Are Universities a Net Good or Evil for Our Country?

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Speaker 2 And we are recording on the Ides of March, Saturday, March 15th. And this particular episode will be up on

Speaker 2 March 20th, Thursday, March 20th. We hope when this airs that Victor is alive and well in Lawrence.

Speaker 3 I'm going to write a will before I leave Monday.

Speaker 2 Oh, well.

Speaker 3 I have one, but I'll have to update it. Okay.
I don't want to end up, you know what we were saying? My wife and I were here.

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Speaker 3 We're out in an isolated thing together, right?

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Speaker 2 Well, anyway, Victor,

Speaker 2 we're going to do a lot of higher ed analysis today from you.

Speaker 2 We've got some interesting articles I've come across.

Speaker 2 One is by J.P. DeGance.
He's writing this for World, which is the

Speaker 2 big Protestant magazine. And it's about what he calls the self-inflicted academic crisis.
And we'll get your,

Speaker 2 I'll read a little bit about that. And we'll get your thoughts on that and plenty of other things, including, say, this Hamas-loving woke professor at Columbia University,

Speaker 2 taxing college endowments, the staggering number of Chinese communists, Chinese students in America.

Speaker 2 And maybe we'll have some time to get off colleges talking about Gavin Newsom, who's competing with us with podcasts, with

Speaker 2 conservative leaders.

Speaker 3 And he's doing it with the help of Charlie Kirk and Michael Savage and Steve Bannon.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. Well, we'll get your thoughts on all these things, Victor, when we come back from these important messages.

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Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis-Hanson show. Victor, yeah, J.P.
DeGans, who runs a very

Speaker 2 important nonprofit. It's called Communio, but he wrote this piece for World, and it's titled A Self-Inflicted Academic Crisis.
Our University's Career-First,

Speaker 2 Family-Last Ideology Fuels Their Own Collapse. And here's how it begins.

Speaker 2 Our collapsing fertility rate has become a matter of increasing interest to the elite thinkers such as Elon Musk and many others. A key intellectual source of this fertility collapse is academia.

Speaker 2 Secular liberal universities and colleges have incubated anti-family, anti-marriage, and anti-child-rearing thought.

Speaker 2 Ironically, these ideas are now leading to the destruction of the very institutions that advanced them as them first as admission officials begin to reach the demographic cliff.

Speaker 2 The demographic cliff, Victor, by the way, is

Speaker 2 starting this year,

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 free fall in, shall we call it, reproduction that stems from 2008,

Speaker 2 that lack of students, that this would be their freshman year in college, and many colleges are scrambling. Where are they going to get students layered on top of that, Victor?

Speaker 2 As you know, many people are like, why do I have to go to college anymore? Et cetera. So, anyway, very interesting article.

Speaker 2 Your thoughts?

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, they're they're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 For all practical purposes,

Speaker 3 the universities, especially the elite ones,

Speaker 3 and that can be private and public, but they tend to be private. I'm talking about the Ivy League or the Seven Sisters

Speaker 3 undergraduate or Stanford,

Speaker 3 things like that. They're all I mean, when you look at

Speaker 3 political donations, they usually go up 90 to 95 percent to Democrats. If you look at the zip codes at Stanford on voting, it's usually 90 percent to the Democratic candidate.

Speaker 3 Then, when you look at the Bill of Rights, there is really no First Amendment.

Speaker 3 What I don't understand is there's all these people that are complaining that Mr. Khalil has been denied his First Amendment rights.
He can say whatever he wants. That's not the problem.

Speaker 3 The problem is he's distributing

Speaker 3 promoting a terrorist entity, And he is negotiating on the apart and he is one of the spokesmans for this apartheid group at Columbia that has taken over two halls and has committed $30,000 in damage.

Speaker 3 And when you have the President of Barnard blasting his group,

Speaker 3 and there's going to be suspensions. But my point is, why don't they talk about freedom of speech if they really believe in it when a speaker is shouted down?

Speaker 3 Why didn't they come out and say Judge Duncan had a perfect right to speak his mind at Stanford Law School rather than to be shouted down and people yell at him, we hope your daughter is raped?

Speaker 3 Or why when Ben Shapiro came to Stanford, why were people plastering the university with these posters that said, Ben be gone with a picture of a raid can as if he was a Jew to be sprayed away in Zyklon B or something.

Speaker 3 So they don't protect freedom of speech. They don't honor the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment.

Speaker 3 So if you're on a campus and you go out on a date and you are a male and a young woman in a he-said, she said

Speaker 3 environment says that you took advantage of her sexually and you say, no, I didn't.

Speaker 3 Maybe he was a cad, he didn't reciprocate with kind talk in the next week or so after a sexual Congress. I don't know.
But the point is he will not be allowed an attorney.

Speaker 3 He will not be allowed cross-examination. He will not be allowed to see his accuser in a court.
He doesn't have any constitutional protections. Ask Joe Lonsdale what happened to him at Stanford.

Speaker 3 And then they violate the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts, Jack.

Speaker 3 How in the world did we get to a point where you could have an auxiliary subsidiary graduation ceremony based on race?

Speaker 3 I remember when it happened at Cal State Fresno, the Chicano graduation, what was the purpose of that? What was the purpose of it?

Speaker 3 And only people of a particular race there, and there was the Asian graduation, there was the gay, there was a black.

Speaker 3 If they had had a white graduation, people, and that was the minority when I was at Cal State Fresno, people would have gone crazy, and they should go crazy. But the point I'm making is they have

Speaker 3 racially separate dorms, and they call them theme houses.

Speaker 3 They have racially separated safe spaces where people of particular races can't go on campus, just like Jim Crow, only they think they're liberal, so you can't use that simile.

Speaker 3 And at particular universities, you can pick the racial profile of your potential roommate in a

Speaker 3 university dorm. This is all in addition to the fact that

Speaker 3 they have been charging not the Bill Gates Foundation, not private vocations, 50, 60% overhead on individual faculty grants or team grants. I'm talking about

Speaker 3 55 to 60 percent charging the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health and skimming that money off.

Speaker 3 And that is in addition to these multi-billion dollar endowments that give you 6%, 7%

Speaker 3 multi-million dollar tax-free income when they're not nonpartisan. And so now they're looking at a crisis, and they are in crisis mode.
They're anti-Semitic. We just had a 900-page

Speaker 3 investigative report at Stanford University by mostly liberal professors, and they found systemic, if I could use that term, anti-Semitism across the board at Stanford University.

Speaker 3 And we are going to lose about $200 million if we have to abide by what we charge private foundations, just 15% overhead and can't gouge the government anymore.

Speaker 3 And should the House and Senate reconcile on somewhere between 15, 10, or 20%

Speaker 3 tax on endowments, Stanford would lose another $300 or $300 million.

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 at a time when people are saying this is a dangerous place, if I'm a Jewish student, this is a dangerous place to be on an elite campus because they will not or will not or cannot discipline radical pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah, pro-Palestinian protesters who think they have a perfect right.

Speaker 3 They just did it yesterday at Cornell. I mean, Friday.
They went into a Cornell seminar on the Middle East.

Speaker 3 Former Ambassador Crocker was there. He was moderating, and they disrupted it.

Speaker 3 And they've done it, they just did it to Larry Summers at Stanford. A group came in and disrupted him.
But they feel that they alone can do that, and there's no consequences. And the university

Speaker 3 won't enforce their own rules. And then the other thing, very quickly, Jack, is that in the hysteria post-George Floyd, most of the major universities suspended the SAT or ACT exam,

Speaker 3 and they suspended the comparative ranking of high school GPAs. So they let in people

Speaker 3 who were not, according to their own prior standards, qualified. At Stanford University, they put on their website, I have no way of knowing it's

Speaker 3 adjudicated, they let in about 9% of white males who make up about 30 to 35 percent of the population.

Speaker 3 So they were saying to themselves,

Speaker 3 we demanded the SAT of you, and we ranked you, Victor, so if you were applying from Salma High School with your 4.0, it wasn't the same as Palo Alto's 4.0. Okay, I get it, it probably wasn't.

Speaker 3 But the reason they were doing that all these years is because they said the following.

Speaker 3 I'm just taking Stanford. I'm not picking on it as an example.
We have a rigorous, rigorous general education program.

Speaker 3 Science, math, Western Civ, history, philosophy, seminal text, exegesis required, and deep thought, papers.

Speaker 3 And the only people who can do this rigorous work are those with a certain SAT or GPA from an accredited top-rank high school. Now,

Speaker 3 our curriculum is necessary, and we're not going to have great inflation because we have to

Speaker 3 have to impress law school, Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Duke Medical School, I don't know, Ford Motor Company, DuPont, all of these hires have to know if you get branded with a Stanford BA or you're going to graduate program, it reflects the top-notch

Speaker 3 aptitude that you had. And we're not Cal State Fresno, where Victor's from.
This is, and so then they threw it all away.

Speaker 3 And within four years, you would get employers saying, hey, I got this guy from Stanford, and we hired him. He's not only obnoxious, but but he doesn't know anything.
He's not analytical.

Speaker 3 He can't write very well. He speaks poorly.
How do you get through?

Speaker 3 And so that's happening right now. So what do they do? They just quietly started, well, you know, kind of sort of, we're going to quietly reinstate the racist

Speaker 3 ACT and the ultra-racist SAT and the ultra-ultra-racist comparative examination of GPAs by the quality of their high school.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 that's who they are. And we saw saw Claudine Gain and the rest of them that knew that they were institutionalized anti-Semitism and they thought nobody would care because

Speaker 3 the Jewish community puts a high price on elite education. They'd always give money.
They would always support them. They could always lie to them.
There's no anti-Semitism on campus.

Speaker 3 And also foreign students. It was the idea is that The United States has no standards.
It helped the universities hate the United States as much as we do.

Speaker 3 We're just going to come over from Gaza or Syria or Morocco or Algeria. We're going to enroll and then we're going to start protesting and supporting terrorist causes.

Speaker 3 And if you don't like it, we'll say you're depriving me of my First Amendment rights. Get used to it.
That was their attitude. And now people are saying it's non-sustainable.

Speaker 3 When you get people like Elon Musk or Bill Ackman or Mark Andreessen, and they all say, you know what?

Speaker 3 These places are toxic.

Speaker 3 And they teach a certain creed that does not

Speaker 3 lead people to happy lives.

Speaker 3 And it attacks the nuclear family, it attacks fertility, it attacks traditions, it attacks patriotism.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we don't want to put up with it anymore. So if they...

Speaker 3 You know, they said to Hillsdale College, you're too conservative, you're too patriotic, you're too traditional, you're too

Speaker 3 analytical, don't take money from us. And they said, Fine, we're not going to take money from you.
Well, why don't they do the same thing?

Speaker 3 They just said, you know what, we don't take your stupid dollars. We at Stanford want to be Stanford.
We don't want any federal money.

Speaker 3 We have a $30 billion endowment. Harvard can say, we have over a $50 billion endowment.
Take your stupid cash. We don't need no badges.

Speaker 3 That's it. And they don't do that.
So they want the money, but they don't want to abide by any basic standards of decency. And

Speaker 3 I've been at a lot of universities. I've probably spoken at over 200 or 300 in the last 50 years.
I've traveled on university lecture series. I've been given honorary degrees.
I've given graduation

Speaker 3 talks. And

Speaker 3 I come to the conclusion at 71 that I'm not sure that on a plus

Speaker 3 minus evaluation, cost-benefit analysis, that they are a force for good.

Speaker 3 I think the engineering and the science and the math is critical, but when I look at the GE, I don't see that very many of them, whether professors are teaching Shakespeare or

Speaker 3 Hegel or

Speaker 3 Socrates, Plato, I don't see that at all.

Speaker 3 I just don't see it happening.

Speaker 3 And to

Speaker 3 the degree they are, it's always negative. It always is.
And people are just tired of it.

Speaker 3 They don't want to send their kid off to college at 18 and pay pay 100 grand and have him come back at Thanksgiving and say, I didn't know you were a white settler oppressor.

Speaker 3 They don't need that in their lives.

Speaker 3 Especially from this neurotic bunch of academics.

Speaker 2 In this

Speaker 2 piece by

Speaker 2 J.P. DeGatz,

Speaker 2 he said that as of now, there are 900

Speaker 2 feminist studies programs in colleges in America. You take how many kids are in them now times every year, go back 30, 40 years.

Speaker 2 There's an army of

Speaker 2 feminists out there who are

Speaker 2 part of his article, obviously the point of his article, or

Speaker 2 role of depopulating America.

Speaker 3 I've dealt with them my entire life. I once had a student, Womane.
I won't tell you very much about her, but I was very young, and she was a very nice student. She had three children,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 she wanted to come back and get a minor in classics and I think she was separated or divorced so she approached me in class and said I have no money

Speaker 3 is there any she came into my office to tell me this with her three children so she said is there any way I could leave my three children in your office while you're teaching

Speaker 3 and I said no and she said just give me a week or two so I did and she was a very nice person I come back my office was full of kids I talked to them, and then she did get something.

Speaker 3 And she was very bright.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 gosh, she was working a full-time job, single mom, and very bright. And

Speaker 3 then

Speaker 3 she got into

Speaker 3 women's studies.

Speaker 3 So I forgot all about her. About five, no, maybe eight years later, this person comes into my office with her women's studies advisor.
She has almost a butch haircut.

Speaker 3 And she tells me that

Speaker 3 she felt that my classes were sexist and she felt that I was part of a paradigm

Speaker 3 and she felt that

Speaker 3 I said things in class about Western civilization that were

Speaker 3 and she could and this other woman was beaming, you know, her advisor,

Speaker 3 who between you and me seemed very gay and was trying to tell this woman that she might be ambiguous. And I listened to about five minutes and I looked at my watch and I said, are you done?

Speaker 3 And she said, no. And I said, I'm done.
And I just have a polite

Speaker 3 recommendation. Do not ever come into my office again.
Do not see me. Do not say hello.
Do not say goodbye. You are an ingrate.
I tutored you. I let your children stay in my office.

Speaker 3 And I've had that about four or five times with the university people. And it's always the same thing, Jack, when I look back at 21 years in the CSU system.

Speaker 3 It was always somebody who was very earnest and very bright and very idealistic. And they were coming back to school.
And there were two typologies. One was what I would call the DEI type.

Speaker 3 That was they were Hispanic, Hmong, or African-American.

Speaker 3 And they would come in and they were so excited about Homer's Iliad or the Spartans at Thermopylae or Dante's Inferno, all these classes that I would teach. And they were wonderful kids.

Speaker 3 And then they would either, one of two things would happen. They would get their minor in classics and they would gravitate to another psych major, sociology major.

Speaker 3 or they would stay in classics and we would really make them competitive. We'd say, if you want to go get a law degree, you might want to get an MA for a year.

Speaker 3 You might want to learn French and German. you might want to learn how to write Latin and Greek.
We did all of this, our team did, four professors.

Speaker 3 And I would say in 50% of the cases, the longer these students went to graduate school after their BA or MA, or the people who had minored and went into other programs, I would bump into them and they would come back and want a recommendation

Speaker 3 for

Speaker 3 graduate school or a fellowship, and they were completely unrecognizable, completely unrecognizable. They would come back and say, you know,

Speaker 3 I was thinking about Achilles,

Speaker 3 and you were just so tied into the patriarchy. And these are people who didn't even know who Achilles was five years ago or four years ago.
Or, would you please give me a recommendation?

Speaker 3 Because I'm applying for the Diversity Action Officer at Cal State, such, such.

Speaker 3 And they had all this lingo.

Speaker 3 And in every case, there was no sense of gratitude that they had come out of the non

Speaker 3 and that we were not political. We were trying to give them this broad educational background.
I had one kid who was really brilliant. He dropped out three times.

Speaker 3 I tutored him, tutored him, tutored him, tutored him, got him into graduate school twice. He dropped out once, got him in again.

Speaker 3 And he, next time I saw him, he was giving me an indictment about my Western civilization, racist, sexist stuff.

Speaker 3 So at that point, I just, that was one of the reasons I retired at 50, 49, actually, I just, from teaching and went to the Hoover Institution. I thought, you know what?

Speaker 3 There is such institutional bias and these young impressionable minds once they figure out where the power, the money, the influence, the heft is in these university campuses, They understand that the path of least resistance is to be very left-wing, left-wing, left-wing, left-wing, and mouth all of these shibboleths.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I just

Speaker 3 said, you know what, it's not worth it anymore.

Speaker 2 I had enough.

Speaker 3 I hate to say it, but every once in a while I'll be in Fresno, you know.

Speaker 3 I must have had four or five. I had eight classes with,

Speaker 3 I had to average 200 students a semester for

Speaker 3 a semester.

Speaker 2 Right, for 20 20 years.

Speaker 3 Yeah, 400.

Speaker 3 For 8,000 students.

Speaker 3 And I remember most of them.

Speaker 3 And I tutored, I probably gave every semester I was teaching four, and then Bruce Thornton and I, my colleague, would teach an overload, five, five preps, separate preps, 200 students, and then four or five or six independent studies for students so they could get their major or their individual minor or whatever.

Speaker 3 But the point is, in the years that followed, a lot of those people that I would write recommendations for, help get public, you name it, I would bump into.

Speaker 3 And I would say 50%

Speaker 3 were completely flipped over to be hard left and had the whole, especially after the DEI thing. And they were, because most of my students were minority students, women.

Speaker 3 Either women or minority students, or they were very poor whites from the Oklahoma diaspora. But my point is this, is that this university is insidious and they would sell them on this bill of goods.

Speaker 3 They would say, you know, I'm teaching now Latin in high school or I'm teaching this in junior high and I and I have a curriculum where I'm talking about the theft of the American Southwest.

Speaker 3 And I'd say, from whom? Well, the United States stole it from Mexico. And I said, well, where did Mexico get it?

Speaker 3 From indigenous people. And which indigenous people got it from the other indigenous people? And is this tragedy you're teaching them or

Speaker 3 so I just got to the point that I said

Speaker 3 no I'm and at that point the last 30 years you know you just kind of

Speaker 3 you're not in academia anymore you're just you don't want anything to do with it and I just dropped out of

Speaker 3 it it's a negative force in American life I really believe that and I hate to say that because I was a big proponent of higher education.

Speaker 2 Well, you're a big proponent of good higher education. But Victor, I want to press on that a little bit first.
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Speaker 2 We thank Open Phone for once again sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hansen show. Victor, a couple of

Speaker 2 things about what you,

Speaker 2 your exegesis, I wasn't going to call it a rant this time.

Speaker 2 Segregation,

Speaker 2 you didn't use that word, but that's essentially, you're talking about things at college that are segregation. It's funny how that word has kind of disappeared from.

Speaker 3 I use it a lot. It's segregationist.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 3 if you can have a dorm

Speaker 3 and only one particular race is allowed to be in it,

Speaker 3 or you can allow students to say, I don't want that student to be my roommate because of his or her race,

Speaker 3 or I can't go to this graduation ceremony because I'm not a particular of that particular race, or I can't go to that section of the library. What is it?

Speaker 3 It's segregation. And they understand that.
And

Speaker 3 they've turned the world upside down.

Speaker 3 So if you want to say anything and you're reading, I don't know, Catcher in the Rye or Kill a Mockingbird, then you say we're going to have a trigger warning, and you attack the dead author and say this was illiberal.

Speaker 3 Basically, what's the biggest problem that academia has is that it's not training people in math, science, literature, history, analytical thought, inductive thought.

Speaker 3 So the students are not very well educated.

Speaker 3 But at the same time it's occurring, they're arrogant because they've been told that the therapeutic through therapeutic curricula that their job is to use the standards of the present affluent leisured society and go back and trash the very university that is hosting them and make fun of their traditions, their racists, their sexists, prior professors, their courses to tear down statues, rename things.

Speaker 3 But they never say to themselves,

Speaker 3 well, history is kind of ironic. So, what are people going to say about us in 50 years?

Speaker 3 That we aborted a million fetuses a year, many of us, maybe 20,000 who were viable in the ninth month, more so in the last three months.

Speaker 3 Are they going to say that you had a million people defecating, urinating, fornicating, and injecting on the streets of your major cities? Is that what they're going to say?

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 the point I'm making is they're very arrogant and they think that their own standards won't not apply to them, and they will.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 that's my biggest beef with them. And

Speaker 3 it's very sad to see arrogance and ignorance at a young age, to be so strident. Like all these Palestinian people.

Speaker 3 This is a true story. When I was walking in

Speaker 3 November of 2023, we had this encampment at Stanford, and it was violating all the rules. You were not allowed to be, you know, sleeping out in the quad for 24-hour.

Speaker 3 They even had a sign as you walked by, Jack, it said, be quiet, don't disturb sleeping protesters in their tents.

Speaker 3 And so these people people would come out and hand you things, and they were saying, River to the sea, river to the sea. And this is kind of a stereotype.

Speaker 3 And of course, they didn't know which river, in most cases, Jordan River. I don't think they'd ever knew where the Jordan River is.
If you ask them,

Speaker 3 I said to one of them,

Speaker 3 so the river to the sea, Palestinians, will be free. How are you going to free up the Red Sea?

Speaker 3 And she said,

Speaker 3 the Red Sea?

Speaker 3 And I said, yeah, the Red Sea. And she says, what do you mean? I said, well, you said the river to the sea.
What sea did you mean?

Speaker 3 I thought she was going to say, idiot, the Mediterranean Sea, but of course she didn't. She had no idea about which river, which sea.

Speaker 3 And they don't know anything about the partition or they don't know anything about what it's Trans-Jordan. They don't know anything about the 6773

Speaker 3 Yom Kippur. They know nothing about any of that.
And yet they get there and on those soapboxes they scream and yell and say all of these things. And

Speaker 3 it's really sad to see these students that are so unimpressive. And I'm not just saying it as an error.
I love students, but oh my gosh,

Speaker 3 it's a waste of time almost to talk to them these days because they don't read and they don't

Speaker 3 think for themselves. And they're not taking courses.

Speaker 2 Dan, our mutual friend, my great friend, Dan Mahoney, who taught a lot long, you know, more till more recently than you did.

Speaker 2 And Dan, I think he stopped teaching at Assumption in about 2020 2021 and the decline in in the knowledge base of this of the students was very obvious from what he was teaching at the end to what he was teaching 20 years earlier and the arrogance as you say just upped was and he had enough just had enough i mean who needs this crap if you can do other things i mean it's just i was 21 i went to stanford university in the classics phd program and i walked in to see a german they were all first of all, they were all Europeans.

Speaker 3 And she

Speaker 3 said, I said, I'd like to take your philosophy. And she pulled out a random book from her thing and said, read this.
And it was Lysias's on the cripple. I did it pretty well.
And then she said,

Speaker 3 I'm teaching a composition class. I want you to take it.
And the next thing I knew, she whipped out a paragraph in English. She said, write.

Speaker 3 And that was what everybody did. And the idea that you'd eliminate that from the classics curriculum as an undergraduate, how would you ever be able to study the ancient world?

Speaker 3 And that was just in this tiny, irrelevant little field. And think about what they have done throughout.

Speaker 3 Out a whole group of English majors that doesn't know much about the Shakespearean plays. They don't know who Alexander Pope is.
They don't know, have ever read a word of Milton.

Speaker 3 And they don't know anything. And they don't know about the inductive method.
And yet they're so loud. And they're so poorly educated.

Speaker 3 And when you do meet people like the Hillsdale students, or some of the Pepperdine students, or you meet some of the conservative students at Stanford that deliberately take the few traditional classes,

Speaker 3 they have an alan about them, and you talk to them, and it's kind of like, shh, Victor, please don't tell anybody how easy these courses are,

Speaker 3 because it's just a joke.

Speaker 2 We study.

Speaker 3 Stanford gave almost 80% of all of their courses A.

Speaker 2 Same thing at Harvard, same at Yale.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, who wants to die on the altar of standards?

Speaker 3 Because if you do, I don't know what will happen now where the DEI auditors are out, supposedly, but they did check to see if there was a systemic racist pattern in faculty grading.

Speaker 3 That meant if you were teaching a class and the university had changed the entrance requirements and suddenly you got students that weren't able to do the work that you yourself thought was commiserate with Yale or Harvard or Princeton or Duke or whatever, and you had to grade accordingly, and you did that enough, then you were going to be in big trouble.

Speaker 3 So then you gave people A's.

Speaker 2 Well, we're going to talk about one of these woke

Speaker 2 Black Lives Matter type of professors at Columbia.

Speaker 2 We've got some other academic-related topics, Gavin Newsome. And we're going to get to some of these things when we come back from these important messages.

Speaker 2 We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show recording on March 15th. This episode is up on Thursday, March 20th.
Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Speaker 2 If you're a fan of Victor's writings, go there and you'll find tons of free stuff, links to Victor's articles, American Greatness essays, weekly syndicated column.

Speaker 2 archives of these books, links to his various appearances. Then there will be ultra items three times a week, twice as articles, once as a video.

Speaker 2 Victor does things exclusively for the Blade of Perseus. You should subscribe.
It's $65 a year,

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And by the way, if you're on X,

Speaker 2 Victor writes

Speaker 2 maybe every week, every 10 days or so, kind of a screed, a rant, a great one.

Speaker 2 And that's at V.D. Hansen is is his handle there.
We have the Victor Davis-Hansen Fan Club on Facebook. Good friends.
Good people.

Speaker 2 Victor, what did I want? Oh, gratitude. Just quickly before we move on to other topics.
It's interesting. I mean,

Speaker 2 you mix with all people, all things, all ways in your life, various social institutions, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But ingratitude is the mark of academia. Yes.

Speaker 3 That is the worst trait trait of all time.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I think it is, ingratitude. I know it's close.
It's different than loyalty, you know, disloyalty.

Speaker 3 It's an inability to see how someone has helped you, who A, didn't need to help you, and necessarily might not even have liked you, but felt the principle was important.

Speaker 3 And I was...

Speaker 3 I would say that the people I owe the most to as professors were all left-wing,

Speaker 3 but they were

Speaker 3 disinterested and they were fair. And I owe so much to people like John Lynch, you know,

Speaker 3 or Mary Kay Gamel or Gary Miles or all these professors I had at UC Santa Cruz who were all people of the left. But I never heard any any

Speaker 3 bias from them as far as students went. They loved students.
They had really strict standards. It was really amazing.

Speaker 3 I mean, gosh, I turned in a paper and John Lynch once wrote and said, if you don't stop splitting infinities, I'm going to

Speaker 3 you, Victor.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 2 that's a conquerable

Speaker 2 habit, splitting infinitives.

Speaker 3 I know.

Speaker 2 I want to bring up this Columbia teacher, but just first, you mentioned Khalil before, the pin-up boy now for the left. There's a story in today's Post that

Speaker 2 he worked for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the infamous UNRWA, who had any number of its employees involved in the October 7th massacre of

Speaker 2 Israelis. So I don't think it's anything.

Speaker 3 He knows what he did. He was proud of it.

Speaker 3 Anger is that somebody called him on it. And Marco Rubio has been superb.
Marco Rubio,

Speaker 3 he has been absolutely right. He just makes the same argument.
If Mr. Cuddlil had been honest, and when he applied for a original student visa and then a converted work visa, had he just said,

Speaker 3 given us his affiliations and what he intended to do when he got to the United States, at his head the pro-Hamas apartheid divest

Speaker 3 student group

Speaker 3 that was responsible for thousands of dollars of damage and takeover. If he had just said that,

Speaker 3 we would have not invited him. It has nothing to do with free speech.

Speaker 3 If he was a guy who just was going to class, he never broke a rule, he just, and every once in a while he went to a protest

Speaker 3 on behalf of Palestine, maybe,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 3 that would nobody cares that, but being for a

Speaker 3 State Department-designated terrorist group and being involved in appeasing or defending people who had used violence and promoting

Speaker 3 promotion of the October 7th massacres.

Speaker 3 Our Constitution, as proverbially referred to, is not a suicide pact.

Speaker 3 Because if you take the left's position, Jack, is you have to let in anybody with any views whatsoever to your country. Anybody.

Speaker 3 But we know that they don't believe that. Because if they

Speaker 3 were an apartheid, racist,

Speaker 3 Ku Klux Klanner version in Europe and they came, we wouldn't let them in.

Speaker 3 So it all it's it's the left, it's always one way with them, always one way.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Beneath every double standard is a single standard, as the great Joe Sobrin used to say.

Speaker 2 Victor, speak at Columbia University, which was already mentioned, that's where Khalil has done some of his agitating.

Speaker 2 There's a piece, again, in today's New York Post, Saturday the 15th, by Chris Ruffo and Hannah Grossman. I'm sure folks know who Chris Ruffo is.

Speaker 2 He and Hannah Grossman are actually now working and writing for the Manhattan Institute, which

Speaker 2 Victor, you're a contributing editor to there, magazine. City Journal.

Speaker 3 I used to write a lot. I haven't written it.
I've been too busy with my other obligations, but it's a wonderful venue.

Speaker 2 City Journal is I come it's a quarterly and and Brian Anderson is the editor.

Speaker 2 Brian's just the loveliest man on the planet. And I think he's the editor.
I think he's the best magazine in America. But anyway, Chris and Hannah write a piece that the Post picks up.

Speaker 2 A Woke Prof Fuels Ivy Hate. A race studies kook aided in campus chaos.
And this race studies koop is a neuropsychologist, Jennifer J. Manley.

Speaker 2 She took part directly in these anti-Israeli protests on Colombia. And she

Speaker 2 gets federal, she gets a ton of federal money for grants. On

Speaker 2 much of her research is based on the so-called social determinants of health thesis, which posits that racism, sexism, and homophobia can cause brain disease in blacks and, I'm not going to say Latinx, Latinx communities, a thesis that critics have described as pseudoscience.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 she's a pseudoscientist.

Speaker 2 Somehow or other, Victor, she got tenure at an Ivy League college.

Speaker 3 Ivy League schools have

Speaker 3 they have less standards than the CSU system.

Speaker 3 And they know that. And that's what my point is.
They're not worth it. You shouldn't send their kid there.
They'll become indoctrinated. They will not be educated.
They will feel entitled.

Speaker 3 And they will be exposed to some of the more obnoxious people in their entire lives they'll ever meet at the university campus.

Speaker 3 And then, you know, the same thing in the National Institute of Health when we talk about a 15% maximum surcharge or we talk about maybe 30% in cuts, she's the type of person we're talking about.

Speaker 3 It's not just an act of

Speaker 3 commission that she's doing these things that are self-destructive, but we omit we omit other people who have real scientific they they can't get a grant because it's this herd mentality and that all of a sudden after George Florey, if you said the word equity or diversity or inclusion or black or Chicano, underserved communities,

Speaker 3 then you were going to get money for a pseudo-project. But that meant that somebody who was trying to find the proper chemotherapy to treat head and neck cancer was not going to get it.
So

Speaker 3 that was the problem. And that's true about everything,

Speaker 3 every totalitarian ideology that seeks to be inclusive and holistic. And that means

Speaker 3 all points of our lives, whether it's FA, you know, Federal Aviation Administration, air traffic controllers, what, you start to superimpose this ideology and look at everything through the lens of race, then you don't have time enough to train, and you get exemptions, exemptions, exemptions.

Speaker 3 You can't say that I miss that plane because I'm black. I can't say that I'm an underrepresented member of a gay community.
I can't, it's just a commissar-like system,

Speaker 3 and there's no empirical analysis and evaluation, and it's forever.

Speaker 3 And people forget that. It's not just hiring people on the basis of DEI,

Speaker 3 it's forever. That person feels like they have an exemption.
And we saw what happened in the South with white supremacy. If you were white and you were accorded a certain

Speaker 3 exemption, then it didn't help you at all. You were just, it ended up in mediocrity because you didn't have to be evaluated on the same standards as other people were.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 mentioned before also taxing endowments. I'm happy to see that at my old stomping grounds in the U.S.
National Review, there was a piece by Henry Olson

Speaker 2 titled Tax the Ivies. Just read a little bit here quickly.

Speaker 2 It's rich that so many professors at these elite institutions argue for higher taxes on the wealthy while they comfortably cash their paychecks from entities that are among the most tax-protected of any in the nation.

Speaker 2 And that's why the Republican tax plan should include Texas Representative Troy Nell's Endowment Tax Fairness Act.

Speaker 2 That bill would raise the marginal tax rate on investment earnings on the endowments at very wealthy colleges and universities to 21%, the same rate paid by for-profit corporations.

Speaker 2 And that would raise a lot of money. The Tax Foundation estimates it would raise between $70 billion and $112 billion over 10 years.
What's good for the goose ought to be good for the gander.

Speaker 2 The nation needs more revenue in ways that won't harm the economy. If it wants to reduce its gargantuan deficit, taxing the left's postgraduate cleric is a great place to start.

Speaker 2 That alone is an interesting idea.

Speaker 3 It is. It is.
And I've been writing about that for a long time. Tax the income on endowments.
But it will also...

Speaker 3 It'll also shut down a lot of these centers, the Center for Diversity, Inclusion, Climate Change, all of these things that were never there 20 years ago.

Speaker 3 So people have to ask themselves, if we go back in time to 1970 or 1975, just to take an example,

Speaker 3 do people really believe that people who graduated from Harvard, Yale, Princeton in 1975, 65, 55

Speaker 3 were less educated than their counterparts today? I think everybody admits they were far better educated.

Speaker 3 So did all of these centers and these special programs and these Daesh studies classes

Speaker 3 that were all political or ideological or therapeutic, did they help?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 So, if you were to cut them back by starving the beast

Speaker 3 and the universities couldn't afford them, somebody's going to say, well, Victor, they would just cut out the Shakespeare classes and still fund them. Maybe, maybe not.

Speaker 3 Another problem is that the donors don't want the money, so they they feel they're giving money to their alma mater and it's going to help the prestige of the university and enhance their own degree from it or get their name in a building, but

Speaker 3 they can't really feed this monster. They have to be much more selective.
And I think you're starting to see that, especially with Jewish American donors to the Ivy League.

Speaker 3 They're not just going to write a check anymore because they understand how it will be used.

Speaker 2 Victor, I just want to take a moment for our sponsor, Home Title Lock. Lock.
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Speaker 2 Victor, before we head into the break for the final question, I just want to note on still on education front, I think I read this in Breitbart.

Speaker 2 Huge number of Chinese in U.S. colleges.
Rep Riley Moore, who's from, I think, West Virginia, a Republican from West Virginia, finds that there are 300,000 Chinese nationals in our university system.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 one part of this article says there are 25% of New York, NYU, New York University students are Chinese national.

Speaker 2 And his point is that there are some serious national security issues at the very least related to this. By the way,

Speaker 2 if there was some law passed to ban them, my gosh,

Speaker 2 that would cripple a lot of schools financially. And they are counting on that money to come in.

Speaker 3 Well, if 1%, the FBI had said it, the figure, I think

Speaker 3 Christopher Wray said it was high.

Speaker 3 If 1% of these Chinese nationals were actively engaged in espionage, then you're talking about 3,000 students.

Speaker 3 And I've had a lot of Chinese students that have kind of admitted that when they go back to China they're questioned, no matter whether they were actually

Speaker 3 actively spying. But when you look at the Chinese military today and you look at its jets and its artillery, even its uniforms, its military academies, it's all borrowed from Western militaries.

Speaker 3 So where are they getting that expertise?

Speaker 3 They're either getting it from two places or both, from people who are probably in the United States sending them materials about our munitions and our protocols, our military, or we're just educating all of these people that go back with that expertise.

Speaker 3 It's the same thing that Japan did

Speaker 3 at the turn of the century. They sent about a quarter million Japanese students to study nautical engineering in Britain and to study

Speaker 3 land warfare originally in

Speaker 3 France and then after that was earlier after the Franco-Prussian War in Germany and that

Speaker 3 when the Russian fleet

Speaker 3 showed up in 1905

Speaker 3 the Russian Baltic and Pacific fleets they were shocked at the chat that the Japanese dreadnoughts were so much superior to the Russian because they had used Japanese new

Speaker 3 expertise in mechanical engineering and fabrication and had studied at British universities and were building carriers, cruisers, destroyers that were as good or better than Western based on Western designs.

Speaker 2 Well, Victor,

Speaker 2 we are going to

Speaker 2 head into the home stretch here. We'll talk about

Speaker 2 one of your favorite people ever, Gavin Newsom. And we'll do that when we come back from these final important messages.

Speaker 2 We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, my friend there.

Speaker 2 We've recorded two shows today, and unfair to have been given what he's enduring here. But Victor,

Speaker 2 let's close out by,

Speaker 2 I'm looking at a piece from Hot Air, the Gavin Newsom backlash is still building steam. Now, Newsom can't run for re-election as governor, but he's looking at 2028, right?

Speaker 2 He says, the only reason that everyone isn't talking about what a terrible week Gavin Newsom is having, this is the week that we have just passed, is that people are too busy talking about what a terrible week Chuck Schumer is having.

Speaker 2 Still, almost as many Democrats seem irritated and fed up with Newsom as with Schumer.

Speaker 2 The source of that irritation is Newsom's new podcast, where he has so far invited as guests Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, and Steve Bannon.

Speaker 2 I wonder when he's going to ask Victor Davis-Hansen to be a guest.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think I'm going to pass on that.

Speaker 3 I noticed, though, he doesn't.

Speaker 3 He,

Speaker 3 I mean, Michael Savage is a... I like Michael Savage.
I've been on his show, but he's a controversial, was a controversial talk show. Steve Bannon is

Speaker 3 an ultra-mAGA who's at war with many of the Trump

Speaker 3 Musk wing of the MAGA movement. And

Speaker 3 Charlie Cook is a great guy, but

Speaker 3 he's a very, very conservative activist. But what I'm getting at is he's not asking

Speaker 3 some conservative authors, why doesn't he have Larry Arne go on there, for example, as an example? or Shelby Steele or somebody like that.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I think he's talking about operational or transactional politics,

Speaker 3 not the philosophy behind what is destroying the state. And

Speaker 3 I listened to some of them, but what I'm getting at is I didn't get these types of questions. Question one.

Speaker 3 Gavin,

Speaker 3 the California people approved a $7.5 billion bond,

Speaker 3 three to four billion of it, which to build three huge reservoirs. You did not build them at the sites site and the Sacramento River, the Los Banos Grande site, nor the Temperance Flat.

Speaker 3 But you did use a quarter million dollars to blow up four dams on the Klamath River. Why did you do that when they were providing clean energy, flood control, recreation, and irrigation? Question two.

Speaker 3 Jerry Brown gave us high-speed rail, but

Speaker 3 what is your plan from the Bakersfield to Merced 170 mile road to No?

Speaker 3 And it's cost probably $15 to $20 billion.

Speaker 3 It will lose $1 billion a year. What is the ultimate 700 miles still? Is it 300, 400 billion dollars? What are you proposing we do that?

Speaker 3 At the time you're doing this, the 99 lateral, the 101 lateral, and the I-5 lateral are all in many places just two lanes in either direction.

Speaker 3 They are some of the most dangerous highways in the United States. In addition to that, parallel to the high-speed rail, there is a Santa Fe Amtrak line that in many places only has one track.

Speaker 3 Why don't you use that money to

Speaker 3 make three six-lane modern freeways north and south or fix the Amtrak so that trains can go the entire distance in both directions?

Speaker 3 what is your plan to deal with a half million homeless people? Gavin, you're $3.4 billion

Speaker 3 short on Medi-Cal.

Speaker 3 Why are you allotting money year after year for people who are here illegally? Do you know that that shortens community,

Speaker 3 tax-paying citizens of California? Gavin.

Speaker 3 Can I ask you another question, Gavin? Why do we have the highest income taxes at 13.3%

Speaker 3 and we're rated almost in the bottom 5% of high school and grammar school test scores? Gavin, why are one-third of all welfare recipients living in your state? Gavin, why is

Speaker 3 those below the poverty level are 20% of the population? Gavin, why are 20% of PG ⁇ E power users, the largest utility in California, not paying their bills?

Speaker 3 Why are those bills 80% higher than most states?

Speaker 3 Just ask these questions. And don't let him just say, well, I think transgender biological males are wrong in women's sports.
Okay, what are you going to do about it?

Speaker 3 Why is your state resisting the NCAA?

Speaker 3 And the answer is he's not going to do anything about it because he's a captive of an insane legislature that is a result of, on the one hand DEI people who say they're DEI and the other is wealthy

Speaker 3 left-wing people from San Diego to Berkeley who are fueled by an economy that's medieval based on 9 trillion in Silicon Valley, Apple, Google,

Speaker 3 Facebook, et cetera, the video, that's where the money comes from. And it's a medieval state.
It looks great when you go to Palo Alto. Boy, I mean, that doesn't even look great in Palo Alto.

Speaker 3 If you go to Los Altos or walk through Menlo Park, it still looks pretty good.

Speaker 3 You come down here to Fowler, Sanger, Fresno, Stockton,

Speaker 3 Delano. It's a different world, especially out in the country outside the cities.
That's the real California.

Speaker 2 Well, you just riffed off a column there, Victor.

Speaker 3 I've written too many of them.

Speaker 2 It's good.

Speaker 3 Nothing changes because

Speaker 3 the people vote for these people, and

Speaker 3 they're going to have something in store because the EPA under Lee Zeldin has done a heroic job in clearing the mess out of Pacific Palisades.

Speaker 3 But they're going to and then they can talk all they want about waiving coastal commission requirements and all that. But they're going to deal with the people they voted in.

Speaker 3 And they have an agenda, and that's let's remake this

Speaker 3 exclusive, largely white and Asian enclave into a community for the people with high-rises and bus services and no parking, et cetera. That's what they're going to dream of.
You wait.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well,

Speaker 2 they like making

Speaker 2 seven, ten-story ghettos. It's part of the liberal.

Speaker 3 The people who like that, remember, are the people who are living in $50 million homes

Speaker 3 on the beach, about five miles away.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, Victor,

Speaker 2 as we conclude here, we have lots of listeners who

Speaker 2 catch this on Apple, and they can rate the show zero to five stars, and practically everyone gives you five stars. They leave comments, we read them.

Speaker 2 People leave comments now on Rumble, where we're now appearing. I've got two.

Speaker 2 One is from

Speaker 2 Interrositor, who writes, I love seeing VDH on Rumble. I also love seeing him smile on the show.

Speaker 3 Makes me pay a lot more into this stupid flu.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well, it makes me feel like things are going in the right direction. So

Speaker 2 to remind Eeyore of that. And then there's another interesting comment by Dovey12, D-O-V-I-812.

Speaker 2 Hey, Victor,

Speaker 2 you mentioned we needed a sheriff to run for governor.

Speaker 2 Have you heard of Chad Bianco?

Speaker 2 He's in the race. So I looked up a little.
Chad Bianco has announced he is a

Speaker 2 L.A.

Speaker 3 County Sheriff?

Speaker 2 Riverside County.

Speaker 3 Riverside, yeah, I have heard of him.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he announced on February 17th he's a Republican. So

Speaker 2 maybe the cavalry's coming or the sheriff anyway.

Speaker 3 We need something so desperately.

Speaker 3 I see things. I was driving to town the other day.
I see things.

Speaker 3 I'll just give you, before we leave, a a little synopsis of my drive into town. I won't mention the town.
I go into mail letters at the post office box.

Speaker 3 I'm a bicycle is coming the other direction toward me

Speaker 3 and I I don't know what why he would want to stop at the

Speaker 3 uh mail and the alleyway, you know, where you put boxes in the and now they become theft-proof so that people can't put the little h hangers down in, you know, and pull with gum and pull out letters

Speaker 3 they had been doing. I had lost a lot of letters that way.

Speaker 2 Fishing, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. And this guy comes toward me, and he has a gold skull mask on.
He has long hair and he's riding his bike, and it's there it was between a storm.

Speaker 3 And I thought, you know what, I know you're sick, but you're not hallucinating. So he stops, and I roll down the window, the other window, and I said, Could I help you? But he had a skull.

Speaker 2 He was a skull

Speaker 3 riding. So then

Speaker 3 I

Speaker 3 get back in

Speaker 3 and I drive.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 he didn't say anything to you.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 No, okay. He just stopped.

Speaker 3 Okay. And I thought, well, should I stay here

Speaker 3 and see if he's curious about the five bills I just paid or not? And then I go over to a bank. I won't mention the bank.
And of course, the ATM doesn't work.

Speaker 3 And then I do the drive-in, and that is out.

Speaker 3 So then I think, well, I got to go pick up some groceries. So I go to get my cart that's outside the grocery store.
And I notice the first six have napkins, wipes,

Speaker 3 shopping literature in it, newspapers,

Speaker 3 debris. So I pull out six of them, and then I get another one, and then I go in, and everybody's, it's very, you know, I'm there, and then I get in line, and the person ahead of me

Speaker 3 has

Speaker 3 everything separated, like little separations, like beer here, candy here, and then these are like $20, $30, $40, and then the big, huge cart comes,

Speaker 3 and then it's

Speaker 3 exasperation that the first two EBT cards are not working.

Speaker 2 Of course.

Speaker 3 And so I'm waiting, waiting, and then when you're in a world like that, you want to be hyper-legal. So I was parked way away from all this.
I always park away because I'm...

Speaker 3 About six months ago, I was there and a person who looked like they had a nice car came in and another person claimed that they had hit them and was, you know what I mean, that

Speaker 3 scam and wanted money from this other person. So I just parked my car, which is not the nicest car by any means.
So I just park it way distant. So anyway, and I always park my

Speaker 3 laundry, I mean my shopping cart. I take it all the way back and put it in where it's supposed to be.
And the poor person was there. He was so nice.
He said, thank you so much.

Speaker 3 I wish everybody did this. But the final thing I said is that when you check out, the checker walks behind the counter with a little code gun and

Speaker 3 reads the barcode on your shopping cart.

Speaker 3 Because I guess you have used a credit card when you paid, so they know who you are, and then that barcode is a not.

Speaker 3 So then when I drive through the country home, my two-mile, I see their carts on the side of the road in a ditch. So they're trying to stop the theft, but they have to record every single one.

Speaker 3 And then as I was driving this way yesterday along, I won't name the avenue,

Speaker 3 I noticed this car. I'm going about 45, 50, and there's a car going about 10 miles an hour, about a mile ahead of me.

Speaker 3 And then it pulls over, so I slowed down.

Speaker 3 And the person...

Speaker 3 is opening the trunk and that means he's going to unload all these

Speaker 3 trash. But then I slowed down

Speaker 3 and didn't get next to him parallel. So then he walks out and looks around, and then

Speaker 3 he closes his trunk because I had my phone. I was going to take a picture of his license plate.
And then he putt putza on.

Speaker 3 And at that point, I said, I did my duty, but as I turned left on my street, I looked down and he was pulled over again. That was just like a typical 20-minute, 30-minute odyssey.

Speaker 3 I felt like I was dealing with a Lystragonian Cyclops Circe

Speaker 3 Calypso trying to get home I really did

Speaker 2 and that's another day in California yeah that is California now I thought it was where bowers and flowers bloom in the spring

Speaker 3 now and I really feel for

Speaker 3 there was a guy there who

Speaker 3 a Mexican-American guy who works for a farmer I know. He's a genius.

Speaker 3 He can put a conduit under 50 feet of asphalt.

Speaker 3 He knows how to take pipe sections and put water hydraulic and drill a hole right through and thread. He's amazing.

Speaker 3 And he came up to me and we were talking about everything and how hard it was to farm in California and everything.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 people, they all know it's not working. They all know it's a completely dysfunctional, dangerous society.
And

Speaker 3 I won't mention one last thing is there's a a very famous medical center in California, not here, but it's one of the most famous.

Speaker 3 And I had a relative, a former relative, son-in-law, went in for a routine procedure, schedica,

Speaker 3 and died

Speaker 3 in the recovery room. I had another friend from high school who went six months earlier for a heart valve.
The surgery was successful.

Speaker 3 came back the next day and didn't wake up. I had another person say they just had a medical procedure there.
It was the same thing.

Speaker 3 And what I'm getting at is that

Speaker 3 when your educational system is 45th in the nation,

Speaker 3 And your UC and CSU systems have been non-merocratic, and you have been admitting people at your stellar universities not on merocratic criteria for a number of years,

Speaker 3 and you are running a huge deficit

Speaker 3 and $77 billion to start this year, you're starting to see the breakdown of an inherited society which the present generation is not able to sustain.

Speaker 3 And that can be roads, high-speed rail, reservoirs, the California Water Project, crime, homelessness,

Speaker 3 routine petty theft. Oh, by the way, one last thing, I'll shut up.
That same place where I went to get food, I was checking out,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 all of a sudden, this guy, they have a security area, you know, where you watch the customers. A guy's in there with TVs and stuff.

Speaker 3 And all of a sudden, this guy is very strange looking ahead of me, right?

Speaker 3 And he's got a kind of a trench coat and everything. And this guy bounds out of the security thing and grabs him by the neck.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I thought, wow, this is just some kind of gang fight or something. But the security guy was really good.
And he said, empty it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Oh, he had 20 stakes.

Speaker 2 I mean, you should have seen what came out.

Speaker 1 I mean, there was

Speaker 3 everything that came out of his coat and pockets. And then he grabbed him by the neck and he said,

Speaker 3 I said something to the effect, are you going to arrest him? And the checker was watching. He said, No, they just, so he escorted him out, and then the guy wouldn't leave.

Speaker 3 And he started, so he got pretty rough with him. And he said, get out of here.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I guess they didn't get the message that it's no longer legal to steal $950

Speaker 3 for merchandise. We repealed that.
I thought we did. But that's just a day in the life of stuff.
And

Speaker 3 it wasn't like that 40 years ago, 30 years ago.

Speaker 2 sounds like you need uh who's the sheriff from Walking Tall right Bradford Pusser Peuser

Speaker 3 it's it's a nihilist ideology it destroys everything it touches yeah and then the the worst thing about all this is that then you go to the university and you read things written and and the the generations that created the state

Speaker 3 multiracial generations who did a one they built this wonderful

Speaker 3 airports freeways California water,

Speaker 3 Glenn Dumpkey and the tripartite UC, CSU, Community College Plan.

Speaker 2 Made the desert bloom. Yeah.

Speaker 2 They did everything.

Speaker 3 And they were such great people. And all you hear is denigration and that they were polluters and they were

Speaker 3 and they destroy their dams. They destroy their aqueducts.

Speaker 3 They can't.

Speaker 3 And yet those people had more intelligence and competence in their little finger than all the Galvin Newsoms in the world.

Speaker 1 Well, again,

Speaker 3 child of privilege, child of privilege, inherited privilege, smug,

Speaker 3 boutique left-wing politics.

Speaker 3 Never subject to the consequences of his own ideology.

Speaker 2 Ingratitude, Victor, ingratitude.

Speaker 2 Hey, I just need to mention

Speaker 2 I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society. And it comes out every Friday and has 14 recommended readings.

Speaker 2 I know you're going to like it. Go to civilthoughts.com, sign up.
We're not selling your name. It's nothing transactional about it.
I really do believe you will enjoy it.

Speaker 2 Thanks for those who do subscribe and who write me. And thanks, everyone who took the time to leave comments, Victor's website, Rumble,

Speaker 2 Apple, wherever. Victor, you've been terrific.

Speaker 2 You're indestructible. Keep being indestructible.

Speaker 3 I am not indestructible.

Speaker 2 Well, we will all

Speaker 2 dust you shall

Speaker 2 be.

Speaker 3 24 hours I go on Mr. Toad's Great Adventure.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 yeah, the wild ride.

Speaker 3 Notice that one thing happens when you've had the flu and you're trying to get over it. I'm not infectious, but when I've done this before,

Speaker 3 one or two things happens.

Speaker 3 Either you see a different climate that's warmer and you force yourself to think you're perfectly and you get well,

Speaker 3 Or you get run down and you get stranded somewhere worse. But you have to have an upbeat, optimistic point of view.

Speaker 2 I hope you're playing lands where it's supposed to, and you're not rerouted to Gary, Indiana, or St. Louis or some.

Speaker 1 That's happened to me places a lot.

Speaker 3 Or catches fire at the dock, like the one in.

Speaker 2 Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 safe travels, St. Christopher.

Speaker 2 Go with Victor. Thanks, everyone, for listening, and we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 3 Thank you, everybody.

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