Commencements, Visas, Debt, and Trump's Trumping

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Speaker 1 Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Speaker 1 Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. And he's back in the Selma saddle.

Speaker 1 Some of you have seen this, the two most recent episodes of the podcast on YouTube and Rumble. And Victor and the great Sammy Wink were recording from Washington, but he's back now in Selma.

Speaker 1 He's even got kind of an agrarian cap on today.

Speaker 1 Is that Campos? Is that the case? Yeah, Tony. It's Furman.

Speaker 1 There's two brothers. I like them both.

Speaker 1 This is Furman Campos Farm. He rents my place.

Speaker 1 And he's one of the larger larger almond growers in the world. But he's a wonderful person.

Speaker 1 I was at a wonderful family. So does Tony Campos is a wonderful person, too.
Yeah, I like Tony. I was at his facility.
There was a mountain. It looked like it was 50 feet tall of

Speaker 1 almond husks and debris. Tony Campos and Fermin Campos's fathers

Speaker 1 came from

Speaker 1 Basque land between Spain and France with nothing and and worked 20 hours a day and ended up

Speaker 1 as a brother combination that probably

Speaker 1 one of the most successful almond farmers around. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, best almonds in the world come from near where you are, Victor. Except no imitations.
Hey, we are recording on Saturday, May 31st. This particular episode will be up on Tuesday, June 3rd.

Speaker 1 We have a lot of graduation, Ivy League graduation and related article matters to talk about. I can only find my notes.

Speaker 1 Marco Rubio, speaking of colleges, Marco Rubio has issued an edict on visas for foreign students. Donald Trump has dropped a bomb on the Federalist Society.
Jamie Dimon,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 great banker, has some very well

Speaker 1 reported thoughts on debt and China, and we'll get Victor's take on that. And if we have time,

Speaker 1 conservative gays

Speaker 1 and the battle with leftist gays. I don't think it's unimportant.
We will get to most, if not all, of these things when we return from these important messages.

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Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show here. I'm taking notes, Victor.
Let's go to, let's take

Speaker 1 these

Speaker 1 college-y topics. We should start with two commencements.
Let me lump these together. One's Harvard, one's MIT.

Speaker 1 Let's take the MIT one first. A commencement speaker accused the Massachusetts

Speaker 1 Institute of Technology of being part of wiping, quote, Palestine from the face of the earth, end quote, Thursday. This is two days ago, leading multiple students to walk out.

Speaker 1 Megha Vimuri, MIT's class of 2025 president, praised her classmates for protesting against Israel in the wake of the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack.

Speaker 1 Victor, I think she may also have had a prepared speech that she switched out

Speaker 1 in order to

Speaker 1 do that. And then

Speaker 1 Harvard's commencement

Speaker 1 speaker, here's a story. I'm not sure where I got it.

Speaker 1 Harvard Divinity School graduate selected by faculty members to speak at the school's commencement ceremony used her address to praise Elam Taiti Tamakla,

Speaker 1 Tamakla. Yeah, he's the assaulter.
Correct, yeah. And we have some other thoughts on the assault later.
So, Victor, two

Speaker 1 leading colleges of America and love of Hamas persists on elite campuses.

Speaker 1 MIT and Harvard need to quit why they're behind. And they really do need to.

Speaker 1 Because the whole world, if you look at a Gallup poll three three years ago, it was quoted in a number of venues. It was almost 60% had a good impression of higher education.
That's down to about 30%.

Speaker 1 It's going to go lower. So they do things on these campuses that all of us who've spent our entire lives on these campuses have known about and have thought.

Speaker 1 But the public was not aware of how extreme and how insidious it is on a campus and what their role, pernicious role, unfortunately, in American society is, or can be.

Speaker 1 And so far, the public has given them a pass because they say, well, we train the world's engineers. We do

Speaker 1 great science. Yes, you do that.

Speaker 1 But you also do a lot of damage in the social sciences and humanities and the university at large.

Speaker 1 And the scientific and mathematic communities do not produce the administrators in general that run the university. And so

Speaker 1 I can't figure it out, Jack. Here you are right in the middle of a dissension and a fight with the

Speaker 1 Trump administration. And here you have these two liberal neighboring campuses, MIT and Harvard.
And the Harvard president, is her name Kornboff? I can't remember how to pronounce it.

Speaker 1 She was one of the three that didn't get fired, the only one. There was Claudine Gay, and then there was the Penn president, and she survived.

Speaker 1 So she has a commencement, and the speaker, as you point out, hijacked and switched and then gave a diatribe. Jewish students, of course, basically

Speaker 1 walked out and then

Speaker 1 the president just didn't really mention her, just said she won't be taking part in the

Speaker 1 celebration. And she said some milquetoasty thing, like everybody has a right for the First Amendment, but this was

Speaker 1 an event where we were apprised that she was going to do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so what? The fact of the matter is she destroyed your graduation

Speaker 1 with her politicking, and she should be punished. And if I were you, I'd expel her before

Speaker 1 the term was up and not graduate her, and then let her sue you. But you're just making Donald Trump's case, aren't you?

Speaker 1 That you cannot or will not stop the politicking that is basically in support of what Hamas did and is doing.

Speaker 1 Remember, they sent not just, they didn't just kill 1,200 people, they sent along with Hezbollah 20,000 rockets to kill civilians. They hid, they hid.

Speaker 1 And if you want to say there's civilian collateral damage, yes, there is. It's because they hid in a labyrinth, subterranean labyrinth beneath mosque, hospitals, and schools.

Speaker 1 And maybe the Harvard faculty could figure out how to get killers underneath a hospital and they could do a better job than Israelis. But so far, nobody's offered them any advice other than

Speaker 1 get over it. And by the way, that protest against and the anti-Semitism started after October 7th and not 22 days later when the Israelis went into Gaza.

Speaker 1 So they were triumphantly celebrating the death and murder of Jews. Let's get that straight.
Within 24 hours. Within 24 hours.

Speaker 1 BLM made those posters with the hang gliders glorifying those killers from the air. Stanford lecturer separated his class and said, You Jews over there,

Speaker 1 we had all these incidents going on. And then Harvard, you know, they're saying, Well, yeah, we had a comprehensive report, just like Stanford's.
I think Stanford's is 900 pages.

Speaker 1 And yes, it said that there was systematic

Speaker 1 anti-Semitism, and we're addressing it. And then

Speaker 1 in two different graduations, or the law school, two incidents, the person, the two people who roughed up and got in his face, pushed a Jewish student, called him all these names, one of them gets a $65,000 reward.

Speaker 1 And by the way, he wouldn't have gotten that reward had he not

Speaker 1 been

Speaker 1 basically convicted, but they had a settlement where he had to do, I don't know what it was, 80 hours of community service. But he was basically guilty, and that was a no-low contender deal.

Speaker 1 And he was rewarded $65,000. The other participant was made the marshal of the Divinity School, Divinity School.
And he was picked by the faculty, Harvard, by the faculty.

Speaker 1 So the faculty is on record saying that if you go around our campus and you push Jews and you assault them and the police intervene and find you culpable, we're going to reward that for you by giving you a big fat award, the faculty.

Speaker 1 And then we're going to go tell Tony Trump and those right-wing crazy MAGA people that we're dealing with anti-Semitic. No, you're not.
You're anti-Semitic to the core because of two things.

Speaker 1 You want to make 110% on every student, so you bring them in from China and the Middle East, and they're there as 27% of your student body, and then they bring their ideology with them.

Speaker 1 And you don't care about that.

Speaker 1 And then DEI has postulated that if you are a victim, i.e., you're not a white male, cisgender, whatever they call it, then you are a victim, and a a victim is free to be victimizer.

Speaker 1 So they can do whatever they want and they have categorized on that Marxist binary Jews and Israelis as white interlopers, settlers, oppressors, and therefore you can say anything you want about them because

Speaker 1 we are victims. And the subtext of all this, Jack, is as

Speaker 1 the report on the, and we discussed it, the profile of the Columbia students, these kids are the creme of the creme. They are wealthy.
They are privileged.

Speaker 1 Whether they're black or Hispanic or Middle East or white or Asian, they are the wealthiest people and the most privileged. And this is their rite of passage.

Speaker 1 So they go in there and they spout all this thing. But mark my words.
They still may be left by the time they're 40, but they will all be making a lot of money.

Speaker 1 And for all of their equality of result and equity,

Speaker 1 their parents and their network will place them, just like they got placed at Harvard. They will put them in the right law firm, the right investment firm, the right foundation, the right NGO,

Speaker 1 and then they will raise kids just like them. And so this is a toxic tumor in this country, these universities.
I have a lot of friends, you do too, on the right, who are defending Harvard.

Speaker 1 I have colleagues where I work. about free speech and they don't seem to get it.
And what am I saying about get it? It's like immigration. You don't have to

Speaker 1 invite anybody into the United States if you don't want to. It's no right to come here.

Speaker 1 And it's just like the person coming into your home, if you in the middle of dinner, if he says, you know, you're a terrible cook,

Speaker 1 this duck tastes like rubber. You can say, can you please leave? If somebody comes over here

Speaker 1 and they applied for a student visa and you said, yeah, you can study, you know, Middle East history or chemistry and they come over here and they break the law or they support openly a terrorist organization as designated by the state department then you can just say you know i i just we got other people want to come that want your plus slot just buy see it wouldn't want to be here you can do that you don't have to explain anything and that's the same thing with harvard you can just say you know we have thousands of colleges in the united states we've got tens of thousands of community colleges and they need money and we don't have enough money to give everybody.

Speaker 1 So you know after giving you billions, billions, billions every year, we just feel that we'd rather give it to somebody else. We don't have to explain why to you.

Speaker 1 You know, we're going to give you

Speaker 1 here in California, we're going to give it Readley College if we want.

Speaker 1 We'll give them a performing arts center. We'll help them.
These are working class kids. They need technical training, the vocational training center in Fresno.
We'll give that.

Speaker 1 They can do that. They don't have to explain to the Harvard president, And he shouldn't play a wounded fawn.
You know, oh, it's so bad that they're taking my money away. No,

Speaker 1 he's unleashed

Speaker 1 the wind, and he's sowed it, and he's reaping the whirlwind with his students. They can't control him.
They really can't. They're going to keep doing it and doing it and doing it.

Speaker 1 And every day they do it, they make the administration's case. And every time they do it, they're going to have more exposure.

Speaker 1 And finally, people in the public are going to say, wait a minute, they're charging 50%

Speaker 1 surcharges on grants? Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 Oh my gosh.

Speaker 1 In 2022, the Supreme Court said you couldn't use race.

Speaker 1 But all the data,

Speaker 1 Harvard's forced to cough up on hiring faculty and

Speaker 1 admitting it's race. They're just spitting in the eye of the Supreme Court, this liberal organization.
Oh my God. I didn't know they had 27% of their students come from the

Speaker 1 illiberal schools in the liberal countries, and they're using them to pay the tuition over the amount that is accorded to Americans.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, you don't have First Amendment rights?

Speaker 1 You know, it's very funny. I'll just end this round with

Speaker 1 the Harvard and

Speaker 1 MIT, and where I work, Stanford, they're all saying that Donald Trump is intruding into the

Speaker 1 mechanisms of governments. And people I like say that.
I remember, Jack, when Obama was president, he had his Secretary of Education, legal counsel, write a little letter. It was called Dear College.

Speaker 1 And they mailed it out to almost every four-year college in the United States. And it basically said,

Speaker 1 if you, in matters of sexual harassment or assault among your student body. If you don't do the following, we're going to cut off your federal funds.
And the following was:

Speaker 1 from now on, we don't want you to require

Speaker 1 guilty or beyond a reasonable doubt. No, no.

Speaker 1 And we don't want you to

Speaker 1 say the evidence

Speaker 1 suggests this. You have to,

Speaker 1 we're not going to have any of that. So basically, the person.
No due process. Yes, no due process.
The person is not innocent until proven guilty. All you have to do is 51% of the evidence.

Speaker 1 You don't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he's guilty. You just have to say the preponderance of evidence.
They gave outlines that were contrary to the Constitution.

Speaker 1 And nobody said, none of these judges said anything. Not one of them.
These district judges. And by the way, right now, everybody take a deep breath.

Speaker 1 If these 350 left-wing district judges who are issuing these injunctions, if right now at Harvard and MIT

Speaker 1 there were black students who

Speaker 1 systematically got 200, 100 higher SAT scores and higher GPAs than their Asian or white counterparts, and they were not admitted in the same ratio as Asians and whites were with those scores,

Speaker 1 number one. And number two,

Speaker 1 if these two students in the law school and the Divinity had seen a black student and they had accosted him and pushed him, and the Trump administration had intervened and said, we're not going to give you any money because you're systematically discriminating against blacks, both in admissions and the way These district judges would have never even

Speaker 1 blinked an eye. They would have said the Trump administration should be rewarded for that.
And I say that because we know that, because Obama did. He intervened and they didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 And so this whole thing, you know, I'm really disappointed in a lot of close friends of mine on the right who keep saying the following. One of our friends,

Speaker 1 well, I won't mention names, but anyway, it goes something like this. Well, there's a lot of things wrong with the university.

Speaker 1 You know, the surcharges on the grants are too high, and the student loan thing is corrupt and

Speaker 1 there's a lot of anti-Semitism. They don't really track communist Chinese and Qatari money.
I understand that. A lot of anti-Semitism, again, on check.

Speaker 1 First Amendment, if you come into a lecture and they may rough you up like they have other speakers. Judge Duncan, you know, they might hijack the lecture as they did at Stanford Law School.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 1 they do so much good good work in science and math and health. And I just think that Donald Trump has no business interfering in those critical areas.
And I just say to them, he's not interfering.

Speaker 1 He's just saying

Speaker 1 that science can be subsidized by the ten largest grants.

Speaker 1 If you look at the endowment in the Gates Foundation, the Tides Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation,

Speaker 1 it's well over a couple hundred, $300,040, four hundred, half a trillion dollars. Why don't they just devote it to doing it? Then they can do all what they want.
They can do it all.

Speaker 1 They can give award for every Harvard student that hits a Jew.

Speaker 1 They should have an award, not just in the divinity school, the law school, but they should have one in the medical school, the business school, and it should be called Hit the Jew Award.

Speaker 1 And you go out there and you hit a Jew on the Harvard campus, and we're going to give you $65,000, and Bill Gates and the Rockefeller are going to pay for it. That's fine.
I could care less.

Speaker 1 That's their business. I don't like it.
But what the difference that our friends don't understand is there's no right for the federal government to have to write a check for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 Just like they make thousands of decisions every day about what to fund and what not to fund. I can tell you that

Speaker 1 my entire life I've seen absolute geniuses not get a national endowment for the humanities, and I've seen idiots do it. And that's

Speaker 1 nobody sued them, did they? That was the decision of the federal government. And I've seen them cut back, and I've seen them in law.
That is their business.

Speaker 1 And so I wish our legal scholars and our legal eagles on the right would not try to confuse that issue. Yeah.
Well, I'd like to hear another rant from you related, Victor. But first,

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Speaker 1 And we thank the good people at American Alternative Assets for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show. Victor, one quick thing, and then another broader thought for your broader thoughts.

Speaker 1 The $65,000 prize

Speaker 1 was a position to work for for CARE, the radical

Speaker 1 they had their hands on it, fingerprints on it. Yeah.
So that was.

Speaker 1 They know what they're doing. We know what they're doing.
The only mystery is how, to what degree will they shame themselves to try to disguise what they're doing?

Speaker 1 President Garber,

Speaker 1 you're going to lose this. You may think you'll win a tactical victory, but the more we learn about Harvard, you can't stop it.
It's a runner-rate weight train.

Speaker 1 Every time you give one of your sanctimonious performance art virtue signal talks to your faculty so they don't fire you or the Harvard Corporation doesn't fire you,

Speaker 1 you're going to have a loose cannon in the divinity school, the law school, that's going to give an award to a Jew beater. They're going to do it because that's what Harvard is.
You can't stop it.

Speaker 1 Or they're going to hijack a graduation and give you basically a pro-Hamas rant. And it's going to continue that way.

Speaker 1 And then you think that you're going to follow the 2022 Supreme Court ruling, you can't control the people in the admissions office. You've hired hundreds of DEI people.

Speaker 1 You're not going to let them out go, like you promised. You're going to just say it's the Department of Belonging, and they're going to do what they do.
That's what they do.

Speaker 1 They use racial bias to socially engineer society in the way that they think it should become. And you can't stop it.
So just get rid of the pretense.

Speaker 1 And just say, we are Harvard and we're left-wing and we believe in DEI and we believe in compensatory or repertory racial prejudice, and we're going to keep doing it. And that's it.

Speaker 1 And when you attack us, we're going to say you're going to cut cancer research. And that's pretty much the whole deal in a nutshell.

Speaker 1 Along the lines of what our friends on the right have said, and I've read a piece in the journal from the other day from

Speaker 1 someone not only necessarily legal eagles,

Speaker 1 but

Speaker 1 the idea that wouldn't it be great if

Speaker 1 preferable, of course it would be preferable if these institutions reformed.

Speaker 1 But at the Bradley Prizes the other night, Jim Pearson, who's a good, I know a very good friend of yours. I know Jim, he's a good man.
He was one of the honorees.

Speaker 1 I think he gave an excellent talk. excellent talk, an assessment of the universities.
And against this very premise, like they're reformable from within.

Speaker 1 They are the most prestigious ones, not the Hillsdales and Thomas Aquinas colleges, et cetera,

Speaker 1 Grove Cities.

Speaker 1 They are lockstock and barrel partisan ideological

Speaker 1 and aligned with the Democratic Party organizations.

Speaker 1 He said

Speaker 1 the Harvard

Speaker 1 Board of Directors, whatever they call themselves, I think there are 38 of them. Not a single one's, they're all Democrats.
No, every single one is.

Speaker 1 There's not one Republican, put it that way. Not one.
Well, the thought of reforming from within is,

Speaker 1 A, preposterous, and B, okay, they're colleges, but they are ideological enemies of our Republic and the things we stand for. Yeah, I don't know why they don't just say,

Speaker 1 to hell with you, Donald Trump. We are what we are.
We're an indoctrination center. That's what we are.

Speaker 1 We have been that way since the 60s. That's our mission.
And then I've had people write me or say say to me this week in Washington, you know, I was at the Bradley and I was at various,

Speaker 1 why is Donald Trump doing this?

Speaker 1 He's running a counter-revolution. The first term he said, I'm going to deal with the symptoms, foreign policy, border,

Speaker 1 crime, energy. And he found out that it was almost impossible to enact change.
There were the anonymous, there was the James Comeys, there was the people in the DOJ.

Speaker 1 And then then he came in his years of the wilderness and he said, you've got to address why these people have such power when there are issues, nobody wants 80, 20, 70, 30 issues.

Speaker 1 Nobody wants an open border. Nobody wants a ban fracking.
Nobody wants the new

Speaker 1 Green New Deal. Nobody wants the transgender into women's sports.

Speaker 1 And he came up with a convincing argument that they have control of the institutions, popular culture, the media, the universities, K through 12, etc. So he just said, you know what?

Speaker 1 It's a lot of it is the federal government is giving money to hard-left people under the guise they're disinterested, and they're not. So I'm not going to get in a fight, Willie.

Speaker 1 I'm just not going to fund NPR or PBS.

Speaker 1 And all of their reporters are biased. Everybody knows that.

Speaker 1 When you have a TV show and you say that David Brooks is your archetypal conservative, nobody believes that. It's just a joke.
So

Speaker 1 all they have to do is get private money. And they can do that.
They only need about a half a billion dollars. They can almost just go to George Soros.
He's worth $10 billion.

Speaker 1 Just say, give me a half a billion every year. And universities can do the same thing.
That's what Donald Trump is saying.

Speaker 1 We're not going to, that's what USAID and NGOs and the pride flag on the embassy and the gender studies and Kabulion.

Speaker 1 That's what you guys are doing. You're part of a left-wing revolutionary project, and you caused the revolution, and we're going to have a counter-revolution.
And that's the problem. But

Speaker 1 those on the right who are pleased, you know,

Speaker 1 they're calling you, giving you, I guess, mild grief, or maybe more than mild grief, don't be so mean. I think many of them are naturally worried about the brand.

Speaker 1 They bear the brand of Princeton and Harvard, etc. They don't want to see it diminished.
I think it's very

Speaker 1 difficult.

Speaker 1 I am Victor Hansen, Selma, born, farm for a number of years, live on my farm. I don't look at my Stanford Ph.D.
as, oh, I went to Stanford.

Speaker 1 I have a lot of empathy for the old Stanford where my mother and her sister were educated, my cousin and I went there because they gave me a fellowship. And I worked as a TA for five years.

Speaker 1 I didn't leave.

Speaker 1 And I had some of the best professors in the world. They were linguists,

Speaker 1 philologists. Nobody knew Greek and Latin like they did.

Speaker 1 Nobody will ever again know it like they did. And I was taught as they were taught and I really feel that I owe them a lot.
Same thing in my undergraduate education at the UC campus at Santa Cruz.

Speaker 1 But I don't feel that that name is part of me and I don't feel that when I see somebody and they said that they got a BA from Fresno State, I don't assume that they are less well-educated or they're less prestigious.

Speaker 1 I don't, it doesn't matter to me.

Speaker 1 And when I taught at Cal State Fresno and then when I went to Stanford, I don't, maybe other people reacted. It didn't make any difference to me.

Speaker 1 It was just I taught for 21 years, 10 classes a year, mostly, eight to ten, and I wanted to write more.

Speaker 1 But it didn't, if Cal State Fresno had said to me, we have a think tank, and it's right near your house, and we

Speaker 1 I probably would have done it. But my point is that you're right about all these people.

Speaker 1 They feel that their brand, like their cattle brand, they've been burned into the rear end with it, and it's part of them for the rest of their life.

Speaker 1 And they don't want to deprecate it because it has monetary value. And they know that people that think like them

Speaker 1 And, you know, I've been on so many hiring committees, even at Hoover and I can tell you that when you get these applications and there's two people and you've never seen anything from them.

Speaker 1 And one person says Michigan State or University of Iowa, and the other person says Princeton PhD or Harvard PhD.

Speaker 1 The group looks at the Ivy League, and then it's incumbent upon the other people to prove they're ten times better.

Speaker 1 But I don't think that way because I see the other people, and I said they're in the real world, there's a lot of attractions in these other universities.

Speaker 1 But I think you're right. I think a lot of them,

Speaker 1 it's a snobbery, and they feel invested in this system.

Speaker 1 Well, how conservatives cannot see these places as Bill Buckley saw 70 years ago, Ghana Managal,

Speaker 1 what they were already becoming at the time.

Speaker 1 You know, it's the first reaction to these people when Trump wanted an accounting from Harvard, I was thinking, first thing they did was float rumors that Barron got turned down at Harvard. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And that was the way they think. He has to be thinking like we do, that you've got to get to Harvard and get that brand.
And we didn't give him that brand. And that's why he's angry.

Speaker 1 And that was very revealing. Very revealing.
Well, if he was the idiot child of Joe Biden, he would have gotten into all the colleges. Victor, maybe one of them did.
Hey, Victor, we have a few more

Speaker 1 higher ed things to get your take on. One being

Speaker 1 Marco Rubio's edict on visas

Speaker 1 and Harmit Dylan, who I met the other night.

Speaker 1 I've known her a long time. I admire her for her erudition, her competency, and more importantly, her fortitude.

Speaker 1 You can't intimidate her.

Speaker 1 She just won't be intimidated.

Speaker 1 There's not going to be any finer lawyer.

Speaker 1 Very constantly. If you're going to violate civil rights legislation, maybe in the context of a campus, especially,

Speaker 1 I feel sorry for you because she'll probably enforce the law to a very professional degree and you should cut a deal with her because you'll lose in court. Put your hands on the hood of the car.

Speaker 1 Okay, well Victor, we're going to get to these at greater

Speaker 1 length, your thoughts, of course, when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 1 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show. It's Saturday, May 31st.
I know in the future, folks, we're going to try and do these podcasts closer to the date they actually come out.

Speaker 1 This one is out Tuesday, June 3rd. Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.
You'll find it at victorhanson.com.

Speaker 1 I strongly, strongly recommend you visit it, sign up for its free newsletter, but also...

Speaker 1 Try subscribing. Stick your toe in the water.
It'll cost you $6.50 for a month. What do you see when you subscribe? What do you get? Well, you get access to the twice.
Victor writes twice every week.

Speaker 1 He writes an exclusive piece for the Blade of Perseus, ultra articles, and then he does an exclusive 10-minute or so video.

Speaker 1 And you have all the access to all the archives, archives of these podcasts, that's free.

Speaker 1 Links to Victor's American Weekly American Greatness essay, weekly syndicated columns, links to his various appearances in his book. So you'll love it.

Speaker 1 If you're a fan of Victor, you've got to be there. The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
So Victor,

Speaker 1 Harmie Tech tweeted,

Speaker 1 put an ex-post the other day. She says, if Stanford University were stock, it would be time to short it.
And why she wrote that, it was in reference to Marco Rubio's edict that the U.S.

Speaker 1 will begin revoking visas of Chinese students, including those with connections. to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.

Speaker 1 And some of those critical field assessments, Victor, I think I saw saw in say engineering, masters or advanced degrees in engineering at some of the Ivy League schools, more than half

Speaker 1 actually sometimes more 70% or more are foreign students. Yeah, her reference to Stanford,

Speaker 1 and I'm just inferring, I haven't been told that by her, I think is

Speaker 1 predicated on two realities. Number one, she's from, she works in the Bay Area.
So she has first-hand knowledge of the universities in that area. And number two,

Speaker 1 when you talk to Chinese students, and I have a lot of very good Chinese students when I teach at Pepperdine and I meet on the Stanford campus, but they feel that the West Coast campuses are nearer to them, and there are Chinese American communities there, and they have more consulates there.

Speaker 1 So they tend to concentrate to maybe, except for maybe Harvard, Yale, the blue-chip, so-called blue-chip Ivy League, they look at Stanford and Berkeley particularly.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 she's responding when she says short, all these areas that we've talked about where I said that universities have exposure, Stanford is iconic in each one.

Speaker 1 So we said that they don't respect First Amendment rights. They had a federal judge come two years ago, Judge Duncan.
He was invited

Speaker 1 by students at the law school. He came to the law school.
He started to talk.

Speaker 1 Transgendered Stanford law students and their supporters on campus shouted him down. They screamed and yelled at him.

Speaker 1 Then the DEI, I don't know why we would have an administrator, a high-paid administrator who has no legal expertise, but she was the DEI law person.

Speaker 1 She hijacked the lecture, went to the podium, interrupted him, and read out a manifesto. Basically, and that was planned.
She had written it out before.

Speaker 1 So she must have known, as a Stanford administrator, these students were going to disrupt a speech. And then they heckled him.
And when he walked out,

Speaker 1 talking about a federal judge, the students, some of them, said, we hope your daughter is raped.

Speaker 1 And then they started to block the hallway. They started to jeer at the

Speaker 1 dean of the law school, who now is the provost. That is an iconic moment when you talk about First Amendment, when you talk about violating the 2022 Supreme Court room, I didn't put it on the website.

Speaker 1 Stanford did. Just go to the Stanford website on admissions, and it will tell you, go look at 2021, 22, 23, 24.
It will say the incoming class is about 19 to 20 percent white.

Speaker 1 That demographic is, depending on how you calibrate, is somewhere between 67 percent and 70.

Speaker 1 Unless you believe that white students applying to Stanford have markedly lower GPAs and SAT than Hispanic and black students, then I apologize. But when you look at it, 9% males, 9%,

Speaker 1 and you know, when you do the math, that's about 180 students.

Speaker 1 And when you look at white male athletes and you look at white male wealthy kids whose parents give Stanford 10 million a year, perhaps, and you look at white males that are the children of

Speaker 1 the hierarchy at Stanford, the administrators, the board members. I've had a Stanford board member tell me that they were very happy to be on the board because their children were admitted.

Speaker 1 I've had other people tell me that if you were on the board or you know somebody in the board, your child will

Speaker 1 have a greater chance to be admitted. If you do, that's the 180 slots, Jack.
So you're, let's say you live in West Texas and you are a certified prodigy and you have a perfect SAT.

Speaker 1 Stanford Stanford

Speaker 1 reported, the San Jose Mercury reported that they turned down between 60 and 70%

Speaker 1 of students who optionally took the SAT and got a perfect score. That's like 001%.

Speaker 1 But they turned down 60 or 70%.

Speaker 1 So they know they were violating. They know they were violating the Supreme Court.

Speaker 1 And then Chinese, the Stanford Review had a serial article that they were students that were engaged in espionage by their own admission, and that all students had an obligation when they returned to be debriefed by the Chinese government.

Speaker 1 And we did have a member of the People's Liberation Army as a visiting lecturer on the Stanford faculty.

Speaker 1 And Betsy DeVos did fine Stanford in the first Trump administration for not fully being candid about the extent of money coming from foreign sources.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 when you talk about administrative bloat, Wall Street Journal claimed that for the 15,000 graduate and undergraduates, there was about 14,000 administrative staff.

Speaker 1 And we do know that when Stanford is forced to cough up the information, they are charging the Department of Energy, the Department of State, especially the National Institutes of Health, somewhere between 35 and 55 percent overhead.

Speaker 1 So all of the, and then they have had option, they call them optional, auxiliary, in addition, separate graduations by race and separate theme houses.

Speaker 1 Believe me, everybody, if there was a theme house for the 9%, the minority on campus, that said European theme house, and it was all white males, And then there was a separate graduation that said, now that we're a minority, we're one of the smallest minorities on campus.

Speaker 1 We're only 20%.

Speaker 1 So we're going to have a European-American graduate. They would shut that down in two seconds, and they should.
And they would say it was racist. And it would be probably.
But they wouldn't.

Speaker 1 So my point is they have violated every one of these areas that the Trump administration.

Speaker 1 Now we have a new Stanford president. And there are no more Hamas camps.
Remember, it was supposed to be one night. three months, four months.

Speaker 1 There is nobody storming the president's office and desecrating it.

Speaker 1 There are no poor Mexican-American, largely maintenance workers, painstakingly taking tweezers to pick out of sandstone porous historic columns, the red paint that these spoiled brats sprayed in support of Hamas.

Speaker 1 That's not happening.

Speaker 1 And the president, Mr. Levin, did not sign that letter in support of Harvard.

Speaker 1 And I think, Jack, the reason that this is happening is there are supporters on the alumni that said, you know what, I just can't give anymore. And you know, another thing is,

Speaker 1 if you're letting in 9% white male and you've had all of these silicon barons that have so much money, I'm not talking about the multi-billionaires, I'm talking about the mid-level staff that makes a million a year.

Speaker 1 And their children have perfect scores and perfect everything, and they don't get in, why would they give any money? They're not going to give any money.

Speaker 1 So their mid-level donors are down, and they've got about 100%. If they do cut back to 15% surcharge, that's going to cost them about $180 million.

Speaker 1 And they're looking at a tax on the endowment.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 who knows if Trump turns his gaze to Stanford what he'll find. So the president understands all that, and he's trying to

Speaker 1 save it. And somebody's going to say, well, Victor, they get 35, you have 30 plus billion dollars in endowment.
Yes, but these investors do two things.

Speaker 1 Number one, the money that comes into them is not in the general fund for the most part. It's things like,

Speaker 1 I want to support the LGBTQ tree planting society on campus. I want to

Speaker 1 fund a professor of archaeology, and you can't touch that money. It's designated, even though it's added in theory to the endowment money.
And second,

Speaker 1 the endowment income rises by a percent or two the more long-term it's tied up. And what do I mean by that? Real estate.
They're getting into real estate more than they ever have. Long-term bonds.

Speaker 1 And it's very hard to liquidate that at a profit. And so a lot of these universities will, I think, they're going to be going out in the open market and borrowing money

Speaker 1 to pay their bills. And because they've maxed out with the tuition that they charge $90,000 a year to 100 room board and tuition.

Speaker 1 And you can't have any more than 25 25 or 30 percent foreign students, so you might as well call it the University of Beijing or Mumbai or something, or the University of Riyadh. And so

Speaker 1 I don't think they can up the money-making foreign students. So they're in a bind, they really are.
And that's why I do not understand why they keep doubling down. I don't.

Speaker 1 You mentioned before the Hamas camp on Stanford, and I had wanted to raise earlier, Victor. I don't know if if you heard that the hostages who were eventually released

Speaker 1 from Hamas's stranglehold

Speaker 1 said how Hamas, their captors, used to use the headlines of American papers and the news of what was happening on the campuses to torment them.

Speaker 1 That shouldn't be a surprise, but

Speaker 1 take a bow. And when Trump was elected,

Speaker 1 the Hamas captors, according to some hostages, changed their attitude toward the hostages.

Speaker 1 Trump, remember, had issued an ultimatum. I would say as a footnote, asterisk, because off topic,

Speaker 1 Donald Trump has told Hamas, you better let all the hostages out or else. He's told Iran,

Speaker 1 you're not going to have nuclear weapons, and don't drag it out. He's told Putin to end it.

Speaker 1 And he said to the Houthis, Houthis,

Speaker 1 you do this one more time. And

Speaker 1 in the first administration, he was able to

Speaker 1 reify those challenges, threats, whatever term, by killing Soleimani, by bombing ISIS into oblivion, by getting rid of that creepy terrorist Baghdadi, by when the Wagner group attacked an American insulation, I don't think Biden or Obama would have done anything.

Speaker 1 But he just said, do what you've got to do. and they killed anywhere from 200 to 400 Russians.
In other words, our military killed more Russians in one hour than the entire 60 years of the Cold War.

Speaker 1 And that gave him credibility. But if he has a larger MAGA resistance to any use of optional force, as we saw in those contentious, leaked Jeffrey Goldberg discussions between Pete Heckseth and J.D.

Speaker 1 Vance, then

Speaker 1 you either have to do two things. You have to tone down the rhetoric or you're going to have to at some point

Speaker 1 reify it and just say, you know what, we're going to lower the boom on you. If you don't, then

Speaker 1 you're going to go down the Obama path of 2011-12 when John Kerry and Obama kept saying, if we have red lines, if we start seeing WMD moved around, remember all that? And they didn't do anything.

Speaker 1 So they invited Putin in for the first time in 40 years into the Middle East, and he's never left.

Speaker 1 Well, toning down the rhetoric. Maybe we should talk about some toned-up rhetoric, Donald Trump related to the Federalist Society and Federal Judges.
And we'll get your take on that, Victor.

Speaker 1 And maybe also,

Speaker 1 before we get to that,

Speaker 1 get your thoughts on Jamie Diamond's very public comments. And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 1 We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show. Victor, let's

Speaker 1 say get rid of Jamie Dimon, but let's

Speaker 1 there's so much to talk about on Trump and the Federalist Society and the attack that he leveled against it. But you

Speaker 1 what are your thoughts? Jamie Dimon is very concerned about our debt and about a potential conflict with China.

Speaker 1 And you have some thoughts on what he said.

Speaker 1 Trump has a very strange respect for him because Jamie Dimon has made it clear that he's disinterested as far as endorsing a candidate. He might have endorsed Hillary, though.
I can't remember.

Speaker 1 But he's made it pretty clear that he's not a Trump supporter. But he's also made it clear that he would adjudicate what Trump did by his actual record.

Speaker 1 I think he had that interview when he said, what's wrong with the economy? You know, good good growth. What's wrong with unemployment? Low energy? He went through the whole thing.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he's...

Speaker 1 And by the way,

Speaker 1 despite the Wall Street Journal, remember everybody, the Wall Street Journal told us in March and April that these tariffs, I should say the threat of tariffs, was going to spike inflation by now.

Speaker 1 Supply chain crisis, inflation really high, and the trade deficit we were told would go up.

Speaker 1 And the economy would be less robust. Well, we just got the the latest figures.
This is the lowest inflation in four years and the trade deficit in April was cut in half from March.

Speaker 1 And there is good GDP growth. And income growth, too.

Speaker 1 Income growth. Yes, income.
That's a very good point, Jack. And I don't see anybody in the Wall Street Journal news saying, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
They don't.

Speaker 1 And I don't understand what's going on there. But that news division is to the left of the New York Times.

Speaker 1 And I think that that's because if you look at the people writing the news, most of them come from the Washington Post, Politico, or the New York Times. And the op-ed,

Speaker 1 you know, Kimberly Strassel is kind of like a heroic figure on that op-ed. Holman Jeekens is too, but it's getting more and more left-wing, especially the guest columnists.

Speaker 1 And that's their venue, but I think they'll lose a lot of readers. Maybe they'll make up their readers with new left-wing readers.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 so

Speaker 1 we'll see. But But Jamie Dimon has been very empirical.
And he came out the other day and they asked him, I think they were kind of leading questions. He didn't want to go where they wanted.

Speaker 1 And he said, you know, about the trade war with China. And he said, yeah, we have a rivalry, but we're not an enemy.
I mean, and I think what he was saying was pretty

Speaker 1 understandable. What he was basically saying, this isn't quite like Russia.

Speaker 1 We didn't have all these students from Russia here. We didn't have all these trade relations with the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 We had, you know, all these missiles, and they don't have yet 6,000 missiles pointed at. That's what he was trying to say.

Speaker 1 But then he said something that was kind of counterfactual or in contrast to what he just said. He said he was more worried about us.

Speaker 1 And I think if you look at the totality of his remarks, we have too much debt. $3 billion in interest, $37 billion

Speaker 1 national debt, $2.1 trillion

Speaker 1 budget deficit in climate, and $1.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it will be 1.1 trillion, maybe not. Maybe Trump will cut it in half.
But the point is, he said that because of all this debt, we have limited and we have

Speaker 1 more interest payments than the defense budget. And because for some crazy reason we're going, contrary to World War II and

Speaker 1 the war in Korea, we're not making a lot of weapons.

Speaker 1 Anderil, that new startup, brilliant company, is trying to change that with thousands of drones.

Speaker 1 But he said, you know, by day eight, if we decided to save Taiwan, by day eight we would be out of our missiles, our smart missiles, harpoon missiles, everything, Patriot batteries.

Speaker 1 They would be expended. So

Speaker 1 his conversation was unity, but he said, let's all get together and agree on one thing. If we have this global presence,

Speaker 1 and people don't like us for it, then let's make a lot of weapons, a lot, and let's just be the biggest, the biggest club in town. And so we don't have to use it.

Speaker 1 But if we ever did have to use it, we have an inexhaustible supply. I think he was hearkening.
He didn't say explicitly, but you know, in World War II, as I've said before, we created 95%

Speaker 1 of the world's aviation

Speaker 1 fuel. We supplied 25% along with Great Britain of the Soviet Union for good or evil of their wherewithal in World War II.

Speaker 1 We created 50,000 tanks. We built more liberty and freedom ships than any other all the other countries combined.
One a week. Henry Kaiser shipyard.
We just won that war by enormous productivity.

Speaker 1 We just outproduced everything. We didn't try to make the most expensive that was the Germans that did that.

Speaker 1 They didn't want to build a four-engine bomber, or they couldn't, a practical bomber to deliver ordnance. They thought they were going to have a really sophisticated V-2.

Speaker 1 When you look at the cost to put 2,000 pounds of explosive in a V-2

Speaker 1 versus 20,000 pounds in a B-29 or 15,000 in a Lancaster, it's no, it's about 10 times cheaper to do the bombing route. And that's what we did.

Speaker 1 And what he's saying is we've got to do that again immediately. I also have to confess of a prejudice.
I lived in Greece almost three years, and

Speaker 1 the Greek diaspora, Jack, in the late 19th century, as the Ottoman Empire, which had been harassing the original inhabitants of Asia Minor, Turkey, were Greek,

Speaker 1 there had been a reverse exodus

Speaker 1 until the young Turks took over in

Speaker 1 1918-1919. And the old capital of Smyrna, Smyrna Figs, and all that, on the coast, it's modern-day Izmir.

Speaker 1 There was over a million and a half Greek community on that really rich belt from Bodrum and Haliconarsis in the south opposite Rhodes all the way up to the Hellespont.

Speaker 1 And it was a thriving Greek community. And then in

Speaker 1 21, after World War I, Greece bet on the right horse, the Allies. And the French and the British supplied them.
And

Speaker 1 Turkey was fragmented. The Ottomans had imploded.
And in that vacuum, they thought they were going to carve out ancient Ionia, maybe with a capital at Constantinople, and reclaim it.

Speaker 1 And they had this population base. And they called it the Megala Idea, the great idea.
And it was going to reclaim the ancient Aegean. So you would have

Speaker 1 Asia Minor, and then part of the plan had worked. They had

Speaker 1 restored Macedonia, Thrace, parts of Bulgaria,

Speaker 1 and they had restored Crete, and they were going to restore the Dodecanese islands. and the whole thing would look like ancient the Athenian Empire in a way.

Speaker 1 And people had even talked of restoring Alexandria, which was mostly a Greek community from antiquity.

Speaker 1 And then the Allies got cold feet and they cut off a lot of the aid and they turned on them and the Greek army was stuck

Speaker 1 and they had about a 700-mile retreat.

Speaker 1 They were pushed into the Aegean and those million people were butchered.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 priests were flayed and tortured. Not all of them were butchered.
I can say that because I lived a year on Mikros Asiyas Street, Asia Minor Street. And in 1978, I would talk to all the people there.

Speaker 1 They had come there in the 20s, and they were in their 70s. And I would talk to them, and they would tell me all these stories.

Speaker 1 The Americans actually were the only country that tried to pick up the refugees and bring them back.

Speaker 1 But about two or three hundred thousand came to Athens and and the in the neighborhood and I where I lived.

Speaker 1 My point of this long excursion is Jamie Diamond's family was one of those. I think his father's name was Papadi Mitriu.

Speaker 1 I lived on Papadium Pulu Street, but

Speaker 1 I think his family's name was changed. I'll have to remember it from Papadium Mitriu to Diamond.

Speaker 1 And I think his father was actually came to the United States as as a refugee from the disaster in Asia Minor.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 he's a Greek American,

Speaker 1 but he's from a very distinguished element of Greeks that were,

Speaker 1 I don't know how to put it, but some of the brightest people in the world had gone back to Asia Minor. Some had lived there forever.

Speaker 1 And if somebody believes, if you're Turkish and you're listening, you object when I said the original inhabitants. Erdogan did a 23andMe test, you know,

Speaker 1 and he wanted to prove to skeptics like myself, not that I'm anybody, but major people that he knew, that he was getting sick and tired of hearing the Byzantines had been there a thousand years under Rome and another thousand years in Greek, and that it was all.

Speaker 1 So he did a genetic test, random, to prove that the Seljuk Turks were the real inhabitants. And what he found was

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 most people who are Turkish citizens

Speaker 1 of all their

Speaker 1 variegated mixtures, you know, some of them are Turkish,

Speaker 1 the largest percent are Greek of their ancestry.

Speaker 1 In other words, when Constantinople fell, people fled to the countryside and they intermarried to survive. But it was Greek.

Speaker 1 And anyway, if you look at some of the most talented people in the world, It were these people who went, either were living on the coast of Turkey in what we call Ionia or Smyrna,

Speaker 1 or who migrated there in the end of the 19th century in the hope that it would be a vibrant Greek community again, as it was in antiquity and during the Byzantines.

Speaker 1 And they were all butchered or they were refugees. And every time I meet a Greek American that came from that area,

Speaker 1 they're some of the most dynamic, successful people in the world. Kind of like the Armenian diaspora.

Speaker 1 We were the third largest area, Fresno, after Los Angeles and Boston for Greek immigrants that escaped the two genocides.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 if Jamie Dimon was Italian, you would think less of him.

Speaker 1 You know, he grew up in Jackson Heights.

Speaker 1 I like Italians. I've always had.
But I have a special empathy for small people in dangerous, small countries and dangerous neighborhoods.

Speaker 1 So I would say that I have a special empathy for Israelis, for Greeks, for Kurds, and for Armenians.

Speaker 1 Because they have distinct cultures and their neighbors are the majority and antithetical and they have tragic histories, whether they're Armenians or Greeks or Israelis or Kurds of being oppressed.

Speaker 1 And in one way or another, the United States has always

Speaker 1 been a source of either refuge for them or aid to them or military alliance with them. And that's why I always support those four different groups.
A lot of Greeks went to Australia also. A lot have.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that was very popular, especially in the 1950s and 40s after the war. A lot of them did.

Speaker 1 Let's, Victor, round out the show today on

Speaker 1 a pretty

Speaker 1 hot topic came out yesterday on Friday. So again, we're recording on, when are are we recording? On Saturday, May 31st, Donald Trump on Truth Social.

Speaker 1 And I'm not going to read this because this is nasty stuff, but a very long

Speaker 1 report. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Based off of the U.S. Court of International Trade,

Speaker 1 three judges,

Speaker 1 I should say, yeah,

Speaker 1 sorry, the

Speaker 1 full panel, they ruled against his tariffs. Okay, that's what it comes down to.
Well, who are these judges? And how do they get there? And so it's all about the judges.

Speaker 1 And of course, there's been so many other judges, Victor, as you know, we've talked about, who are standing in the way of Donald Trump's many of his efforts. And

Speaker 1 we can all recall from 2016, I think

Speaker 1 one of the reasons Donald Trump won the election, the margin of victory, was that people took confidence in that he was going to use the list provided to him by the Federalist Society, which was run by two men, Leonard Leo

Speaker 1 and Gene Meyer. And

Speaker 1 that list was used. I think it was a very important political tool and a very important

Speaker 1 judicial tool. Probably 70% of them would satisfy the definition of being conservative as defined by Trump.
70%.

Speaker 1 Maybe not 30. And what he is angry at is when the left

Speaker 1 The left doesn't do 70-30.

Speaker 1 The left does 99.999999.

Speaker 1 Hard left.

Speaker 1 And if they don't like what you say, who was the justice? They kicked, got, they got Briar. You know, they get them off the court.

Speaker 1 But yeah, so Trump had a vicious attack against the federal society, a bunch of losers. Leonard Leo used

Speaker 1 the word scumbag.

Speaker 1 I was going to read a word. Sleezbagbag.
Sleazebag. And

Speaker 1 all kinds of intimations. Anyway, I think, Victor, this is within the conservative movement.

Speaker 1 This has created a lot of the very initial stages of this carpet palming, and I'm sure there will be a lot of fallout, but it was a serious charge against a significant player in the movement and the causes many of us believe in.

Speaker 1 And I was just wondering what your take on this is. Yeah, I was in Washington.

Speaker 1 I was in Washington, so I had a lot of conversations with maybe 10 different people who one person met me at the hotel. I talked to some at another venue and they all were very,

Speaker 1 I say, curious and bewildered and angry in various ways.

Speaker 1 And if I was to distill all of that, there's two things going on. Donald Trump was actually in that

Speaker 1 blast text a little bit self-critical. He said he came to Washington,

Speaker 1 he had not really been there much. He trusted people when they said they were conservative.
And now he's finding that his appointees are ruling against against him,

Speaker 1 which happens, although it doesn't happen much on the left. And I think it's part of a larger matrix when he looks back at his first

Speaker 1 administration, and I'm very, I like H.R. McMaster, he's a close friend, but I think he would say that he wasn't a MAGA person, and he wasn't, and he was often critical.

Speaker 1 And then there was Mattis, who I think would say the same thing, my friend, and I know him. And then there's

Speaker 1 Bill Barr, who I think did an incredible job, professional, but people would not say that he's a MAGA person. Then we have John Bolton, who was

Speaker 1 never going to be appointed and never going to be confirmed by any Republican president. And when Donald Trump appointed him, that was the only chance he ever had to be national security.

Speaker 1 All of his close friends and the groups that he swam with, they never appointed him. George Bush did a recess appointment for UNBAC, but he would have never been confirmed.
And yet

Speaker 1 had national prominence. And he kind of campaigned to get rid of H.R.
McMaster and took over. My point is that then he became a fierce critic.
So Trump, when he appointed his new people,

Speaker 1 he said,

Speaker 1 I can't do this anymore. So, you know, I'm going to appoint people that are not only for me, but have been victims like I have of the administrative.
So Cash, FBI, they went after you. Tulsi,

Speaker 1 they went after you. Pete, they used to make fun of you.
The Pentagon, you wrote your book.

Speaker 1 And RFK, they went after you. And so he wanted people who were very, very loyal.
And then I think he thought by extension because

Speaker 1 he made twice the number.

Speaker 1 You see, everybody, because Obama hadn't quite rushed his appointments to vacant, because they were all convinced that Hillary was going to be president. And Obama the last

Speaker 1 six months was not going to reign on her parade because they thought, you you know what, she's going to wipe out Trump and she gets to have some of these appointments.

Speaker 1 And the result was they didn't rush to the extent they usually do.

Speaker 1 And Donald Trump in the first term had double the number of judicial appointments that he will have in the second, because Biden, you know,

Speaker 1 didn't take any chances and filled almost all of them. And Trump now says, well, the judges are acting like my first year political appointment.

Speaker 1 The only problem with that is that judges are independent. And so you can't say that they're on your side or not the other side.
The left does it.

Speaker 1 The left says that judges are independent and they're disinterested and they're not political.

Speaker 1 But of course, when they are conservative and then they try to storm their homes or threaten to kill them, as one assassin did, or

Speaker 1 Chuck Schumer go to the gates of the Supreme Court and yell out their names and try to intimidate them.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I guess Trump is saying

Speaker 1 Leonard Leho advised me, and and Leonard Leo did not,

Speaker 1 his appointees are about 30% against me and that's his fault. And then the second theme was, the sleaze bag is he was the head of the Federalist Society and now,

Speaker 1 and I'm not saying anything

Speaker 1 that I don't read in the paper or people, you know, it's public domain, it's not me, that now he's a multi-multi-millionaire and that he has operational control for Mr.

Speaker 1 Said in Chicago's fortune and other fortunes.

Speaker 1 And he

Speaker 1 has an advertising company anyway that he has made, he's done very well the last three or four years after he left the Federal, or two years, three years after he left the Federal Society.

Speaker 1 And Donald Trump then feels

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 and there's also been rumors that he is behind an effort or part of an effort or tangential to an effort of aggregating conservative

Speaker 1 sites,

Speaker 1 media sites. Media sites, you know, yes, journalism, and trying to make a huge conservative conglomerate.

Speaker 1 And I'm not sure that it would be, from what the news reports, that it would be favorable to Donald Trump.

Speaker 1 Could be, but

Speaker 1 I don't.

Speaker 1 That's what I gleaned about it.

Speaker 1 Background of all that also or so parallels. You would know more, Jack, because your job entails.

Speaker 1 You have to know all that, or you won't be able to help philanthropies on the conservative side. Correct.
And I am keeping my opinions to myself.

Speaker 1 You do have also,

Speaker 1 and Kim Strassel, who we mentioned before, did a piece about J.D. Vance pressuring Chief Justice Roberts on, so that you have this general MAGA displeasure with

Speaker 1 federal judges, conservative, or allegedly conservative judges. So this is going to go on, Victor.
You know, it's very funny.

Speaker 1 Because my mother was a superior court judge, and then she was the state, I think she was the second woman in the state of California, 1975, pellet court.

Speaker 1 And you're not supposed to intimidate a judge. And I was farming once, and my dad

Speaker 1 was on one of his,

Speaker 1 I don't know what you'd call him, every once in a while he would have a bunch of friends he knew from the World War II age or something, and they were going to find oil, so they would have an old water well rig, and they would go somewhere and drill for oil.

Speaker 1 And it was kind of really romantic, and he'd have maps, and he was on one of his oil excursions. And she just called me up and said,

Speaker 1 I have to go to this reception, and there's going to be all these people there, and I've had some criticism of a decision I made. I think it was was on a real estate deal.
And would you go with me?

Speaker 1 And so I went. In those days I had long hair.
I was kind of, I didn't look very impressive.

Speaker 1 But I went there and a guy came up, I won't mention his name, and he put his finger in my mom's face and said, you're going to destroy my company with those judicial rulings.

Speaker 1 And you have no business ruling against me. And then another person came up who had lost a case which my mother apparently,

Speaker 1 I didn't follow it, had thought was flagrantly wrong and she had to

Speaker 1 adjudicate the fees that he was asking and she not only did not give him fees but she penalized him for a gratuitous suit to go after an entity who was completely innocent.

Speaker 1 And he came up at this reception and started yelling. And so I just said to them very politely, I wouldn't do that if I were you.
And you shouldn't go threaten an appellate court judge.

Speaker 1 Oh, we're not threatening him.

Speaker 1 I said, that's what you're doing. That's what you're doing.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so I'm very sensitive to that. I d I think J.D.
Vance understood that you sh that's you can't do that, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 you know I didn't quite understand what he was saying. Did you, J.D.?

Speaker 1 Not really. And part of the criticism of him, too, was, look, dude, you went to Yale yearly, law school graduate.
You you cannot expect expect

Speaker 1 the, well, you can expect the outcomes you want because of the argument you make, but not because of the appointment

Speaker 1 party affiliation of the appointees. Roberts, everybody was angry at the health care decision, but absolutely.
Yeah. Yeah.
Obamacare. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But if you look at the civil rights, the 2022 decision, he was one of the most eloquent people on that decision about ruling against Harvard and Carolina. And I think

Speaker 1 the thing about the Chief Justice and

Speaker 1 all presiding justices, of courts,

Speaker 1 whether you like them or not, or whether they're on your side, your party or not, they have other responsibilities sometimes.

Speaker 1 Chief Justice has to adjudicate the district courts, the circuit courts, visit them, keep them in line so they don't, you know, because the Ninth District Court of Appeal in San Francisco is completely insane.

Speaker 1 And so, what do you do when they do these things? And what you do, all these. And if you look at the actual Supreme Court rulings, Jack, I think 70% of them are going for Trump.

Speaker 1 I think Kim made that point. She did.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that

Speaker 1 they're overruling the district courts. And so I think what they're trying to do is get control of the judiciary.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 a chief justice is an administrator. They have to

Speaker 1 make the rules. They run investigations.
They keep the nine justices

Speaker 1 from screaming at each other. It's a little different than

Speaker 1 being just one of the justices.

Speaker 1 And that's.

Speaker 1 Somebody's going to say, well, Victor, it didn't stop Earl Warren. Look what he did.

Speaker 1 There were people way to the left of Earl Warren, trust me. William O.
Douglas was completely mad.

Speaker 1 Justice Blackman, who was a Republican. Yes.

Speaker 1 And most of the Warren Court were Republican. There was only one guy in the court that was sensible, and that was, remember Wizard White? Writes White, who was a Kennedy appointee.

Speaker 1 And he became actually more conservative than the Republican appointee. He was one of the two votes against Roe v.
Wade, and he called it raw judicial power. He had the courage to say that.

Speaker 1 And Earl Warren was an Eisenhower appointment. Eisenhower, I regret it.
But if you actually look at the decisions, Earl Warren was more of an

Speaker 1 administrator. You know, once he found the pulse of where the court was going, then he suggested they do this and that.
But the real firebrands were other people. And I think that's true today.

Speaker 1 Rehnquist, he was kind of an administrator too. You know what I mean? He wasn't a leading.

Speaker 1 I liked him because, remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton, he had that special robe with all the stripes on it?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wasn't it custom-made?

Speaker 1 From the Pope's

Speaker 1 Brevets or something on it.

Speaker 1 I don't know what it was. Sergeant Major.

Speaker 1 It was like a nice medieval robe.

Speaker 1 Well, Victor,

Speaker 1 we've come close to the end. A couple of things to

Speaker 1 business to conduct. I do want to, I've gotten some lovely letters.

Speaker 1 I'm getting lovely letters, emails every week from people who have subscribed to Civil Thoughts, and that's the free weekly emailed newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society, which is trying to strengthen civil society.

Speaker 1 You'll find that it's centerforcivilsociety.com if you're interested. But for civil thoughts, if you want to get it, go to civilthoughts.com, sign up, it's free, and we are not selling your name.

Speaker 1 14 great articles I've come across the previous week that I think you will enjoy

Speaker 1 reading.

Speaker 1 We have so many, many, so many comments, so many comments to now through YouTube, Rumble, Victor's website, Apple.

Speaker 1 I'm going to share two. Victor's email.

Speaker 1 Which I don't share a thing. I won't share because some of them.
Only when you do the angry reader.

Speaker 1 Yes, they're angry reader material. They use the F-word almost every word.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Here's one from William Last Name C7F. He writes, I so look forward to Victor's insights.
His unique background and knowledge adds perspective to these wild times.

Speaker 1 Stay safe, Sammy, Jack, and especially Victor. We need you as a bulwark against the lying liars and their deranged supporters.
And then one other lying liars, I like that. I had a close friend, and

Speaker 1 he passed away. He was a wonderful kid.

Speaker 1 I went all through school, but he was German. And every time he got mad at somebody, he said, You lie like 10,000 dogs.

Speaker 1 Catchphrases.

Speaker 1 A couple of last week we talked about the insanity of Colorado on a podcast, and that prompted Drive-By Quipper

Speaker 1 on YouTube wrote: Wow, Colorado is the exact opposite of Florida. Please don't come here to escape the madness.
Stay where you are and do something about it. Don't hide behind

Speaker 1 because we stand our ground. Stand your ground.
I thought that was a great comment, Victor. And also

Speaker 1 I've been to

Speaker 1 postmodern Denver.

Speaker 1 I was at the University of Colorado at Boulder and gave a talk.

Speaker 1 Was that through that program? They have a conservative professor there. But I also spoke to some English professors, which was a little different tenor.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I was trapped in a hotel. I couldn't get out because they were after Andy.

Speaker 1 We mentioned that. NGO.
No.

Speaker 1 Ng.

Speaker 1 Ng. Ng.
Excuse me. Andy Ng.
And he's a very courageous guy. And

Speaker 1 he was there for a different venue, I think. And all of a sudden, they were breaking windows on cars, and they surrounded the building.
They were Antifa.

Speaker 1 The poor guy called me on his cell and said, I'm your taxi. And you got to sneak out the back way and then walk.
two blocks this way and three blocks this way and I'll meet you.

Speaker 1 But I'm not driving up there. These people are dangerous.

Speaker 1 You saw them the other day in Seattle. There was

Speaker 1 a religious Christian group protesting. They surrounded this mother and the child.

Speaker 1 I have to believe

Speaker 1 Kash Patel and others will treat Antifa like. They were like the Italian black shirts, and the mayor of Seattle played the role of Mussolini.
He kind of winked and nodded and said, you know,

Speaker 1 you're a Christian. You're in my town, and you're going to offend people.
And stuff happens. Yeah, you were asking for it, essentially.
But they're no different than the mob,

Speaker 1 the mafia, the biker gangs, whatever. I'd love to see the FBI crack down.

Speaker 1 There's a tape somewhere on the internet where, right during the George Floyd, a carload of Antifa go into some little small town and they get gas and they're scouting it.

Speaker 1 And then did you see that? And there's those three big guys

Speaker 1 go over to, and then they just jump in.

Speaker 1 And there's another one where an Antifa guy is doing something, and he's threatening people, and a rather large-looking, dangerous guy goes after him and chases him. It's weird.

Speaker 1 I don't quite understand the ferocity of them, because when you look at the Antifa, they're all spaghetti-arm, kind of nerdish,

Speaker 1 and they all are dressed in black, and they don't want to reveal their faces, but

Speaker 1 they're not physical specimens, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 They would be the kind Charles Atlas would. I don't think they would come to Fresno or Selma and do that because they wouldn't last very long.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 let us pray that the

Speaker 1 FBI, the new FBI, brings them to justice. Victor, you've been terrific.
Thanks for all the wisdom you shared.

Speaker 1 Folks who've listened, to the folks who watch, whatever platform you're doing it on, thanks for joining us. We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 1 Thank you, everybody, for listening and watching. See you next time.

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