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 we remember George Orwell's

Speaker 2 pig saying some Some animals are more equal than others, and that's what we see with the left. They are the more equal.
And Bernie the same way. He has three houses.
40%

Speaker 2 of America can't afford one. And he's identifying with them as victims.
And yet he seems

Speaker 2 he's never really had a job in the private sector. So he's been able to translate his government service into a multi-million dollar portfolio and three homes.

Speaker 2 And yet he rails about people who do that on a grander scale than he does.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, one last thing for me anyway, not to saturate our listeners with Catholicism, but we Catholics do believe at these moments that the Holy Spirit hopefully guides the conclave of cardinals.

Speaker 2 But the thing that worries people like me are, well, the last conclave, which consisted of cardinals appointed by Benedict and John Paul, Pope John, now he's a saint, Saint Pope John Paul II, conservative men picked this man.

Speaker 2 What is the conclave filled with cardinals picked by Francis going to pick as his successor? So it's a very worrisome time

Speaker 2 for a lot of us.

Speaker 2 That said, Victor, I just want to let our listeners know. We're going to be back

Speaker 2 in a moment with Victor's thoughts. But first, an important message for anyone who's concerned with their financial future.
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Speaker 2 Victor, I wanted to know if you would share some thoughts on Steve Wittikoff. And my friend, our friend, John Fund,

Speaker 2 wrote this

Speaker 2 analysis of him. Let me just read this pretty quickly.
John writes, I'm not a foreign policy expert, but I've learned to recognize when someone is clearly out of his depth in that area.

Speaker 2 And this is clearly the case of Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor and golfing buddy of President Donald Trump's from his old stomping grounds in Queens, New York. Witkoff, nominally the U.S.

Speaker 2 Special Envoy to the Middle East, has become Trump's all-purpose emissary for almost all of today's key foreign policy issues.

Speaker 2 One day, he's meeting with Vladimir Putin to settle the Ukraine conflicts. The next day, he's negotiating with Hamas to urge the group toward a ceasefire with Israel.

Speaker 2 And a few days later, he's interacting with the Iranians on their nuclear weapons program. Wickoff's travel schedule is often busier than Secretary of State or CIA director.

Speaker 2 Victor, people are starting to roll their eyes and lament and moan. Is this guy successful? What are your thoughts?

Speaker 2 I have nothing, no criticism per se, except sometimes he's been indiscreet and he has to correct himself. But my point is that no one,

Speaker 2 even Henry Kissinger,

Speaker 2 when he was in the shuttle diplomacy of 74,

Speaker 2 there were other people in his entourage that were, I guess his name was Cisco and other people that were helping him.

Speaker 2 In other words, he was trying to do Vietnam, he was trying to do detente, he was trying to do China, he was trying to do the Middle East, and he was spread through, and he had auxiliaries or subordinates that helped him.

Speaker 2 So when you take a businessman who supposedly gets things done and you put him in the Iranian nuclear negotiations, the Hamas hostage negotiations, the Ukrainian war, the

Speaker 2 attitude toward Russia. He's overtaxed.
He's spread too thin. And

Speaker 2 he hasn't done this before. So my polite suggestion to the administration would be to

Speaker 2 assign him something that he feels comfortable. I think it would be probably the Hamas or that negotiation.
I don't know. I mean, I can see why the Trump administration did not bring Mike Pompeo back.

Speaker 2 I don't agree with it necessarily, but they thought that he wanted to run for president, and he had been critical of aspects of January 6th, and he had been critical, at least momentarily, of the Mar-Lago raid that something Trump had done had partly justified.

Speaker 2 All that being said,

Speaker 2 he was on base with Trump on Iran. He was on base with Putin.
So I don't see why a guy like that couldn't be an additional special envoy. I know he might get the mega base.

Speaker 2 I don't quite understand why the mega base has got he was a good secretary of state, is what I'm saying. But people like that.
And I would get two or three of them to operate with a single portfolio.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 he's got too many portfolios to do it. And then more importantly,

Speaker 2 if you

Speaker 2 he's not, I don't, he's nominally working for the Secretary of State, who's the architect of foreign policy, and you don't get the impression that

Speaker 2 his profile should not be higher than Marco Rubio or Waltz, the National Security Advisor. Usually, when you have rivalries about key

Speaker 2 foreign policy debates within a administration, you have the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State. That's why Kissinger combined the two in himself.
There's always rivalry there.

Speaker 2 Usually the Secretary of State feels he has loyalty to this huge cabinetcy, and the National Security Advisor is more hawkish.

Speaker 2 But that being what it said,

Speaker 2 this diminishes Rubio's role. And Rubio's done a great job, and he should be much more high-profile.
He should be negotiating, I think, the Ukraine war. Rubio did.
And have him be in response.

Speaker 2 Everybody reports to Rubio on the Ukraine war. And then have Waltz give him the portfolio of

Speaker 2 the nuclear.

Speaker 2 You know, the particular assignment's not important, but utilize those two official positions. And then let

Speaker 2 Kok just have one portfolio. Because he's clearly overtaxed and he's got too many things.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, before we go to a break, and I, you know, part of the love of the show is the authenticity of it.

Speaker 2 The biting of Apple, Apple, the dogs barking in the background.

Speaker 2 I'm a mess. I apologize to my listeners.

Speaker 2 I had the flu, then I had a sinus infection, and it goes away for a day, and then it comes back worse. I have to ask you, though, about dogs.

Speaker 2 This is a stray dog. Somebody dumped this dog, and

Speaker 2 my wife decided to nurture and save it. And it's a new little dog, and we had just two dumped the other day.
That's an editorial, everybody, on what's happening.

Speaker 2 when illegal immigration is in the news and people are not at ground zero they have no idea of the minor major whatever you want to call them fallout or collateral damage but when I

Speaker 2 when I see dogs now every three or four weeks dumped at our house people drive by and they say wow it doesn't you know it looks like they might have some means because the driveway looks nice or something they just pull in and dump them and then, oh wow, there's an orchard, it's near town.

Speaker 2 I'm just going to unload. And it made me sick this morning when I was walking where I grew up in this pond.

Speaker 2 There is a washer, a dishwasher, a dryer, a huge freezer, a refrigerator. 20 bags of trash, all the literature in the trash except the address, which should identify the dumper.
It's all in Spanish.

Speaker 2 It's all over the, it's a beautiful natural.

Speaker 2 And when I was farming it, I would pick up an individual, if somebody left an individual cup, I would, it was immaculate. And it just, and I don't own it anymore.
My brother sold it.

Speaker 2 So my point is that it drives me nuts. And that's what the dog is.
It's just, poor thing was dropped starving, as they all are. And then you feed them.
And then

Speaker 2 if you take the

Speaker 2 local pound is actually so full that they tell you there's no room. There's no room to kill them quick enough.

Speaker 2 So then then you don't know what to do so you know my wife said well I don't know if it's got any shots or not I don't know if it's spayed I got and then you go through all of that

Speaker 2 so I don't even know if it's had raby shots it's just sitting in our yard yeah well it's more than an inconvenience especially if you have a tender heart for God's man's best friend did you see they left came out I forget what study about a week ago that dogs are bad for the world you know they kill things they they foul the environment etc Same people who want us to eat bugs

Speaker 2 want us not to have power. What do they want? They say everything.
Eating meat is bad for the world. They want to eliminate that.

Speaker 2 They micromanage our whole lives, but then you think, if we did everything that they want, what great thing would they do? What would they be empowered?

Speaker 2 How would they be freed from all of these pathologies that we inflict on them? Would they write a great... Would they do another Homer's Iliad? Would they write The Inferno?

Speaker 2 Would they do Michoangelo's David? What great art would they give a Getty? No, I don't see anything coming out of what they're doing. All I see is bitterness and insecurity and envy and hate.

Speaker 2 When I listen to Bernie Sanders or AOC or Nancy Pelosi

Speaker 2 or the Senator Hall Van Hollen going down, I don't see any positivity.

Speaker 2 positivity.

Speaker 2 We know people in our lives who enjoy seeing other people grovel or be inconvenienced. And

Speaker 2 as a movement, as an ideology, I think that's central to the left. No, it's absolutely true.

Speaker 2 I wanted to get solar panels about eight years ago, and it took like four months to get

Speaker 2 the inspector came out here, and he came out and he said,

Speaker 2 well,

Speaker 2 where's the, I don't have it on my files, this building. I said, it's ag exempt.
It was built before the new regulations. He said, well, then I have to have a proof that it was there.

Speaker 2 I said, You can see it.

Speaker 2 And I said, Is there anything out of is the circuit breaker box out of everything? All the Romex are cabled and they're in conduit as everything.

Speaker 2 No, it's all it all meets inspection, but I don't have this building on my record, so you can't put panels on.

Speaker 2 I said, If you walk a half a mile, you'll see about nine dwellings, all of them with bare Romex, porter potties, maybe 50 people living in in a house zone for single people, dogs that are on license.

Speaker 2 Why don't you just walk over there

Speaker 2 and see how many regulations you can find? Because I think you could find 50 in about an hour that have been broken. But you won't do that.
You want to come over here because I'm very polite to you.

Speaker 2 And I said, yes, sir, yes, sir. I will address that.
And you know that I will go out and I'll go through every archive in my entire family.

Speaker 2 I will find a document that shows this building was was in existence before 1994.

Speaker 2 I will show when it was built and I will go to the county planning and I will get it on your record for you.

Speaker 2 And it'll take me two months and about 50 hours, but that'll make you feel really good and powerful.

Speaker 2 But if you go over there and you try to tell that Wild West area, and it's a whole area, you don't know what you're going to find. You don't know what you're going to find.

Speaker 2 You don't know what the people are going to do to you, and you won't go there there because you won't feel big about yourself. You'll feel small and scared.

Speaker 2 And that's the problem with all of these, when you get these huge government octopuses and these people who have not had experience in the private sector, they get an emotional delight out of forcing people to grovel.

Speaker 2 They can't be just polite. When I said that, he didn't really disagree with me.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I love you, Victor. That was spot on, my friend.
Spot on.

Speaker 2 Okay, we're going to be back and talk about, let's talk next about the aforementioned Canadian elections and lady astronauts, and we'll get to Trump and Harvard, all when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Monday, the 21st of April. This episode will be up tomorrow, Tuesday, the 22nd.
Victor has a website I forgot to mention it at the beginning.

Speaker 2 That is the blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com. At the end of the show, I'll tell you why you should subscribe.
If you're a fan of Victor, you gotta be there. You gotta subscribe.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, I didn't ask you.

Speaker 2 You spent Easter with the children, grandchildren? Yes? Yes, I spent Easter.

Speaker 2 My daughter and her husband have three children, and my son and his wife have two children, and they all met.

Speaker 2 My daughter moved up to Northern California in the foothills outside of Sacramento, a beautiful little place where they had Easter egg hunts and

Speaker 2 drove up there.

Speaker 2 It's 220 miles, not that far.

Speaker 2 So it was very nice.

Speaker 2 What are they called, Grandpa? What's your poppy or are you just going to? Well, I don't see it.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's not like the extended family that I grew up when I i had my grandparents living here and my brothers living here and it was kind of tribal we were all so they don't see me very much so i'm referred to

Speaker 2 my daughter and son refer to me as grandpa or something but they call me victor

Speaker 2 oh wow which is good

Speaker 2 hey victor yeah

Speaker 2 hey speaking with a french accent uh or i think that's a french accent canada uh will have its elections next monday on the 28th Actually, elections have begun. They've had advanced voting.
And Pierre

Speaker 2 Poulievre is, this is a snap election. He's the Conservative candidate.
Mark Charney is the Liberal who took the place of Trudeau, who he called the snap election.

Speaker 2 And right now, the polls show the Liberals ahead. And I think...
Victor, there's got to be some culpability for this with Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 It seemed a few months ago when Wiz Trudeau was the captain of the sinking ship that this was the Conservatives were going to rout.

Speaker 2 I could be wrong, but what are your thoughts about what's happening up there?

Speaker 2 What was wrong?

Speaker 2 What's wrong with Canada? Mr. Trudeau, we all thought that he was an aberration, that he was a man-child.

Speaker 2 I guess

Speaker 2 he voted in because of his looks, because he showed no intellectual

Speaker 2 ability. He was kind of very vindictive.
We saw that with a trucker strike.

Speaker 2 But everybody thought, you know, if you look at terms of per capita income and GDP, unemployment, inflation, military expenditures and NATO promises,

Speaker 2 relations with us,

Speaker 2 you got the impression that Canada was stalled and that the conservative elements that had once been with this great Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who was gifted, a free market advocate, and really had Canada going in the right direction after a decade, I suppose, that they wouldn't go back to this failed.

Speaker 2 But who are we to speak? We had under the first three years of Trump, everything was going well, and then

Speaker 2 we got rid of that, and we got somebody who was Obama on steroids as far as policy. That is, whoever was

Speaker 2 signing with the auto pin, the Biden initiatives. So I think that

Speaker 2 and Donald Trump does not like Polieviev,

Speaker 2 Pulaiv, Puliev. He doesn't like him, and I don't know why he doesn't.

Speaker 2 I think his attitude is he's a conservative, so he should be kind and favorable to me, but he doesn't understand Canadian pol he understands Canadian policy, but he doesn't appreciate the situation he's in.

Speaker 2 The Conservatives is that people are angry at the United States because the United States has been saying to Canada, you're spending 1.37 on your defense expenditures.

Speaker 2 You are one of only eight nations that refuses to honor your 2014 promises to spend 2% of GDP.

Speaker 2 And this is especially shameful for you because in World War II, you had the third largest navy in the world for a while. You had your own beach at

Speaker 2 Normandy.

Speaker 2 You were

Speaker 2 the Dieppe raid. You suffered, you were courageous, and now to see this,

Speaker 2 our open border has always been secure, and it was not secured by Trudeau on your part.

Speaker 2 And so, and you're running anywhere, depending on how you figure it, a $63 to $100 billion surplus. You've got asymmetrical tariffs.

Speaker 2 And so when Trump emphasized those, all of what I just said, but in the Trump art of the deal, it's loser, 51 state, then it made it impossible for a conservative to object to what the liberals were saying about Trump, because then they would say that he was a Trump puppet.

Speaker 2 So then he was critical or more critical of Trump, and that meant that Trump was critical of him.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so he lost, it was a lose-lose situation for the conservatives. If they objected to what Trudeau has done,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 Carney, is that his name, Carney?

Speaker 2 Yeah, Carney, if they objected to that, then

Speaker 2 they were on the side of the United States.

Speaker 2 If they supported Trump,

Speaker 2 I mean, if they were supported Trump and they objected to everything that

Speaker 2 they were on the United States, if they joined the liberals to denounce Trump, it's pretty much what they did, then there was no difference between them.

Speaker 2 They were not able to articulate a particular view. They were just lumped in.
Well, if you feel like the

Speaker 2 liberal people do, and Carney doesn't like Trump, and you agree with him, then why change governments?

Speaker 2 So it was a very hard thing to do. And yet Trump couldn't come out and endorse the conservatives because then that would be the kiss of death.

Speaker 2 And it was very hard, you know. If you look at the art of the deal,

Speaker 2 no one, and we talked about this, I wrote about it, nobody believed that he was going to invade Panama.

Speaker 2 But on the other hand, nobody believed that Obama or Biden or anybody had any ability to force the Chinese back out of Panama.

Speaker 2 And that what Panama was doing was they were being intimidated by the Chinese. They brought in, like a guest they brought in and wouldn't leave.

Speaker 2 And they had port facilities at the entry and exit that were used for espionage and mercantile, the whole thing. So Donald Trump Trump said we might have to reject that, renew.

Speaker 2 Panamanians got nationalistic.

Speaker 2 Long story short, there's a 50-50 chance that this BlackRock deal will go through and there will be an American company for the first time in years that will be controlling the entry and exit.

Speaker 2 And the Panamanians will be relying on our defense in China.

Speaker 2 Nobody would have been able to do that, but Trump did it by this rhetoric. Same thing Greenland.
You know, we want Greenland. Nobody ever thought he was going to absorb Greenland.

Speaker 2 But after it was all said and done,

Speaker 2 Denmark put in an extra billion dollars at the disposal of its colony, its North American colony, and we do have a base there. And the Greenland people got more autonomy, and it worked.

Speaker 2 And the same thing with, I don't know yet with Canada, but in the process of all this,

Speaker 2 it gets chaotic. But I don't think anybody in Canada ever believed that they were going to be the 51st state.
What Trump was saying is, you people have disappointed us.

Speaker 2 You running surplus with your friends. You didn't patrol your border with your friends.
You didn't arm as you were supposed to with your friends. You would just be better off as a 51st.

Speaker 2 And just as a footnote to that little rant, nobody wants Canada to be a first 51st state. That would be like getting California and Oregon and Massachusetts on steroids as a state.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor, we're going to get your thoughts on lady astronauts. I think, I don't even know if they're astronauts, ladies who went up in a thing.

Speaker 2 Before that, I just want to get to something you said before. You mentioned the Bernie Sanders AOC, the Fighting Oligarchy tour.

Speaker 2 I do want to note that

Speaker 2 where am I reading this one? They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private jets doing that. Then Liz McDonald from Lizzie from

Speaker 2 Fox wrote

Speaker 2 about,

Speaker 2 you know, who are these people? This, the Bernie Sanders crowd.

Speaker 2 They are the Coachella rich and elite, already making an average of $84,000. That's more than the U.S.
median. And they're only 25 years old.

Speaker 2 This is who Bernie Sanders prefers to preach anti-capitalism and big government to. 60% of them finance.
Well, this goes on and on. So that's kind of like

Speaker 2 who are participating at those things. And then one last thing I just have to throw in there: there was

Speaker 2 one of

Speaker 2 the Sanders rallies was interrupted by these two

Speaker 2 really kind of outrageous black ladies and young ladies, and it seemed to fall apart.

Speaker 2 I didn't see a, I wasn't watching it on C-SPAN, but these things just seem like tailor-made for benefiting Republicans.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you're going to see a lot of great midterm commercials on the Republican side.

Speaker 2 They're so rich. They should have a commercial with Senator Holland with the margaritas array talking to the M13 person.

Speaker 2 They should have all of those

Speaker 2 CNN clips of people saying they didn't like the United States and hate all of that.

Speaker 2 I don't quite understand

Speaker 2 the discrepancy. I understand limousine liberals and all of that.
We've always had that.

Speaker 2 But this radical movement that's taking over the Democratic Party is the percentage of people who are at college, in college, graduated from college, is just way out of proportion, over 50%.

Speaker 2 And the affluence meter is high. They're not representative.
And that's true.

Speaker 2 Every time you watch the people who were being picked up for the vandalism of Tesla, did you you see that there was a mental health advisor, a woman that was a therapist, was scratching, destroying things?

Speaker 2 And every time I read about it, it's some usual, usually, and I'm stereotyping, but I think the stereotype would be supported by data.

Speaker 2 A white person, male or female, probably over the age of 50, and with some type of either two-year or four-year or even higher

Speaker 2 degree. And that might apply also to the people who are leveling threats about shooting people, killing people.
Kind of the Mangione.

Speaker 2 That's kind of what the profile is now of the left. And then that begs the question, why now? What is going on? It reminds me of the 70s, the late 60s and 70s.

Speaker 2 When you look at the people in the Symbolese Liberation Army and all of that stuff, they were mostly white. They were educated.
They came from affluent families.

Speaker 2 And they were searching for meaning and

Speaker 2 violence. And it was kind of directed at what they thought was middle class, clueless, reactionary, deserving of violence America.
And these people do not like when

Speaker 2 when Trump says they hate America, he should be more specific.

Speaker 2 They hate the middle class. They feel they have no culture, they have no taste, they don't have the romance of the poor, and they don't have their money and

Speaker 2 their sophistication. They can't stand them.
They look at a Trump rally and they say, look at, compare a Trump rally to Coachilla. All those people have American flags.
They all look the same.

Speaker 2 You look at Cochilla, we've got nudity, we've got LBGQ, TQ, we've got hate America, we've got all this weird stuff. It's so much more exciting.
There's music and da da da da da.

Speaker 2 Well, I think that thing you said before, Victor, about someone saying what's the next step has to be killing. You know, you go back 50 years, maybe I'm just riffing here: patina of

Speaker 2 flower power and

Speaker 2 groovy, lovins,

Speaker 2 all that kind of weirdness. Not to say there wasn't terrible violence, right? Bill Ayers and company were bombing everything left and right, you know.

Speaker 2 Black Panthers were murdering people, so it was a terrible time. But at least it had that kind of

Speaker 2 patina.

Speaker 2 There's no such thing now.

Speaker 2 Yeah, what happened with that is

Speaker 2 a lovey-dovey aspect to any of this. They really do just hate pure and simple.

Speaker 2 We talked about a little bit in this early 60s, 62 to 68, it started out with Monterey pop and Peter Paul and Mary and folk music and Bob Dylan without electric guitars.

Speaker 2 Joan Baez, very left-wing, but mostly music and art.

Speaker 2 And then it gravitated into the flower power, Summer of Love, San Francisco 1968,

Speaker 2 come to San Francisco, all that stuff. And it was

Speaker 2 share, it was kind of a communist utopia, lotus eaters,

Speaker 2 Timothy Leary, drop out, tune in,

Speaker 2 turn on.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 that didn't work. It didn't stop the Vietnam War.
It didn't change America. And the wire-rimmed glasses, the way the Beatles had transmogrified from kind of silly,

Speaker 2 shaggy hair to, you know, really freaked out looking. And then it got, everybody moved on.
And so by the 70s, a lot of these hippies had, that's what,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 they were yuppies. That's where the word came from.
And, you know, that

Speaker 2 the great pretender, that great song.

Speaker 2 And, you know,

Speaker 2 so my point is, there was a hardcore element that stayed. And that was the Bill Ayers.
That was the Charles Manson. That was the hardcore.
They looked like hippies, but

Speaker 2 they never wanted to move on and join what they called the establishment. They wanted to destroy it.
That was a Weatherman underground.

Speaker 2 And what's weird about this group is,

Speaker 2 and you're absolutely right, Jock, that these people have adopted the anger and the violence of that extreme post-hippie movement, that type of rebellion. They're not calling for let's peace and love

Speaker 2 when, as I mentioned, this PhD student at George Mason said he wanted to kill people. And you hear that a lot.

Speaker 2 And when, you know, I won't mention names, but there were a lot of reputable people who when

Speaker 2 Donald Trump was almost killed, I think I'll mention I like him, John McWhorter, but right on Glenn Lowry's podcast, he said that it might have been better if Trump had been shot.

Speaker 2 So my point is that this is a hardcore, this is not the French Revolutionary people of 1789 and 90 that were trying to get rid of the Bourbons, create a constitutional monarchy and a parliament, and maybe emulate what Britain had done with the the king versus the parliament and gradually disseminate the focus and loci of power to an executive, judicial,

Speaker 2 legislative branch. That was what the French Revolution,

Speaker 2 I think the original 1789 people were for, but by 1792

Speaker 2 you've got what we've got now. These are hardcore revolutionaries and they

Speaker 2 and they're wealthy people, just like during the French Revolution, just like Bill Ayers. He was the son of a utility executive.
They were all wealthy.

Speaker 2 And these people are very wealthy that are leading

Speaker 2 this group and funding it.

Speaker 2 I still think of these Coke commercials of, I want to teach the world to drink a Coke and love, and everyone holds their hands on a hill, and

Speaker 2 none of that coverage anymore. Hey, Victor, before we get on to lady astronauts, I just want to

Speaker 2 talk about too many of our new viewers and listeners about our friends at bestotgrill.com.

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Speaker 2 And we thank the good people from Sol Air for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Speaker 2 Maybe you can cook apples on a Solair grill. I don't know, Victor.
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 My problem is if I cut the sound, it doesn't come back on sometimes. So people are hearing me eat an apple.
It's all part of the beauty of this ridiculous show.

Speaker 2 I took an antibiotic, and I think that the apple calms me. Good.
My stomach, I should say, euphemistically. Okay.
Blue Origin, Victor. Blue Origin.
I was 31.

Speaker 2 And the people on it were Katie Perry, Lauren Sanchez, who is the soon-to-be-bride of Bacheff Bezos, Gail King from

Speaker 2 CBS.

Speaker 2 I don't know the other ladies. Amanda Nagoyan, Aisha Bo, Carrie-Ann Flynn.
They're all astronauts.

Speaker 2 Some commentator wrote, they're a bunch of Botox ducklipped millionaires, billionaires playing astronaut for 10 minutes.

Speaker 2 Victor, boy, oh boy, has this thing been commented on?

Speaker 2 I know. I mean, the rocket,

Speaker 2 the Bezos rocket looked impressive, and the mission was flawless, and the capsule came down, didn't go in the ocean. I hit hard.
It looked good, but the point is,

Speaker 2 what was the point? Because it just went up for 11 minutes and came down. Maybe it was just a trial.
I mean, there is an element.

Speaker 2 I mean, if somebody said, Victor, would you like to get on a rocket and go off at

Speaker 2 3,000 miles an hour or something and come back down to Earth?

Speaker 2 I'd say,

Speaker 2 I don't know. So there was an element of danger, but what was the point? And I think the point was that they were trying to say

Speaker 2 Bezos

Speaker 2 Empire was that Elon is not the only person doing this. But Elon is the only person doing this.
Because while this was going on,

Speaker 2 Elon had just rescued people in deep space, and Elon had just launched another whole series of rockets flawlessly that have put

Speaker 2 satellites all around the globe and is offering high-speed internet, not just to the Ukrainian resistance to the invasion by Russia, but to everybody.

Speaker 2 And he's already planning a sophisticated mission to the moon, to Mars. So, what was the he's so far ahead? And then I saw the women in the rescue, the woman astro, none of them were made up, Jack.

Speaker 2 They didn't have Botox. They were serious feminists.
That's what feminism is about. A woman going on a mission to outer space that

Speaker 2 everybody was worried might not work. They had been stranded there.
They had been courageous, man and woman. And another woman came in to rescue them.

Speaker 2 And there was no distinction between the task, between male or female. There was a point to it, and they were heroic, and they proved that women can do just what men can in space.
Okay.

Speaker 2 But this, why have all women? And then why don't you just reverse it and say,

Speaker 2 well, we're going to put all the women in the guidance center and the engineering center, and we'll put 11 men up there.

Speaker 2 Or seven men. I don't think a lot of men would want to do it.
If you said that that we're going to select people by only their gender.

Speaker 2 So they were trying to say we're going to show that women can do this, but they only put women up there, but they didn't go the whole way and say, if women are going to be up there, then women should be able to program the spacecraft and engineer the fuel and load the fuel.

Speaker 2 But they didn't do that. And then to have them kind of correct people on the air, you shouldn't say mankind.

Speaker 2 I don't want to be. Again, they were courageous to be in there in the first place, but it looked like a fashion show.
True women are like men,

Speaker 2 that women who do these so-called male tasks that originally does it, and they do them well, and they do them as equally as men.

Speaker 2 They're like men that don't comb their hair every day. They're not like Gavin Newsome, versions of Gavin Newsham, female version.

Speaker 2 And that's

Speaker 2 and you don't, you didn't see the female,

Speaker 2 the woman who was, I guess, almost 60, trapped up there for months. I didn't see her

Speaker 2 with evidence of Botox or makeup or any of that stuff. And that's what was so sad about it.
Gosh, I wonder how they're doing.

Speaker 2 What a. I'm going away for the weekend and you don't come back for nine months and you're not ever going to come back.

Speaker 2 I think they could have been brought back much earlier.

Speaker 2 And it was a political decision not to have a risky mission during the campaign. Those are terrible things.
A great movie, A Man in the Hole, that Kirk Douglas movie.

Speaker 2 You can get the guy out, but you're not going to get him out because you want the headlines and you play the politics. And these things are just terrible.
Anyway, Victor,

Speaker 2 we have to talk about your views on Donald Trump and Harvard.

Speaker 2 Now, I know you talked about them with the great Sammy Wink, but you've written about this, and we have a new headline out today that Donald Trump is going after Harvard for yet another billion dollars.

Speaker 2 And we'll get your thoughts as we

Speaker 2 around the turn into the home stretch. And we will be back with your thoughts after these important final messages.

Speaker 2 We're back with Victor Davis Hanson's show. I mentioned earlier, by the way, Victor's got a website, The Blade of Perseus.
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Speaker 2 Because you'll find archives of these podcasts. A lot of new listeners, a lot of new viewers.
They want to know what has happened before. You'll find them here.

Speaker 2 Links to Victor's various books, his other appearances,

Speaker 2 the articles he writes, and he's going to talk about one in a minute. He writes weekly, an essay for American Greatness, Weekly Syndicated Column.

Speaker 2 And then twice a week, he writes an exclusive article for The Blade of Perseus. And then he gives an exclusive video for The Blade of Perseus.
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Speaker 2 I would say something, I've been bombarded lately.

Speaker 2 I don't know. I mean, I have an office where I have a person I've hired to go through everything.

Speaker 2 But I've been bombarded, I feel really bad, by people. I guess they get my address off the internet and they send books.
And then they, you know, they send cash for the mailing.

Speaker 2 So, and they want me to sign. I want to sign them, but for me to get like one every two days or two or three a day or something, and then I have to go into town

Speaker 2 and sign them and go to stand in line at UPS or the post office to resend them. You know, it's a lot of, so I'm behind is what I'm trying to say.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 But I got nice notes from people. Thank you for the podcast.
Would you please sign this book or this book? Enclosed is,

Speaker 2 you know, a label. All you have to do is go to UPS or here's an Amazon gift card and you can use it.

Speaker 2 But the way it works here in the rural California, it takes a long time to go up, you know, and I've been doing it now for,

Speaker 2 but I don't know. I think our podcast has got a little bit more attention than usual, but so it's not just one a month, it's like three or four or five a week sometime.

Speaker 2 Go to the post office, you meet people in masks and other

Speaker 2 state changes. Okay.

Speaker 2 Oh, I don't want to get into that, what I see at the post office.

Speaker 2 All right, Victor, here's a headline: Trump Tiank another

Speaker 2 billion in funding from Harvard. And this is from today's New York Post recording on April 21st, Monday.

Speaker 2 President Trump reportedly plans to pull an additional billion dollars in funding from Harvard University, just a week after freezing $2.2 billion in multi-year federal grants over the Ivy League School's refusal to make changes to curb alleged anti-Semitism and overhaul admissions policies.

Speaker 2 The latest punishment comes after Harvard released a lengthy list of demands from the Trump administration that White House officials had thought would remain private, sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Speaker 2 Victor, what are your evolving thoughts on the Trump versus Harvard war?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 Harvard, this is an art of the deal, everybody.

Speaker 2 So Harvard has not addressed anti-Semitism, and they said they were going to do it, and then they said they were not going to allow classes to be disrupted.

Speaker 2 They just had one, I guess, two weeks ago at Kennedy School of Government. They haven't addressed it.
They said they were

Speaker 2 not going to disobey the Supreme Court, but they're finding ways

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 they still use race in a variety of manifestations, and they're just not committed. So, Trump wanted to get their attention, so he gave them a whole list of demands.

Speaker 2 And some people on the right, I think Heather McDonald said, you know, you can't, you really shouldn't do this because you're micromanaging the university and you don't want to get into it.

Speaker 2 Well, I would just say that that's what has been happening from the left. They go into a university and they say, Title IX, you're going to restructure your entire

Speaker 2 I was at Cal State Fresno and they just came in and said, this number of people, we're not going going to give you federal fundings unless you have this number of women athletes.

Speaker 2 And by the way, if you can't do it in baseball, then you're going to have a huge equestrian program. And that's what you're going to do, whether you like it or not.

Speaker 2 And then they came in and said, then you're going to fit hit affirmative action guide, whether you like it or not. It's disparate impact and proportional rep.
So they did it all the time.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so my point is, yes, the federal government shouldn't micromanage, but they can. And then in this, this wasn't Trump.

Speaker 2 This was a commission that he had appointed, that people who knew a lot about what was going on in the university. I think Harvard's making a mistake.

Speaker 2 It's up to 9 billion possible loss per annum, and they've already done two. Now he's added another billion cut.

Speaker 2 And I would just say to Harvard what I would say to where I work at Stanford and all these places, I don't think you want to get into a public fight with the federal government.

Speaker 2 Because you, as I said in this column today, you're like a mossy rock on a hillside.

Speaker 2 You look really nice, granite, picturesque, there's an oak tree, but you turn that rock over, and there's all sorts of creepy things underneath it.

Speaker 2 So if the public realizes what you're doing, they're not going to support it. And what do you mean by that, Victor?

Speaker 2 If they know that a surcharge or an overhead is 10 to 15 percent in business, and they see that when a scholar gets a federal check these universities are taking anywhere from 30 to 60 percent even in the age of zoom where some of these scholars are zooming and they're they're not they're not going to support that and that's like a hundred and eighty million dollars a year from where i work so that's not defensible if they find out

Speaker 2 that at your universities, if somebody is angry or has legitimate reasons or ill and says, that person sexually harassed me, or that person said this type of word, hate speech, you are not going to go before a university panel and face your accuser.

Speaker 2 They're not going to be identified, and

Speaker 2 you're not going to go there with legal counsel.

Speaker 2 You're going to have an administrator probably put you on suspension, de facto. at least until scrutiny happens.
That's what happens.

Speaker 2 If you are at these universities and you can't, because of the 14th Amendment or a recent Supreme Court ruling, you cannot discriminate or segregate, can't be

Speaker 2 separate but equal, Plessy versus Ferguson. You can't do that by race.
You can't do it at all. But here's how they do it.
They say, you know what?

Speaker 2 We're going to have the main graduation for everybody.

Speaker 2 But then we're going to have auxiliary graduations based on race.

Speaker 2 So we're going to have the Asian, we're going to have maybe the gender women, we're going to have the Hispanic and the black graduation. Now, they're open to anybody,

Speaker 2 but they're primarily focused on these racial groups. And you go to these things, and I was at Cal State Fresno.
There are nobody there but that particular group, and by design.

Speaker 2 If during the Latino graduation at Fresno State, if I showed up, I would be out. A student student once asked me to go there because he graduated.

Speaker 2 I was just, it wasn't,

Speaker 2 I wasn't,

Speaker 2 there weren't many people who were not Latino. But my point is, if you say another minority, a Jewish, Jewish groups do not have their own graduations.
Whites don't.

Speaker 2 And you'll say, well, they're the majority. No, they're not.
At Stanford, they're 20 to 22 percent white. If you had a white,

Speaker 2 you couldn't even, you wouldn't use the word white. You just said, after the main graduation,

Speaker 2 to honor the legacy of the European Western tradition, of which this university and its free speech and constitutionalism is, and Renaissance art, we want to emphasize that legacy.

Speaker 2 So we're going to have a European-American graduation for the small minority of 20% at Stanford. They would go ballistic.
And they should go ballistic. I wouldn't want to go to it.

Speaker 2 But that's what they would do.

Speaker 2 They don't do that. So what Trump is saying is, we know what you're doing.
You are using safe spaces. And then they'll say to you, well, we don't have segregated dorms.
We have theme houses.

Speaker 2 And then you actually look at it very carefully and you see that the African-American or whatever African term they use, or the Latino, La Raza, whatever it is, that's 99% of that particular race.

Speaker 2 So we know what you're doing. And the same thing about admissions.
We know what you're trying to do. We know that you're trying to get away.

Speaker 2 If somebody said, if there's an executive order that says no DI, then you're going to have the Department of Belonging or Community Outreach. And that's what they're doing.

Speaker 2 And they have utter contempt. And then

Speaker 2 they know that when the federal government went in and guaranteed student loans, they being higher education in general, they started packaging student aid as a federal guaranteed loan.

Speaker 2 We can get that for you. So if you pay $100,000 a year at Columbia or Harvard or Yale or Princeton for room, tuition, and board, we'll get an element it will be a student loan.

Speaker 2 They don't care whether you ever pay it back. They get it up front that there's $1.7 trillion

Speaker 2 out there

Speaker 2 and about 12 to 13 percent of that is either delayed, the people haven't, they just walked away or they're late on their payments. The universities don't care.
They could care less.

Speaker 2 If you said to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, you've got these huge endowments, you're going to pledge those against student loans.

Speaker 2 So you have your financial package and it's $100,000 a year for everything. You're going to loan what you don't give outright.

Speaker 2 I will swear that they will have

Speaker 2 a program to make sure you graduate in four years. They will monitor you.
They will guide you on your major. They will tell how much your major makes.
And they will get every cent out of you.

Speaker 2 But when you take the moral hazard and you transfer in the government,

Speaker 2 and the next thing people don't understand about this rock that's been turned over, in the last 30 years, there's been about $60 billion

Speaker 2 from foreign governments. And almost all of them, with the exception of a few EU nations and maybe a few

Speaker 2 South Korea or Japan, but compared to who's really giving, it's mostly Middle East autocracies and in particular

Speaker 2 countries that send thousands of students, Gutter,

Speaker 2 China, United Arab Emirates, all of these countries. And they, this year alone, just two countries, Communist China and Gutter,

Speaker 2 sent

Speaker 2 $500 million and just this last fiscal year. And what is that money for? That is to set up a professorship, a Middle East studies program, courses in

Speaker 2 a Confucius Institute. And that is to

Speaker 2 what?

Speaker 2 In the case of Communist China, it is to make sure you got 300,000 students here and you make sure that they go back and report what they saw, what they do, and that 2,000 or 3,000 are actively involved in transferring technology.

Speaker 2 So, all you have to do is look at a Chinese submarine, aircraft carrier, jet craft, anything.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 based on U.S. or European or Western research.

Speaker 2 That's what they're here for. And the universities know that because they charge them 100% no discount, maybe 105% with overhead.
And

Speaker 2 if the public knew that, how reliant they are on federal cash and these universities that are bastions of

Speaker 2 anti-Americanism,

Speaker 2 you're too conservative, you're too reactionary, and then they take money

Speaker 2 from a country that has a million Uyghurs working in slave conditions or the gutter where I think, what, 10% of the population is probably Arabic and the rest are indentured servants, kind of

Speaker 2 labor imported from Indonesia, the Philippines, India.

Speaker 2 It's not a very liberal paradigm, and they don't care. And then if you look at surveys, and there's a lot of them, just go Google

Speaker 2 proportion of conservative faculty at higher education. It's about

Speaker 2 2 to 10%.

Speaker 2 I think I just looked at a study. Bryn Moira had 135 faculty, not one registered Republican.
Williams was about the same.

Speaker 2 And so they don't make any pretense about diversity. And everybody's, well, Victor,

Speaker 2 they have an open search. They're required to.
Yes, they do. And they also, until recently, had basically McCarthy-era loyalty oaths, called diversity statements.
And that was really a tip-off.

Speaker 2 Can you please explain, in your undergraduate, graduate, and scholarly career, in your teaching, how have you made a personal commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they have a way of weeding it out.

Speaker 2 I know that because I get an email about every three days, and it goes like this: Dear Professor Hansen, I got my PhD in political science history, fill in the blank, and I have been in trouble getting a job.

Speaker 2 Is there any way that you know anybody at Hoover that would want, could you blurb my book, that kind of stuff. They don't have a network that helps, and they're systematically excluded.

Speaker 2 I could go on, but when you look at all the things they're doing,

Speaker 2 trying to get around DEI, segregated ceremonies, safe spaces, theme houses, and it's all the money they take from abroad.

Speaker 2 If you look at the last 30 years, higher education, with few exceptions, has doubled the rate of inflation. on their tuition, room, and board.

Speaker 2 I know that Hillsdale is cheaper to live than Yale or Harvard or Stanford, but right now, as I speak, it's about $46,000 to go to Hillsdale and pay room board and tuition.

Speaker 2 It's about $95,000 to $100,000. It's not double.

Speaker 2 And why isn't it? Because Hillsdale doesn't take any federal money and their students are not on federal funds. I'm not saying that they would do that anyway, they wouldn't, but they can't.

Speaker 2 Because they guarantee the student support. And they want those students to be happy.

Speaker 2 they want them to be educated, they want them to be competitive, they want them out in four years and they want them to be productive and pay back any loans that they take.

Speaker 2 And so everything about the university is something that the public would object to.

Speaker 2 And if they get into a big fight with the federal government, I guarantee you, we're going to learn about the overhead they charge.

Speaker 2 We're going to learn about the politicalization and weaponization of the faculty. We're going to learn about the racial segregation in graduation space, spaces, dorms.

Speaker 2 We're going to learn about how they cheat on affirmative action and DEI. We're going to learn about all of that.
We're going to look at all the federal money and where it goes.

Speaker 2 We're going to look at the courses and see if you look at the economics department or anything, how many courses are on Hayek or Tom Soul versus Marks, da-da-da-da-da.

Speaker 2 And the Pelpink is going to be shocked. And I'm just scratching the surface.
So they have a lot of liability. And yet,

Speaker 2 I guess they figure that there's a lot of Supreme Court or district judges that all went to Harvard and they're always going to rule on their behalf. I don't know.
But I think they're sorely mistaken.

Speaker 2 And when you look at polls, there's an America Speak recent poll. It's about 30% of the population has a positive view of higher education.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it doesn't work anymore. They used to say, you cut this, and you don't understand the role that we do in sophisticated medical research and engineering.
We do understand that.

Speaker 2 And that's why it's really bad on your part, because you hide behind those departments. And you make it hard for them.
And already they're changing. So a lot of those medical

Speaker 2 grants are doing their DEI, this underserved community. Exactly.

Speaker 2 But they use them.

Speaker 2 Well, we're commies and humanities and social science, but you can't cut anything because we got this great engineering that's working on a rocket.

Speaker 2 That's how that's kind of the argumentation they use.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's even in those departments, engineering, science, calculus, math, physics, it's pretty much dominated by liberal faculty. Not as much.

Speaker 2 But everything about it has changed. It's just not what it was at one time.

Speaker 2 The brand has been tarnished.

Speaker 2 Too much money. Too much money.

Speaker 2 Let me make a statement on behalf of an institution we rarely mention, Grove City College, which was the trailblazer in not accepting federal aid.

Speaker 2 It's a very good college. Yeah, and our friend, you know, our friend, and he

Speaker 2 reminded me of this. And I just checked their tuition and room and board, etc.

Speaker 2 Grove City does not accept federal aid, and it's less than $40,000 a year,

Speaker 2 akin to Hillsdale. So bravo, Grove City.
And if you're looking for colleges that are traditional and

Speaker 2 offer solid education and don't cost you an arm and a leg and have a valuable brand to some degree,

Speaker 2 Grove City is a place to check out. By the way, Victor, I did want to mention, as you mentioned, you talked about the alternate

Speaker 2 graduation ceremonies. Chris Ruffo put out related to Harvard.
They're called Affinity Celebrations, and they are for

Speaker 2 graduates with disabilities, indigenous, first-gen, next-gen. Then there's a one glob of honoring Asian, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Desi American graduates.

Speaker 2 I don't know what a DESI American is.

Speaker 2 Black graduates,

Speaker 2 Latinx, Latinx, as I say, graduates, Arab graduates. And then the one that's not an affinity celebration, it's a lavender celebration that honors LGBTQ graduates.
Is you're right, no white,

Speaker 2 no Jew affinity.

Speaker 2 I would add that the disability ones

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 some of the genders were added on

Speaker 2 over the years because the original were just purely race and they were getting criticism, Latino, black, Asian, da-da-da.

Speaker 2 And now they said, well, it's not about race, it's about every unique group's characteristics.

Speaker 2 And why not just say unity, that we're all the same, that we're all human beings, and whatever differences are superficial to the eye, and why don't we try to unite for a change?

Speaker 2 Why do you turn out people

Speaker 2 that leave those places wanting to be tribal and to identify first with people like them or they think their race is essential?

Speaker 2 Every time I had a student in the Cal State system that identified by race, I did too. I think I mentioned that on on a podcast.

Speaker 2 I had a young woman who said, every time I had her in class, she said, as a Latina, I can't relate to

Speaker 2 Herodotus. This is a course in

Speaker 2 Greek literature and translation. And I would say, as a Swedish American, I can't relate to that question.
And then she would call the dean, and the dean would call me.

Speaker 2 What the hell are you doing, Victor?

Speaker 2 And I said, I'm trying to make a point that it's ridiculous to self-identify by your race. It's your ideas that matter.
And I tutor hundreds of Latino kids, and none of them do that, just this one.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 why,

Speaker 2 you know, I think we're getting to the point where

Speaker 2 I'm worried about higher education because

Speaker 2 there's a lot of good things about it, and it's

Speaker 2 not, we've talked about the sins of commission, Jack, but we haven't talked about the sins of omission.

Speaker 2 All of this this emphases that we've talked about, the effort to segregate dorms, the effort to go through and identify, what is that guy's race now? Let me look at his name.

Speaker 2 Do you think he's 40% Latino? You think he's 10% black? Did they send a picture? I had a student say that they sent 23 and me to show that he was what his racial purity was.

Speaker 2 So my point is, that's a lot of work. And then when you have people,

Speaker 2 the fundamental thing is you say all during during the 90s and the 80s that were, we are Harvard, and

Speaker 2 we are very selective, Jack. We take the 90, we reject 97%, and our graduates have about an 780 SAT, and we have a very sophisticated freshman calculus.

Speaker 2 Okay, that was your standards, and that's why you separate yourself from Cal State Fresno or Cal State Bakery. I get that.
And now what are you doing?

Speaker 2 You're introducing remedial math at Harvard and remedial math at Stanford.

Speaker 2 Because according to your admissions policy, your famous math classes that were required of most students, your students can't do it. And yet, what are you going to do?

Speaker 2 You're going to give them basically a high school remedial at these prestigious classes.

Speaker 2 And how's that going to work out for you when that student goes and sees an employer? Well, I can tell you how it's worked out. There's a lot of employers in Silicon Valley who look at these blue chip

Speaker 2 and they say, you know what?

Speaker 2 They don't know much at all. They don't know much about history.
They don't know much about language. They don't know much about science or math.

Speaker 2 I'd rather have a guy or a girl from Georgia Tech or Clemson or something.

Speaker 2 Not these people.

Speaker 2 And I don't mean these people. I mean all the people from Stanford are

Speaker 2 and so they're not merucratic. And I don't say they have to be, but they said they were.
They said they used to brag in the 70s and 80s how hard it was to get into our school.

Speaker 2 It was just impossible because we have curriculum classes that nobody can do unless you have that preparation and that aptitude.

Speaker 2 And that's why we, when we graduate, they're just, these are the leaders and shakers of the whole world. Well, that's not true anymore.

Speaker 2 And their courses are a joke, a lot of them. They're all political.
They don't teach the inductive Socratic mode. They don't say to the freshman, you are here to be inductive, not deductive.

Speaker 2 You are to look at examples, phenomena, and then you are to draw a thesis from it. You're not going to start with a thesis and then apply it to individual and make them fit.

Speaker 2 And then, in addition to the inductive method, we're going to give you the tools of a basic education.

Speaker 2 You're going to know what a Doric column is, you're going to know what the Pythagorean, you're going to know who Lincoln was,

Speaker 2 you're going to know what the Battle of Gettysburg. We're going to give you all those facts.
So, you're educated. They don't do that at all.

Speaker 2 Victor has six apples. Jack takes three apples.
How does Sammy feel?

Speaker 2 That's what education is now. Hey, Victor, we've come to the conclusion, near conclusion.
We thank our listeners and viewers who leave comments.

Speaker 2 There's so many comments now to get through, especially on YouTube. But here are two I'm going to read quick.

Speaker 2 This is just from a few days ago. This is from Thomas V 9258 who writes, I'm a senior economist at my company.
Don't sell yourself short, VDH.

Speaker 2 You're more intelligent than most economists and absolutely way more intelligent than any commenter. Okay.
And then we have another one from Michael L.

Speaker 2 Wilson, 7971, who writes, The other day, when you told the story of your namesake and about the ring you wear, I was deeply moved and even more proud to be an American. Your dad was right.

Speaker 2 You had a lot to live up to. I think the original Victor would be very proud of you.
Thank you for all. That's very nice.
I hope so. I hope so.

Speaker 2 That was a wonderful

Speaker 2 history. We never know until it's over, though, do we?

Speaker 2 Everything shall be revealed when it's over. Yeah, that's my fear when I get to see my life on a movie.

Speaker 2 Well, I get really scared when I, every time I look at my mother's copy of The Inferno and I see those Gustave Dorier illustrations of the eighth ring or the seventh ring, those pitchforks and horn.

Speaker 2 Yeah, make room for Fowler.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor, speaking of Fowler, I'm actually wearing my hoodie here, Amphil, which has the congratulations. Well, thank you.
It came as a Christmas gift from the company.

Speaker 2 We have the Center for Civil Society at Amphil, related nonprofit. It publishes the Civil Thoughts.
That's the free weekly email newsletter I write every week at the Center.

Speaker 2 We're trying to strengthen civil society.

Speaker 2 The point of Civil Thoughts is just to give 14 recommended readings, great articles I've come across the previous week that I think dear intelligent Americans will like.

Speaker 2 So why don't you go to civilthoughts.com, sign up. Again, it's free.
We're not selling your name.

Speaker 2 I know you're going to like it, and I thank the many people who write me to say that they have enjoyed Civil Thoughts immensely. Victor, you've been terrific through all the

Speaker 2 apple bites and

Speaker 2 the dealing with medication and whatever. You just...
And they've never had a sinus infection for seven weeks, but it's going to end because I said so. How's that?

Speaker 2 We will just pray directly to God. I'm going to be a Nietzschean figure.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you're indestructible. You will recover.
Hey, thanks, Victor, for all the wisdom you shared. Thanks, folks, for tuning in, listening, watching, writing to us.
And

Speaker 2 we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Bye-bye.
Thank you, everybody.