The Pensive West: Self-Contempt and the Contemporary Campus

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Hello, everybody.

This is Victor Davis-Hansen, and Jack Fowler and Sammy Wink are not with me today, as they are often not when we have distinguished guests.

And we do have one today, and he's Benedict Beckhold.

And we're going to discuss a lot of his work.

He's a philosopher, historian of ideas,

and he's going to correct me if I'm wrong.

Born Swedish, I have some affinity for that because my family,

four generations on my father's side ago, came from Lund, Sweden, and helped found a little Swedish community here called Kingsburg, as some of you know.

My great-grandfather, Nels Hansen and Frank Hansen, his son came at the end of the 19th century.

And then

we're going, and then he was educated in Germany.

He's now back in, he's in New York.

I don't know how people like that when their native language is Swedish, can speak fluent English better than most Americans.

And then we're educated in a German university.

And I suggest or probably have an idea that that's not the limit of his foreign languages.

But anyway, he's here because he wrote a wonderful book about Western self-doubt.

And he used the term oikophobia,

which is Greek for the hatred or fear of your own house or yourself or your culture.

And it's about the decline in civilization, Western civilization.

And so,

Benedict, thank you so much for coming.

I'm so glad we can have you here.

Tell us a little bit what oikophobia is, in your view, and how you came upon the idea and what's the danger of it as it confronts the West.

Yeah, so thank you so much for having me.

First of all, I followed your work for a long time, so it's a pleasure to speak with you directly.

And no correction necessary.

I am indeed from Sweden.

I was born in Uppsala.

So I don't look very Swedish, but because I'm also Jewish and I have some other influences as well, but that's where I grew up until I was 14.

And

supposed to answer some, what you touched upon briefly there, I went to high school actually in the United States.

So that that probably helped my English quite a bit.

I came here when I was 14,

but then went back to Europe for studies.

But anyway, yes, so orchophobia, as you said, it means the hatred or the fear of home or one's own house, one's own cultural household, as it were, coined by Roger Scruton, the late Roger Scruton, in the 90s.

And I came upon this term simply by reading Roger Scruton, but when I came, when I saw the term, it immediately resonated with me because this was something that I had experienced myself.

Of course, a lot of us have experienced this, but especially those of us who have spent quite a long time in academia, where okophobia is especially rampant, even more so than I think in society at large.

In academia, both here in the United States and in Europe, I had come across the sort of knee-jerk self-hatred where one assumed that where a Westerner assumed that everything that's wrong with the world is the fault of the West, or an American would assume that everything that's wrong with the world is the fault of America, and so on.

And so

when I saw this word, I realized, well, it's good that we have a word for it, orchophobia.

And this is a word that

needs to be popularized and that needs to be explained.

And so what I did in this book, Western Self-Contempt, to which you referred,

I set out to explain.

to offer an explanatory paradigm, if you will, of how orchophobia arises.

Because one hears people, everybody knows that we're in the grip of cultural self-hatred.

It's something that people often remark upon, but most people don't understand why it is this way.

And your thesis, if I could just interject, your thesis, and I think people recognize it as true, the degree of self-loathing or self-hatred,

if it's not exclusively a Western monopoly or phenomenon, at least it's much more intense in the West.

And so that

we engage in a level of self-criticism that cultures like the people of the Arab Middle East or Iran or China or Russia, well, I won't get into Russia, but it's kind of a different case.

But other cultures that are antithetical or parallel to the West, they don't suffer this or they don't have this.

They don't take self-criticism to the level of hatred.

Or if they do, they've been westernized.

Is that something that's yeah, that's right.

And that's one of the reasons.

So, as you say, Okophobia is not exclusive to the West, but it's certainly much more predominant here than elsewhere.

And I do outline some of the reasons for that.

Namely,

because part of the prerequisite of Okaphobia is egalitarianism and a relatively free and open intellectual space

where intellectuals can criticize and debate without fear of the powers that be.

And these are things that have existed to much greater extent in the West than elsewhere, and not just in modern times, but also in antiquity as well, which is why I actually start this explanatory paradigm already in ancient Greece.

Now, obviously, in antiquity, for a variety of reasons, it wasn't as extreme as it it is today.

But the same kind of tendency, the same explanatory paradigm of why Okophobia happens is recognizable already in the West.

And of course, in Athens, you and I were both fellow classicists.

We know in Athens,

there was the first instance in the West of a truly open intellectual space where intellectuals, philosophers, and dramatists and so on could criticize their own culture without necessarily being shipped off to the gulag or something like that.

And so

this is the main reason why Okophobia is much worse here than elsewhere.

When you see it in antiquity where it begins,

I'm thinking, just as you're speaking, that famous line in Euripis Bacchae, when I think it's Tiresias, and they say, the gods should be better than we are.

In other words, our religious system is not, or Tacitus is famous.

They made it a desert.

when he has that

nationalist leader in northern Britain say,

Calcagus, I think his name was.

Yeah,

make a desert and they call it peace.

And

the Germania is kind of a glorification of non-Western.

But do you see, well, my point is, you're absolutely right that it exists from the very beginning.

It's probably why we are such in the West.

But did you see it as toxic?

Or do you see the development of self-hatred, from self-criticism to self-hatred in the ancient world?

And if you do, did it contribute, you think, to, say, the fourth and fifth century decline of Rome?

Or was

Christianity also a catalyst?

Yeah, so, well, actually, that's interesting.

So I wouldn't entirely exclude those two.

I would say that Christianity and that self-questioning or self-hate is actually part of the, or two sides of the same coin in the case of Rome.

But

what's interesting, you mentioned Tacitus, for example, is that he...

when he brings up those quotes from Rome's enemies,

it would be one thing if he maybe had a dialogue and a debate.

Like Rome's enemies say one thing, and then the Romans counter that with their own argument.

But what's interesting in Tacitus in that particular case is that no Roman actually offers a counter-argument.

And he just lets those statements stand

on the part of Rome's enemies.

Now, one can agree or disagree with those particular sentiments.

One can say that maybe the Romans were more imperialistic than they should have been, and so on.

But the point is that there is a particular

self-critique that

has developed at a certain point in Roman history that simply was not thinkable earlier.

And so when you say self-critique, self-critique certainly leads into self-hatred.

You mentioned Euripides.

I think Euripides himself was quite a patriotic Athenian.

Yes, he was.

Yeah.

But one sees he questions.

So there is a certain self-critique.

I wouldn't call Euripides an orchophobe, but there's a certain self-critique.

He starts to question the Greek view of the gods,

not just in the Bacchae.

We have other plays as well where that becomes.

Iphigenia, for example, in Aulus, that becomes relevant, and elsewhere.

The Heracles, Minominos, the Madness of Heracles, that's relevant as well.

So he questions Greek religion, but he still remains patriotic.

But that's one step in the direction of Oikophobia.

And so later generations continue to build on that, and they turn what is self-critique into a wholesale self-hatred or self-fear.

And do you see it as there were many?

I mean, we have, I think,

I think it's kind of a truism in classics that there were 250, I forgot the German scholar's name who once characterized all the reasons that Rome fell, 250 causes he cited.

But

do you see this as one of the major trends that weaken

the West, say, in the fourth or fifth century?

Or it has.

Yeah, so that goes to the point where you mentioned Christianity.

I would say that that goes hand in hand because I wouldn't consider them separate.

So in Tacitus, also, to go back to him, and I mean, mean, now we're talking, you know, sort of early second century AD,

and in his contemporaries, there is a sort of,

they start to look at Roman religion as something rather quaint.

And they're not, most of them aren't complete atheists, but

they've certainly come to the point where they're now questioning their own religion.

And that makes the Roman population more

susceptible to foreign influences from the East.

and from the roman point of view of course uh christianity is an eastern cult and similarly we had seen the similar development in ancient greece where various um eastern cults uh begin to become popular in ancient greece this is something that isocrates complains about for example already already aristophanes complains about it in his plays as you know um and we see that similar development in the roman empire And so when it's not Christianity certainly has plays a role in the decline of Rome, but the reason why Christianity is able to have such success in the late Roman Empire is precisely because the groundwork has already been laid for it, because

they have already, the Romans have already started to question their own religion to such an extent, at least Roman intellectuals.

Do you think there's something inherent in the Sermon on the Mount type of messaging where suffering

to be moral and save your soul and suffering is more paramount than to punish your friends and help punish your enemies and help your friends in the classical sense and that's a that that's a that's a classical complaint right about about the end of the of the west but there is something to that isn't it

i was just thinking of the siege of constantinople when people on the wall

black tuesday of 1453 were trying to the priests were going around in the last few hours saying that you can get penance no matter how many of ottomans you kill where on the other side of the wall it was 72 virgins were going to be rewarded for the

Christian grandeur.

It's a different type of incentive.

Yeah, absolutely.

No, to be sure.

Christianity certainly had that weakening effect, you might say, on a weakening, not, I don't mean then, of course,

on an individual basis, but on a geopolitical basis, Christianity certainly had that weakening effect.

And that's why

Some Christian philosophers, of course, realize this.

And they realize that, well, if we implement the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount on a geopolitical level, then things are going to go quite badly for us because there are these other empires in the world that do not subscribe to the Sermon on the Mount.

And so you have, I mean, Augustine was one of them.

You have other, of course, much later,

Thomas Aquinas.

They all took part in developing ideas of just war.

Now, that took a while to sort of settle in the Western mind, if you will.

And certainly in the case of the Roman Empire,

the, as you said, the sort of more muscular paganism, if you will, help your friends and harm your enemies, the sort of classic line that you refer to, was much more conducive to fighting off

a foreign enemy than the ideals of the Sermon on the Mount.

So once again, I would say that Christianity certainly took a part in this sort of internal weakening.

Do you think also the greater degree, at least later, of free markets and as you mentioned, a greater degree of open expression, but that combination of prosperity, even what the Romans called luxus to the point of luxury or decadence?

But you see that in America today, that not only do people have the statutory power to express themselves in whatever way they want.

but they are sometimes separated from the necessities of life.

They've reached a point where their essentials are taken care of and they can speculate or they can dream or they can think of utopian criticisms of themselves without direct consequences of starvation or enemies over the hill or attacking them.

Yeah, absolutely.

Already Aristotle

in his politics, he talks about the beginning of science in ancient Greece.

And he said science was able to begin by science, I mean science and philosophy and so on, which is largely the same thing in those days.

He said that was all able to begin because

people's necessities had been taken care of, because a sufficient degree of wealth had been established that there was time, at least for a certain class of people, to devote themselves to knowledge and to the pursuit and development of science.

And we see, and this is certainly a part of the explanatory paradigm of Oikophobia, namely the fact that once,

because

when everyone is busy scraping by a living, they don't have time.

to self-question.

I'd like to go

now that we've established, we're not going to have time to develop this fascinating thesis all the way through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

But say that we're here now with this classical Christian Western economic, social, cultural heritage.

And from what you've written, and I follow a lot what you've written and said, you feel that it's accelerating more so than, say, at the 19th century, early 20th century.

We're in a, I don't know, I don't want to say end phase.

That sounds sort of existential.

But

what are the dangers of it?

And do you see it correcting?

Or are the forces that create it accelerating to such a degree and it's becoming so entrenched that it's going to be very hard to rectify?

Yeah, so I'm not known for my optimism exactly.

Maybe it's that Swedish phlegmatism that

maybe we both share a little bit.

It is accelerating and part of something I also established in the book is that it moves sort of helical fashion.

That is to say, that

even though this phenomenon has happened before and it's now recurring, every time it recurs, it goes...

it becomes more extreme and it moves faster than it previously did.

And part of the reason for that is because we have even more egalitarianism today, even more wealth, right?

The various prerequisites for Okaphobia exist in even greater degree today than they did in the past.

And so it stands to reason that Okaphobia itself would be even more extreme.

What is the role of the universities, you think, the new university as a student?

Yeah, so the universities, the problem with the universities in this context is that the universities tend to pride themselves on being at the vanguard of knowledge and at the vanguard of

the frontier, if you will,

of human science and philosophy and so on.

And sometimes they have been.

It's not a reputation or a self-regard that is completely unjustified.

But the problem, of course, with that is that

desire to constantly be at the vanguard of knowledge and at the vanguard of the progress of human science and understanding is that it leads to more and more outlandish ideas.

One has to,

if one always has to come up with something new, and as academics, of course, we all know that the competition with fellow academics is constant.

One has to come up with some new idea in order to secure the next, in order to secure a particular

grant from a foundation, if you will.

And because of that, this leads to ever more outlandish ideas.

I mean, and this is also sort of a subject that is also recurring in history, the complaint about intellectuals coming up with outlandish ideas.

Already Thomas Hobbes complains about it, saying this is an idea.

This is an idea that only an intellectual would believe, basically, that goes back already to him.

And

when one has that urge to outdo one's colleagues and one's competitors, of course, that will lead to

the loss of common sense, oftentimes in universities.

And also, what I said before when I said that those who don't have wealth, they're too busy scraping by a living to be orchophobic.

The university class, there are exceptions, of course, but by and large, the university class is fairly upper class and they are fairly wealthy.

By and large, they come from wealthier families, most of them.

And that, of course, means that they also come from a background where such self-questioning and such not just self-questioning, but self-hatred or self-loathing has already

become quite normal.

If you were to calibrate it or to assess the level of its

popularity or

how it's become an establishment

doctrine or an orthodoxy, say in three areas of the West, and we would start with, I think

the country that can least afford it and therefore is more immune, but not completely immune is Israel.

And then maybe we look at Europe versus the United States.

Are we as oikophobic as Europe, you think?

And you're yet or not?

No, I don't think we are.

So it depends a little bit.

Our occophobia is more intense where it exists.

So as I said before, wherever occophobia recurs, it becomes more extreme than it previously was.

So one sees more outlandish and more extreme forms of occuphobia in the United States than, for example, with the white self-flagellation, for example, the white self-hatred, this whole obsession with race, that is something that obviously is more American, although now Europeans, of course, are taking over some of our bad ideas in that regard.

But orchophobia is still more progressed in Europe in the sense that

it covers more of the population.

Here, in, and this is part of the reason why we're so split here in the United States, is that even though we do have these extreme forms of orchophobia in the United States, there is also another segment of the country and of the populace that

is much more resistant to that.

Whereas in Europe, even putative conservatives in Europe, there are exceptions, of course, but by and large, have moved in a much more occupic and progressive direction.

And so

it is more difficult in Europe, and I mean here mainly Western Europe,

to have the sort of conversations that we're having because

because Okaphobia has become almost the sine qua non in Western Europe.

Do you think that's partly because it's a luxury that

after world war ii there was a combination of there was literal self-destruction in europe right with two world wars and then combination with the protective nuclear shield and the huge nato american funded force that they felt that we were sort of roman legions that had no god and they were greek philosophers because they really didn't have to spend the money to protect themselves or they didn't feel there was the the threat was existential because of our maybe that's changing.

I don't know.

Yeah, right.

So that's interesting.

I think, yeah, I mean, so first of all, Okophobia started earlier in Europe than in America.

I mean, it goes back to mainly to the Enlightenment on continent in continental Europe at a time when here in the United States, those ideas were still not in vogue.

But as you say, when the United States took over the role of world leadership after World War II, there was still

America

as a part of that role was still involved in conflicts, in wars, and so on.

And although nobody likes war, nonetheless, it does serve as a bulwark against orkophobia because a people has to rally in favor of a particular cause.

In Europe, as you say, they no longer had that need.

And so safety, security, wealth, those are things that were all taken for granted.

As you say now, with the Russian invasion, that...

can change and one does see a bit of a conservative resurgence now in parts of Western Europe.

Still fairly small compared to the conservative resistance in the United States, but it does exist and it is growing.

And we'll see how far how the war in Ukraine develops.

But for the same reason, Israel is much more immune.

You mentioned Israel, much more immune to orchophobia because obviously they are surrounded by enemies on all sides and they simply cannot afford to be orchophobic, which is why the far left in Israel, I mean, it exists everywhere, but it's much, much weaker there than in Western Europe or in the United States.

We're going to take a quick break,

everybody.

I'm with Benedict Beckold, and he's the author of this wonderful book on

Western self-loathing, self-contempt.

And

the term that he's resurrected, oikophobia, is a Greek term for hating your own household or your own civilization.

We'll be right back.

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And we're back.

Thank you.

And we have a few more minutes.

I'd like to ask you,

if you could give us some examples, and we've gone kind of through the history and the abstractions of it.

How does this work out in a way that, because one of the themes of your book and your writing is that this can be very dangerous to a society's health and future?

Give us a few examples that you feel that reflect both the pre-existing doctrine and how it...

it's something that we have to be very careful about given the perilous state of affairs, either internally or externally.

Yeah, so one sees Okaphobia in action and how it weakens the United States.

Now, if every country in the world were a Western-style liberal democracy, then Okaphobia probably wouldn't be so dangerous, actually.

But obviously, that's not the case.

In the world, we have countries like Russia and China and North Korea and Iran and so on.

And so it is incumbent upon the leadership of a Western country to promote Western interests.

And we see, of course, with our current leadership class and our current administration that this is not the case.

The sort of,

I mean, it's played out now to take another example of conflict.

I mean, we just mentioned Israel before the break, the fact that the current administration is sort of waffling between Hamas and Israel.

Now, They are doing that partly for cynical political reasons, I think, because they're afraid of

Muslim voters in Michigan,

but there is also a more philosophical reason, which is this sort of knee-jerk assumption that the West cannot be in the right.

And the conflict in Israel

does, of course, to a considerable extent represent a conflict between the West and the non-West or a segment of the non-West.

And so there is this sort of fear to take unabashedly the Western side in any particular conflict.

Now, in the case of Israel, that of course emboldens Iran, and they see that the United States leadership is weak and that we are okophobia.

They might not use that term, but they see that we don't believe in ourselves and in our own values.

And that, of course, emboldens American enemies.

And so it's certainly the case that okophobia is not just a philosophical problem.

It has a very concrete effect on the real world and people

die because of it.

So when we have a quarter million students from the Middle East, many of them on generous

fellowships from the Gulf Gulf states and many of the Gulf states generous benefactors to their universities.

And we've seen a great asymmetry in the demonstrations on our, especially our elite campuses, pro-Israel or pro-Hamas, or maybe if people resent pro-Hamas, they can say anti-Israel, but I think they are pro-Hamas.

And

when you see at MIT,

the president of MIT was essentially saying these students on student visas were

not only protesting for Hamas and against Israel, but harassing Jewish students.

And yet, when asked, were they in violation?

The president said, yes, they were in violation.

Why didn't you do something?

Well, we did not want to arrest them because they would lose their student visas.

And what I'm getting at is...

So

there's the idea that somebody comes into a Western country and enjoys the freedom to protest, to express their political opinions in a very comfortable, leisured society that's affluent.

They understand what the Western mind is, and they understand that if they were to go back to Gaza or Syria or even Jordan and Egypt

and engage in the same type of self-critical protest against that host government, they would be either killed or put in jail.

What is the thinking about it?

When that is true and it's easy to identify, what do they think and what do we think?

Do we ever say to ourselves collectively,

well, they're hypocritical because they're using our freedoms to attack us, but they wouldn't, but if they hate us so much, why don't they go back and use the same protest against their government?

Or do they think about it?

Are they cynical?

Or do they get corrupted by us, if that's the word?

And do we win them over?

What's your feeling about all of this?

Yeah, so one can, of course, of course, find exceptions.

But my overall feeling there is that I wouldn't ascribe too much in the way of logical thinking to a lot of those people.

I think the thought pattern that you just went through there, I don't think it's a thought pattern

of which most of them are capable, quite frankly.

It's a bit like it's a more dramatic version of

Democrat voters in blue states fleeing to red states, but then continuing to vote Democrat.

Yes.

Even though they should remember why they left California or New York or whatever it is in the first place.

But

so it's a bit like that.

And so I wouldn't ascribe too much logical thinking to those people either.

Essentially, they are seduced by certain aspects of the West, certainly.

I mean, we have the wealth, we have the freedom.

That, of course, is very seductive to anyone.

But

old habit...

and tribalism dies hard, I would say.

And so on the part of a lot of these things, there is this still sort of knee-jerk gut feeling that their own tribe is in the right and they would like to

supplant their own tribe to their new home while still not realizing that that would compromise some of the or many of the things that they have come to enjoy.

That's a very good point.

I can see that as a here in the San Joaquin Valley where we have we're ground zero of the illegal immigration.

We have so many millions of people have come.

California has half of all illegal immigrants.

And

I'd say that 90% of my community or first generation are illegal.

And it's a very funny thing because they will come here and they want to recreate the communities as anybody would of, say, Chiapas or Oaxaca.

And so that means

if they want cows or chickens or ducks in their rural home, just like it is in Mexico, or they'll have habits.

But they've been taught, I don't know, they don't come with this ideology, but they absorb it very quickly that they become very critical of their host, even though their host has given them kind of an

embryonic existence where they can have the culture of Mexico,

but the idea of the rule of law or an independent judiciary or a free market society or a constitutional government, the Bill of Rights, give them

a supersized or an energized form of that.

And it's so and that's true, I think, also of Middle Eastern students.

They have the luxury of voicing things that, if taken to their logical expression, would destroy the West.

But they feel that

they don't quite destroy the West because they like to be here.

They'd love to be here.

I've always noticed that when people have suggested that we deport people who are arrested from the Middle East that break our laws and are here as our guests,

that one suggestion, I've made it in print, gets people, that gets me the most hate mail I've ever had.

That is a really red line that they really believe that people in Europe, the United States, wouldn't dare ever do that.

Say, if you do not like our government or you don't like our society or culture, why in the world would you want to stay here?

Now, it's funny you should mention the point about deportation.

I wrote an article about the incompatibility of mainstream Islam with Western values.

Was that the one in Quillette?

No, that one, this last one was in Marion West, actually.

It's from last year.

Yeah.

And there was talk of, there was interest in having it translated into German.

And then I was told that precisely because toward the end I used the forbidden word that you just used, namely deportation,

that it couldn't happen.

They couldn't translate it.

And I didn't want to self-censor.

So that was the end of that.

But I also think that a lot of people don't, which is true for a lot of Americans as well and a lot lot of Westerners in general, they don't draw a direct connection between our form of government and the freedoms that we enjoy.

If they knew how to drew that connection more explicitly,

they might begin to understand that

you can't really have one without the other, at least not to the same extent.

That the ballot box and the federalist system and everything that we have is actually intimately tied up with our wealth, with our freedom.

And that sort of disconnect as well, or that failure to make that connection, I think, also contributes to

the presumption that

one can continue to

insist on one's own tribalism while yet preserving the things that one finds in the world.

Where do you think this all leads?

I mean, we're here now, and we're looking at the Ukrainian situation where people discount Putin, but I'm not sure you should discount him entirely when he talks about the use of nuclear weapons.

We have Taiwan threatened by China.

We've got Iran always talking about existential destruction with Israel.

Are you pessimistic about the future of the West, or do you think there's enough people that say to themselves, well, these are intellectuals or these are people in government or these are people in leftist enclaves or these are people who will wise up?

Where does it lead?

Because

when you read Petronius's Satyricon, to take one example of an ancient novel, you see it right in your face.

I think there's a scene there where they make fun of a Roman soldier who's out on the front, coming back from the frontier, the decadence, the sex, the food.

And yet, I guess

that, despite that, the empire went on for another 400 years.

But

what's your final Yeah, so

I'm somewhat more optimistic about the United States than about Western Europe.

I think in Western Europe, the demographic changes have gone so far that I am

not very sanguine about

their

ability to pull back from the brink, at least not without violence, unfortunately.

In America, I think we have...

I think there is enough resistance to this orchophobic development for me to be somewhat more optimistic here.

My feeling is that what will probably happen at some point is that our continued weakening will lead to some sort of conflict not that i hope for that of course not not at all uh but will lead to some sort of military conflict um

that will force at least the united states to uh to pull back from that brink um and which won't necessarily by the way stop that progression into orkaphobic madness forever but it will at least it will at least pull it back for a while and sort of slow it down

That's probably my best guess of what will happen.

What else could what do you think?

Because we're just about out of time.

what do you think the government, if it was in the right,

your perfect government,

what would be practical things, whether culturally, civilizationally, politically, or whether it's from the government or from other institutions, what can people do to stop it, to get, to bring back, say, is it civic education in the schools or some appreciation that we have to be perfect to be good or we're better than the alternative or tell people that the Arab world brought in more slaves than we did.

What is it?

Well, so civic education, yeah, I mean, civic education is always good, of course, although it has to be pointed out also that it is often the more educated segments of society that tend to be the most orchophobic, which isn't to say that they're educated in the in the old classical sense.

I mean, as you know very well,

people who are considered, most people who are considered educated today would have been considered a joke in educated circles 100 years ago, which in part due to the demise of classical education, something that you, of course, have written a lot about.

And so, education beyond what is considered to be educated today, I think, would help,

but not the sort of rather mediocre degree of education that is considered educated today

in most areas of society.

When it comes to the government, I don't want to sound too much like a partisan, but I do think that

much of what the Trump administration did,

at least before COVID,

was quite salutary

in this context.

For example,

to touch on a conflict we've mentioned, his move of the embassy, of the U.S.

embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

It might not seem like a big deal, but it is a big deal in the cultural context because he told the Arab world that this is what we believe.

These are our values.

Jerusalem is a Jewish city, an Israeli city.

And

the intelligentsia, the ecophobic intelligentsia had said, oh, that's so arrogant and the Arab world is going to be up in arms and so on.

And actually, nothing really major happened.

And that was because they felt that he was not a typical self-hating

and they actually respected that decision.

And they thought, yeah, I think you're, that's a very good point you made.

I think

that the fact that he was unpredictable and they didn't know what he would say or do, and the fact that they did know that he was very strongly and very unambiguously pro own country.

And oikophilicism.

He was oikophiliac, I guess we'd say.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that made them, because if you think back at it, he did things that at each juncture we were told would be catastrophic, getting out of the Iran deal,

saying the Houthis were terrorists,

saying the Golan Heights is not going to go back to Syria.

All of those things were apocalyptic, we were told.

But actually, I think you make a good point.

Not only were they not, but our enemies developed, I don't want to say

admiration, but it's almost that I saw that with President Obador as well.

When Trump went down there and stopped catch and release, renegotiated NAFTA, started to build the wall or repair the sections.

He damned Trump, but he almost got an admiration for him in a way that he says that Biden is his friend, but he treats Biden, you know, he just threatens him.

He just says that it's going to continue.

That seems to be something that might be a corrective if we were able to remind people psychologically or historically that.

Absolutely.

I mean,

the old saw of Machiavelli remains as true as ever.

It's better to be feared than to be loved, at least on a political, geopolitical perspective, most certainly.

Yeah.

And it's

the Israelis, for all the criticism, it seems to me that the only

the existential threat to Israel is when

they don't win.

In other words, when they are muscular and they take care of their national security needs, then people damn them, but they admire them.

And that's when we had the Abrams Accords that was predicated on the idea that Israel would be a good ally to have in the upcoming war with Iran, if you recall.

But when they hesitate or they become more oikophobic, then people say, well, I can't count on them or that something's happened to them and I will turn on the hatred of israel yeah it's part of the counterintuitive but it's it's true absolutely i mean part of the problem with the uh um biden administration is its moral purism and this moral purism comes from orchophobia okay so because we had this mistake or this uh sin in our past we now have to atone for it well that's the sort of moral purism that just doesn't work in the world and that is perceived as weakness and there's a certain arrogance in the sense that the the biden administration and orchophobes in general they believe that the rest of the world think as we do.

And of course they don't.

They respect self-respect and they respect force.

And that is, as cynical as it may sound, that is what is necessary on the geopolitical stage.

Anything, any apology, any

bending of the knee will only be met with.

It seems like people know that human nature, I mean, that was one of the sick things that...

was eerily accurate that bin Laden said that they they respect the scrolling horse.

But

even if he said it in the amoral sense but it seems to me that we're at a point now where if a national figure say a college president when students ram through a building or harassed other students or they just said you broke the rules and you're going to be expelled that that that that person already stood up for free speech or if a president says if you hit another american insulation we're going to go to the root cause of that and deal with you.

It seems like they would, the people are yearning for that type of Reagan-ass leadership.

Yeah.

And already, Thucydides, as you know, already he says that kindness will be met with

disrespect.

And

as well,

he does.

And then we have that famous and the proem of Livy's history that society fears the remedy more than they do, or the medicine more than the disease.

They get in this period of, I guess it's paralysis.

It has something to do with

it.

Before we leave,

why don't you, could you tell all of our listeners?

So where, what are you, where could they have access to books, articles, your website, so they could displore this?

Yeah.

So my website is BenedictBekeld.com.

Just first and last name.

And that's also my handle on Twitter, Benedict Bekeld.

And I post all of my all of my articles and my books and so on.

Western Self-Contempt, the book you mentioned in the beginning.

That's all there.

Yeah.

And what are you working on right now?

So right now, I'm actually a little bit off the beaten path.

So I just finished this very lengthy article on Islam,

which was published recently.

Right now, I'm actually working more on my first love in philosophy, which was aesthetics, and how our perception of our social and

society perception of art kind of figures,

how that

connects to our politics.

And yeah, that's so that's something quite different, but that's what I'm currently, currently, that's the book project I'm currently working on.

Well, thank you for coming on.

And when we have our next crisis, I hope it doesn't come, but I'm afraid it will, we're going to ask you to come back and explain the context again.

It would be my distinct pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you, everyone.

And be sure to go out and go to Benedict's website.

And I think you really like this Western,

this book on Western self-contempt.

It's available at Amazon.

And

anywhere else you should buy it on your website or Amazon?

Amazon is probably the best place, yes.

We can also buy it directly from Cornell University Press, but Amazon is probably most convenient for most people.

Well, good.

It's been our pleasure to have you, Benedict, and good luck.

And thank everybody for listening.

And we're going to take a break now and we'll come back with another interview I think you'll enjoy as well.

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Thank you, everybody.

We're here.

This is on the Victor Davis-Hansen podcast.

Jack Fowler is not with us today, nor is Sammy Wink.

I'm soloing as I do sometimes

for interviews.

And you just heard a very fascinating interview with Benedict Beckeld, who wrote this wonderful book, Western Self-Contempt, Oikophobia and Decline

of Civilizations.

And we're going to now continue with another interview of Kevin

Fagellis, excuse me, who is a

student.

and student instructor as well at Stanford University, a physicist,

graduate, postgraduate or graduate, we'll find out in a second.

And he's going to talk to us about what has been going on at Stanford and in general, most of our so-called elite campuses in particular,

as a result of October 7th and the Gaza War that ensued.

Something that I've talked about, as you know, in the podcast, just walking from my apartment in the Stanford campus over to the Hoover Tower

for four months, interacting with people who come up to you and want to pitch their.

And when I say people,

it's usually the pro-Gaza line.

Anyway, we're going to talk about the Gaza War and how it affects campuses and what's the manifestation of all that at Stanford.

And so, Kevin, I'd like to introduce you.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Are you a post-doc student at Stanford in physics?

Yeah, I'm actually a PhD student at Stanford.

That's being soon.

I'm at the end of my tenure here.

Yeah,

what's your field of specialty?

So I'm in the physics department.

I do work in artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience.

I sort of straddle the boundary across several different disciplines at the moment.

And

you came to national attention

because you testified to a subcommittee in February in the House of Representatives about what is going on on campuses.

And you referenced Stanford in particular.

Is that right?

Yes, correct yeah so what is it what what what's just give us you know a survey of how the war or the events of October 7th and then the three 20 days later the reaction to it in Gaza how that filtered down or was was

interpreted on cat on the campus that we share right

so anti-Semitism is not new to Stanford.

Let me put that out there, is that prior to October 7th,

I've been a PhD student here a very long time.

I've been here since 2016.

So, this is my eighth year in my PhD here.

So, I've seen a lot.

Um, and this campus, while in normal years, it's like a country club, it's bright, it's sung, it's beautiful, the grass is luscious.

Um, there's been numerous incidents where anti-Semitism has poked its ugly head, most notably in the past, was let's say Ben Shapiro came to give

it a

posters, yeah, with the Ben Begone.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, literally dehumanizing him as an insect, you know, saying that he needs to be exterminated.

So

that was a tragic just

act of anti-Semitism on campus, going back to literal, just like Nazi.

propaganda of Jews.

There were swastikas all over campus, numerous incidents of those

throughout the past several years.

There were

Mizosas ripped down on doors.

I was once at a Rosh Hashanah event in White Plaza, just in the middle of campus.

And the students decided that was a good time to protest Israel while we were having a Rosh Hashonah.

And for those of you not

familiar with Rosh Hashona, it's just a New Year celebration in Judaism.

So obviously anti-Semitism is nothing new.

Let me ask you if I could just interject a minute.

I was a graduate student in classics from 1975 in residence, and I finished got my PhD 79, 80.

And I arrived at the Hoover Institution in 2003.

And while

I guess what I would say is I saw no anti-Semitism,

and there was a much greater presence of Jewish students at the time than there is now at Stanford Part because of these strange new admission policies.

And then when I came back, I was also a visiting professor in 1991 and 92 in the classics department.

And then in 92, 93, I was a fellow at the Center for Behavioral Studies on campus.

And what I'm getting at is, I would say from that period of 1975, maybe all the way up to my first couple of years as a Hoover Fellow, maybe 2004, I didn't see very any of it.

But then I started to see it maybe 2005 and 6.

What explains that?

Was it the greater presence of foreign students from the Middle East?

What was it?

Or was it the change in the Democratic Party, Bill Clinton's old party turned into Barack Obama's new party?

What were the external events that made anti-Semitism prevalent?

And I agree with you.

It's everywhere the last 10 years.

But it wasn't, I don't feel it was there to the same extent, if at all, when I was a student.

Right.

So, I mean, the period of time you're talking about really was this golden age, this renaissance of American Judaism post-Holocaust, essentially, where American Jews really clawed their way up from nothing.

I mean, my ancestors came here without anything, you know, without a dollar, you know, in the late 1800s.

They were working in sweatshops in lower Manhattan, you know, just pennies a day, you know,

just in little tenements together.

And they came really with nothing.

And throughout the 20th century, especially post-Holocaust, Jewish Americans were able to thrive because the world finally witnessed really anti-Semitism for what it was, this mass genocidal campaign against the Jews, which both the...

you know, the Nazis categorized us as, you know, like, let's say communists or subhuman.

The communists then on the other end categorized us as evil capitalists, you know, so it's like this terrible, terrible distortion of reality and conspiracy theories.

But what ended up happening, I think, this is my appraisal of the situation, is that American Jews really did climb to the upper echelons of many different aspects of society over the 20th century, especially towards the last half of the 20th century.

The issue is,

is that

American Jews, we got a little bit too comfortable in the end of the day.

We thought.

They were

too

comfortable in the sense that

they did not recognize their Jewishness to the same degree as their parents, or that they were

more attuned to forces that were starting to form

that were anti-Semitic and they didn't want to rock the boat, or they just.

It's a combination of factors, I'd say.

I'd say that, first of all, they forgot that anti-Semitism is a problem.

When you're living in, let's say, Manhattan, when you're living in Los Angeles, when you're living in, you know,

more coastal enclaves, you sort of forget that your people are hated sometimes.

And when you forget your people are hated, you get a little too comfortable, you get,

and you start giving up the power.

You forget why you needed the power in the first place.

Why did you need the power?

Why was the ADL?

invented in the first place is because Jews needed people to advocate on their behalf because in the end of the day, nobody really likes Jews.

So in the latter half of the 20th century, American Jews started, for whatever reason it is, whether it's guilt or comfort, they started ceding power to other individuals.

And because of that,

the other individuals, it turns out, really just don't like us.

You mean other individuals in what specific context?

No, you can look at the DEI.

Oh, yeah.

So you're talking about the forces.

that are catalysts for anti-Semitism, say, on campus, the DEI movement, the foreign, maybe

the much greater percentages of students from the Middle East on very lucrative subsidies.

And

I think in other

in relative terms, the diminution of Jewish students on campus, there are not nearly as many Jews as there were when I was a student, it seems to me.

That is just a fact.

I'm willing to bet that if you were to look at admissions over the past 50 years, the amount of Jews that have been admitted to diesel prestigious Ivy League universities are just dwindling.

And that's, you know, across the case, you know, Harvard recently got sued the other year on, you know, from Asian Americans because their numbers were dwindling in these universities and they were being discriminated against in admissions.

So this is not a new thing for minorities such as Jews or Asians

because the DI establishment does discriminate against certain types of minorities, whether it's Jews, Indians, Asians.

Do you think the DEI, the idea, part and parcel maybe within

critical racial theory, critical race theory, excuse me, is that the so-called victim cannot be an oppressor or a victimizer.

So

when

anti-Semitism emanated from people who identify with the DEI movement, people thought, well, they are sacrosanct.

We can't say that they're racist or anti-Semitic or prejudiced or biased because

they are victims themselves or so DEI establishes.

Right.

I mean, this is

the tragic irony of the situation is that these

programs give

essentially full reign.

Not full reign, but they excuse the behavior of people that otherwise would be classified as having wildly intolerant views.

For instance, on Stanford campus and on many campuses, this prevalent narrative of, I'm just going to call it what it is, radical Islam, has spread wide and far and has been accepted and has been beloved of these

programs.

And this is a ideology that essentially

wants to denigrate women, denigrate homosexuals, denigrate people that are not of the same belief.

And it's been sort of widely accepted.

And it's just, it's befuddling to me

how

ideologies that are so intolerant have a,

not just a tolerance, but a welcoming entity.

It's a very good point.

You know, I'm speaking from my farm.

When I grew up, there was not a single Jewish person in my 6,000-person small town.

And there were in Fresno, my parents knew Jewish people.

But if there was a prejudice in the United States, a bias, it had been traditionally associated with the rural right or the paranoia that the Jews controlled the fruit markets or the mercantile board of trade.

But it came from the conservative right.

But now, as a person who lives in a very conservative San Joaquin Valley, I don't see any anti-Semitism among so-called conservative rural people that used to be the incubators of it.

It's almost completely transmogrified to the elite left,

and not just people from the Middle East, but people who are either afraid because

they feel it's an orthodoxy on campus, but

it's really the elite left-wing student, academia, media person, government, even corporation.

But it's completely different than it was when I was young, 50 years ago.

Precisely.

And this is, okay, there's whole books on the subject.

There's a book that I'm very fond of by Charles Jacobs and Avi Golswasser called Betrayal, the Failure of American Jewish Leadership, that I believe was published last year.

And the book extensively categorizes the failure of, let's say, the ADL and, you know, other three-leather Jewish organizations to essentially adapt to the transformational narratives of the latter half of the 20th century, where, yes, it used to be that, okay, a lot of the anti-Semitism was so prevalent in the ultra-far right.

And okay, some of that still does exist today.

There still are Klansmen and neo-Nazis hiding out in the crevices of America.

However,

The Jewish establishment has categorically ignored and dismissed the fact that mainstream anti-Semitism in America, and in fact the world,

is

almost exclusively radical leftist anti-Semitism cloaked as anti-Zionism, anti-Israel rhetoric.

And it just happens to be the case that this is the primary driving source of anti-Semitism.

It isn't the right-wingers anymore.

It really isn't.

It isn't.

It isn't.

Kevin, why don't you just, because maybe we can go from, I've been a little bit abstract in my questioning, but

just give the listeners some examples of things that

have happened on the Stanford campus that you know of personally or

that have been docked.

Anything you can tell us about the actual

professors, the way they treat students, indifference of administrators, types of protests that would have not been tolerated by any other group.

What's going on at Stanford is what I'm getting at.

Sure, sure.

I'd love to delve into the details here.

I've been extensively involved over the past six months.

I mean, I started out as a very,

I started out as involved in the religious community over here, but not so much as the activism community.

I never imagined I would get involved in this, but nobody else was.

So I had to stand up for the Jews over here.

So just maybe a quick rundown of the worst of the worst.

Yes,

I think that would be informative.

So let's start with the faculty members, because there's a lot of talk about the students, but the faculty in many cases are just as bad.

There were two very notorious incidents.

The first was Amir Loggins, who is or was a lecturer at Stanford.

And this individual was teaching a class that is,

I'm not sure if it's required by all freshmen, but it's one of the required class, or like it's on a list of required electives for freshmen.

And so imagine you're a freshman, Jewish freshman coming into your first class of ever of college.

And here you have an instructor that

four days after October 7th, I believe it was, was

segregating Jewish students in his classroom and forcing them into the corner and taking their possessions, their bags, their laptops away from them and saying to them, this is what Jews do to the Palestinians.

How did it even know which students were Jewish?

Did he ask them to self-identify?

Yes.

To my knowledge and from reports of students in the the class he asked them to raise their hands wow

and what's the status of his suspension now to my knowledge that suspension is finalized there are petitions from the anti-israel students um to reinstate him saying that it was a gross miscategorization of what occurred that day

but you know this is the fact of the matter is is when jews have something that happens to them, they don't, nobody believes what happens to us, but any other minority group.

We have to, you know,

give us another example of a faculty.

I think one of the other worst scenarios is this guy, David Palumbo Liu, who I believes is a comparative literature professor.

I'm well aware of him.

I've been an object of his attacks myself.

Yeah, he is,

he's a piece of work.

I have to tell you something.

This guy is,

I don't know what his skin in the game is.

Half of me believes that he just wants to seem popular with the young progressive crowd, and this is why he does it.

But

one thing, really, I mean, of all the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel things he said over the past several years, of which I'm aware of many, the one that really takes the cake was this like Facebook post or some social media post in late November where he basically says that he sees the fact that, quote, Zionists don't feel safe on campus as a sign of progress and that we need to get used to it.

So I,

to me, that's, I, I, I, and he, he wrote a whole op-ed and the Stanford Daily

retorting to my critique of him because,

and essentially he doubled down.

But from my perspective, it doesn't matter what ideology you adhere to.

You should not be celebrated that you don't feel safe on campus.

I don't care if you prefer dogs over cats or cats over dogs, just because you have a simple ideological preference doesn't mean you should not feel safe.

Yeah, I mean, if he said that about not just blacks, but if he's, if he thinks there's a difference between Zionist and Jewish students, well, somebody could say, well, then there's a difference between, and there is, between black students and Black Lives Matter.

But if somebody said Black Lives Matter activists or people who adhere to that philosophy should be, feel unsafe.

Precisely.

This is, yeah, they would be, I think they would be suspended immediately.

Classic double standard.

Classic double standard where another incident I was ganged up on, surrounded by about a dozen students at night one day,

shouting in my face, you know, you're dirty, you and your people are dirty, dirty Jews, you make me sick to look at you, and like

calling us disgusting monsters.

And this is

like, imagine 12 white students ganging up on the black student.

Those 12 white students would be immediately

suspended from school.

It would make the front page of the New York Times the next day.

Imagine a horde of a thousand Klansmen, literal Klans members, marching through Stanford campus chanting horrible things against minorities, black people are just like that.

That would be national headline news.

But the fact of the matter is, is that we have thousands of students chanting for Intifada.

I've heard them.

I heard them every morning for the duration of that.

I guess it was almost four months, the Gaza camp.

Why do you think this is?

What is it?

I mean, there's all these theories that abound, but is it because someone,

someone, meaning faculty, Senate, administrators, provost, president, deans, someone at Stanford, or everybody at Stanford feels that if they were to apply the standards to anti-Semitic students, many of them from the Middle East, but not all,

in a way that they would to any other group, then they would incur what?

They're afraid that they would be

people would show up at their home.

People will use those same techniques of protest to get in their face.

They would be considered.

What do you think is the driving force that just restrains them from applying Stanford's rules to everybody regardless of their ideology?

Well, first of all, it's that, I mean, they are scared of being targets themselves.

I mean, President Salor has become a notorious target on our campus.

I mean, his house was vandalized in late January by these same protesters, these same agitators.

Was that a fact that was known to the public at all?

It's a fact that it was vandalized.

We have no idea what happened to his house because the DPS, the Department of Public Safety, is obfuscating investigations there, which I don't think that's on them.

I don't think that's their...

issue.

I think that's a university that's trying to quiet things down type of a thing.

But I mean, nobody wants the ire of the mob turned against them.

If the ire of the mob is turned against the Jews at the moment, then screw the Jews.

Who cares about the Jews?

That's what people's perspectives are.

Half, you know, the anti-Semites think that we deserve it.

And then the people that maybe don't hate us or on our side are just, you know, on the sideline, sort of hoping that things quiet down.

But unfortunately, it's not going to quiet down.

Let me ask you about, because I see some from the faculty point of view, but let's say that

you're a Jewish student at Stanford and you're seeing some person who supports these protests, these anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel protests, but they're not really political.

And they're not Jewish.

They're not from the Middle East.

They're just maybe Latino or white.

Who knows?

Black.

Why are they doing that?

Because the times that I've talked to them, if I've been walking by and I've seen non-Middle Eastern students come up to random strangers and try to give you a pamphlet or say River to the Sea, when you stop and engage them, they know nothing about the Middle East.

They really don't.

And so is it just they have an instinctual sense that this is now the majority orthodox and they want to be on the side of the winning team?

Is that what they are?

Are there this path of least resistance?

And if they were to look at it empirically and therefore maybe empathize

or at least not engage in that activity or empathize with Jewish students, what's happening to them?

They would be ostracized in the minority.

Is that what it is?

Just self-interest, you think?

I think there's a lot of things going on.

It is a cultural war fundamentally in the end of the day.

I will say, just a blanket statement, I think that the...

Middle Eastern students themselves are the ones that you can actually speak to.

And in fact, I think that they're probably a little less radicalized than your average American domestic white student who I think just sees it as a popularity

contest.

Those are the people.

In fact, like the leader of the anti-Israel movement on Stanford campus or one of the co-leaders is in fact Jewish and they parade this guy around night and day, you know, as their spokesperson, as the token Jew that hates.

other Jews, essentially.

And it is just a social movement.

It is a popularity contest.

There's a lot of social pressure not to speak out, especially if you're a Jew, especially if you support Israel, especially if you don't think that mobs of students should be marching around campus chanting for the deaths of any minority.

If the war continues, and I think Israel is going to need a few more weeks at least to eliminate Hamas, and then who knows what will happen on its northern border.

But let's say these tensions

persist, if not accelerate, because we don't know what Iran is going to do.

We don't know what we're going to do.

And this continues, this climate, where does it all end?

Where do you see the Stanford campus like next year, the year after?

Where's it going?

Is there going to be a reaction to stop it?

Or do you feel that it's so far evolved that people are going to

appease it, acculturate to it?

Yeah, first of all, I'm completely expecting that once Israel goes into Rafael all hell to break loose on, I mean, every single college campus in America.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

And I don't think that the universities right now are prepared to handle that situation because fundamentally no university in the country has taken prophylactic measures in response to what has happened already over the past six months to

prevent more outbreaks of this anti-Semitism.

So I think we're going to see more of the same.

I think where it ends is this.

This is where I see in the end of the day, is that

Jewish students already are being assaulted on many campuses, right?

There have been Jews in the streets, not students, but Jews in the streets literally killed, like what happened down in LA, what happened in Detroit.

And

in the end of the day,

these universities are in charge of two things primarily.

They're in charge of learning for the students.

giving a place for these students to actually learn and giving a place for these students to be safe, not have to worry about their physical safety.

For when a parent, God forbid, forbid, sends their child all the way across the country, the university is responsible for their safety and their learning environment.

The universities are not taking action on themselves.

They are not making any new restrictions, code of conduct, or anything to mitigate what is to come.

In the end of the day, this is why I've been so focused, why I went to Congress in the first place, is because I do believe that the situation has devolved so much on these campuses and the administrators are just sitting ducks, lame ducks, that

we have to rely on the government to step in at this point.

I think every single university should have their tax exempt status threatened and I think they should have their funding threatened.

I think that'll happen.

I'm not, I don't want to inject partisanship, but if there's a change in the administration, that'll happen.

I do believe that'll happen.

I don't think that's going to happen because of the election year and the electoral politics.

I tend to agree with that.

In Michigan and Pennsylvania and maybe Nevada,

there's about three or four swing states where the assumption is that the Arab American population that strongly sides with Hamas in this war is

key to a very close election, whereas the much larger Jewish population, which is much larger than the Arab American, either doesn't identify as strongly with Israel as the Arab Americans do with Hamas and the Gaza, or

they've been acculturated so long to be prominent members of the Democratic Party, they just feel that it's unthinkable that they would break finally with the Biden administration because of what...

I mean, to be frank, Biden is now in a process of decoupling from Israel.

And I think will be completely decoupled should they have to deal with Hezbollah.

So

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't see it coming from the government unless there's a change of government.

I don't see it coming from the universities.

I was looking at the admissions policy last year and this year, and it's posted on their website, so it's not, it's a matter of public record.

If Jews are considered, and they are, according to them, and they are white, and yet 21% of the incoming class is going to be white now, even though it's 67% of the population.

And males, to take one example, are about,

I don't know, 47, 48%.

So you got about 9%

white males.

And then when you calculate out of that 9%, if say you have 2,000 entering students, 190, 180, let's say, are white males.

Out of that quota come athletes.

legacies.

I have a lot of people who've called me and said, my kid didn't get in Stanford.

How much does it cost?

and out of that becomes the children of presidents, vice presidents, provosts, deans,

Nobel laureates.

There's not very many slots left for meritocracy is what I mean.

If you're a Jewish student, let's say at a premier high school or private school and you had perfect SAT, you sent it to Stanford optionally, I might add, and then you had a 4.5 with advanced placement.

I don't think you're going to get in.

There's not going to be any chance of it on the barret without being connected either.

And so I don't see the Jew, I see the Jewish students, like, I guess you would say middle class or lower middle class whites, essentially disappearing on campus.

And white males, to the degree they are at Stanford, are going to be somehow either very, very wealthy or they're going to be athletes or they're going to be very well connected within the Stanford community, their parents, et cetera.

And I just think it's not going to be meritocratic.

Stanford had an article released in the San Jose Mercury, I think last year, sort of bragging that the people who optionally took the SAT and got a perfect score, which is less than 1%,

they rejected 70% of them.

Apparently they were happy about that.

But so what I'm getting at is if the Jewish profile on campuses, and I think it already has happened, starts to diminish,

and the Jews that are here are going to be feeling feeling less and less comfortable and the number of students who pay the full the full tuition without scholarship help from the Middle East is going to increase.

I don't see how the demographics as well as the attitude are going to improve.

That's what I'm worried about.

I think that there needs to be a vast overhaul of the DEI system.

I think that's the only option here for just for the sanctity of a meritocracy, a merit-based system where everybody can be evaluated based on the

fact that I think University of Texas, the Texas public university system is doing that.

They're going to fire 200 DEI people and they're going to next year prohibit, according to the Supreme Court, they're going to prohibit the use of race, gender, sexual orientation.

as a criterion.

But that's Texas.

I don't see it happening, even though there's a proposition, Prop 209, and it's been challenged twice, and it hasn't worked.

So it's still on the books.

It prohibits that type of discriminatory consideration for race or gender or sexual orientation.

But

what I'm getting at is that if there's not going to be consequences or maybe even psychic rewards for people who are anti-Semitic on campus, and the number of Jews are going to be who are target are going to be fewer and therefore more vulnerable.

There's going to have to, something's going to happen.

And

it's especially as you pointed out, and I mentioned earlier, if Israel feels that it has to accelerate

going into

areas of Gaza where it's going to be very controversial, and then of course their northern border as well, where they have 100,000 people that have no home.

They're exiled in their own country.

So it's going to heat up one way or the other.

And I'm not optimistic is what I'm trying to tell you, Kevin.

I'm not either, frankly.

I think that Jewish people are incredibly resilient.

However, I am a little concerned that the resilient Jews are not the American Jews.

I think that American Jews have an issue with standing up for themselves.

I think American Jews have an issue with actively and proactively trying to protect themselves or even advocate on their behalf.

I think that the people who are in charge and who are entrusted with the safety of Jews, whether that's the universities or the state governments, the federal governments, are turning a blind eye because of partisan politics.

And frankly,

I don't want to say this because it's a terrible thing, but God forbid somebody dies on campus.

God forbid a Jewish student dies on campus, on any campus, then maybe these universities will be forced to take action, but it shouldn't have to come with a death.

No, it should.

Do you meet Jewish students who, let's say,

come from families that are traditionally progressive?

They've always supported DEI.

They came here very idealistic and they were

diverse campus

and they're they can't believe what's going on.

They're confused.

They don't know what to think.

Do they see that they're natural political allies?

Because I'm just generalizing that the Jewish community until recently has usually voted, say, 65 to 70%

for liberal candidates or more liberal than the alternative.

Do you see that they are starting to wonder why is this happening given my ideology and my previous support for DEI, Black Lives Matter?

Is there a coming to...

reality moment at all?

There was, but I think they are so

indoctrinated themselves that they don't know what to do.

All of their friends are woke radical progressives.

That's what 99% of their own politics happens to be.

And that's fine.

That's an ideological perspective.

The issue is there's a buy-in.

Oh, if you believe in this, that, and the other thing, then you also must hate Israel and demonize Jews.

And it's a little bit of these people.

I've seen it.

I've seen them where they have this perspective and they feel depressed because they're losing friends right and left and they're getting vilified on social media just because they happen to think that Jews should not die.

God forbid.

Right.

And

then they go off to a trip to Israel and they do the horror tourism in the south, you know, going to all the kibbutzim and seeing the terrible atrocities.

And they come back, you know, like invigorated and feeling passionate.

And they say, oh, screw this.

You know, I don't care what other people think for a week or two.

But then they lapse back into the same tired mentality of, oh, well, you know, if I really just believe in this, that, or the other thing that my friends believe, and maybe they'll accept me.

But no, it's never going to be like that.

You're a square peg trying to fend to a round hole.

And it's completely.

enabled and encouraged by the tired, tried and failed approach of the large Jewish organizations who care more about

social justice initiatives than they care about promoting Jewish welfare and Jewish well-being or Jewish defense.

I mean, I struggle to think about all the campus hillels who 99% of their programming is social justice, you know, like, oh, we should care about the environment, but they have no programming on Jewish advocacy.

I think what's happened is the popular culture has made a system of rewards and punishment.

So I know as a columnist who writes two columns a day, I wrote one on Monday about Gaza versus Ukraine, trying to expose the hypocrisy that we put all of these ultimata on, say, Gaza.

I mean, on the Israelis in Gaza.

You know, you have to have a wartime bipartisan cabinet.

You have to avoid collateral damage.

You've got to notify civilians with leaflets.

You've got to have a ceasefire.

You've got to be proportionate.

And we tell Ukraine, you know, Zelensky can cancel elections.

You don't have to be, you better be disproportionate or you'll lose.

Don't worry about collateral damage when you send rockets into Crimea.

So I was doing that, but my point is when you know as a columnist or a writer that when you do that,

the reaction is going to be 10 to 1.

In other words, and this is what's strange about it, because the...

Believe it or not, the American people, when asked the right question, do you support Israel or Hamas in a war,

it's about 65%.

If you change

the question and say, do you think Israel should keep killing civilians in Gaza?

Maybe not.

But if you ask a fair question, the general public, but the general public, as you say, with the Jewish community, isn't really active about it.

But the people who are active in the media, you know that when you write something, they're going to attack you and attack you and attack you.

And so I think for some people, they say, do I really want to do this again?

Because I get all these emails.

I get my voicemail.

I get text.

I get bloggers' comments.

And I think what I'm getting is they have created, the anti-Israeli movement has created a, believe it or not, even though they don't have popular support, they've created deterrence.

And they deter students, they deter faculty, they deter, because I know a lot of faculty that don't like what's going on at Stanford, but they're terrified that

if

they spoke out, they would be ostracized.

They wouldn't get a grant.

They wouldn't get tenure.

They're afraid a faculty committee would go after them.

So they're not going to say a word.

And I don't know how to change that

community where it has to go, it has to be a radical change

to the extent that if you break up a public speaker's presentation, if you harass a Jewish student, if you put your hands on somebody, if you're told to leave a building and you don't, you're going to be expelled.

And if you're going to be expelled and you're on a student visa, and that is part of the visa's requirements that you not be arrested while you're a guest, you're going to have to go back to your country of origin.

I think it would stop very quickly.

Well, here's the

sad thing: is that

here's my cynical take:

I think

because of the influx of foreign students into our campuses

who are on these visas, and the visas are, you know,

dependent on them behaving as good Americans would otherwise, right?

I think that the universities are actually reluctant to set the precedent of disciplining even American domestic citizens.

Well, they're they're resident, legal, most of them are legal resident aliens.

There are a lot of American citizens that are, you know, just like anybody, but a lot of them are from Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf states, states, and they're on very lucrative state,

100%.

So as you know, if you go, if you're a graduate student or undergraduate, that $90,000 for tuition plus room and board, maybe $110,000,

most people don't pay that full amount.

They have all sorts of loans and gets,

you know, scholarships, but not foreign students.

A lot of them pay, and they're really a money maker.

And they're up to about 20%, 25% of most of these elites so i think a lot of them just say you know we need these students to subsidize a lot of the incompetence fat

uh wasteful administration or the way that we run our universities and we're not going to touch them because if we get a name that we expel students that are anti-semitic we're not going to get foreign students yeah at least the ones that we want because they pay the most yeah and look on like the fact of the matter is is no university wants to be the first to start,

you know, deporting students that are advocating for jihad on campuses, right?

Like, even as abhorrent as that is to the American eye, the Americans that have had to live through things like the Boston bombing in 9-11,

you know, to call for jihad on these campuses, to call for that type of behavior

and not send these people back home.

I mean, I think

it's going to, I think there's a slight change when

you can't drive across the Manhattan Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge because of demonstrations, or you storm into St.

Patrick's Cathedral on Easter, or you disrupt a Christmas celebration in Times Square, or you corner Jewish students at Cooper Union.

That can be cumulative.

It's just from people I'm talking to that don't agree with me politically.

I think they're getting to the point where,

especially in the elections, if Joe Biden were to lose the election, there would be a lot of blaming around.

So,

and I don't, I don't, that's why I'm not sure the Arab community who identifies with Hamas in Michigan will actually vote against Joe Biden because they know, A, the alternative would be very less

welcome to them.

And second, they don't want to be blamed as the people who cost him the election if

that would be possible.

But I do think there's changes, what I'm trying to say.

I think people are kind of getting fed up.

And the universities don't have to, they don't really expel the student visas.

They just expel, they just follow their own rules and they expel a student.

And as soon as the student's expelled,

then

the way the law reads, the naturalization, the Homeland Security then says this person's visa is no longer valid.

I'll say

there's a tension, I think, between

the average American citizen that is fed up

with this type of behavior, mobs running through cities, blocking off traffic, blocking off airports, having to go through a protest every time you want to freaking go to work.

The Intel building in San Jose yesterday, people were burning American flags outside the Intel building.

I saw that.

It was a Jewish woman who came out with a bloody face because somebody assaulted her.

Yeah, in Berkeley, they stormed the Holocaust remembrance request to the Berkeley City Council.

And so there's, I think very,

unfortunately, we have to go back to the silent majority statement, you know, way back from the 70s.

There's a silent majority that's completely fed up with this behavior.

They think it's unconscionable.

unconscionable that preschoolers, as in the case in Stanford, preschoolers are being taught about

Palestinian resistance at Stanford preschools.

And they think it's completely crazy that this is being allowed to happen.

However, on the flip side, this is the tension is that

the Gen Zers, the millennials, are able to go crazy to their hearts content, burn every flag, assault anybody, go do anything, march in thousands of people chanting for violent overthrow of not the Israeli government, but the American government in many cases in these cities.

And nobody's stopping them from doing anything.

And they're growing more and more and more emboldened because

it's like a child.

This is how I've always thought about it.

My adversary here on Stanford campus are not the anti-Israel students.

I think they have a particular set of beliefs, and I think they're acting like children.

And when children misbehave, you can't blame them that is the nature of children they fundamentally are meant to misbehave the nature of an adult the purpose of an adult in our society is to educate and discipline children such that they can grow up to be well-adjusted well-tempered rational and well-behaving and empathetic adults in our society The issue is, is the adults in our society, be it whatever institution that is, be it the universities, the city councils, the state or federal governments, are allowing these mobs of people to act like children and behave like children, and they're just never suffering the consequences of that.

No,

they're not.

And who will police the police?

Because there's a lot of faculty children and there's a lot of administrative children that are prolonged adolescents themselves.

And they're not, they're afraid and they're not exercising the authority that's invested in them, either out of fear or incompetence or ideology.

So

I've always,

we're almost out of time, Kevin, but you know, one answer to it is someone who teaches at Hillsdale College in the summer, at the early fall.

And I occasionally do a Zoom class for Pepperdine.

I visit St.

Thomas Aquinas.

I can tell you, there's no...

When you go to Hillsdale College, there's a lot of Jewish students now, more each year.

It's completely safe.

There's public discourse, but I can tell you, if you are at Hillsdale and you give a public lecture and you are a student and you disrupt that lecture, the President Larry Arndt will expel you.

And everybody knows it.

But even if they want, most students would never even think of that.

And the same thing.

I was at the Pepperdine campus last year, and I'm going to do it again.

I didn't see one protest, not one.

And I had students from the Middle East in my class.

They were absolutely polite.

I had people in the hallway come up and ask me about contemporary political things.

They did so on the assumption that no one was going to be loud or disruptive or violent.

And if you go to a campus like St.

Thomas Aquinas,

it's just different.

So I think what

A lot of people have to do is you listen to Kevin.

You can't give money anymore without restrictions or even with restrictions to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford.

It's just not going to work.

I mean, you can direct it toward conservative programs within those or the Hoover Institution or somebody, Jack Miller Center or something like that.

If you give money to these universities with a blank check, then you're subsidizing this type of behavior.

And I really do think we have to recalibrate what

these letter, these degrees after our name mean.

I think if you say, say, well, I have a BA from Stanford or I have an MA from Harvard, I don't think that means what it used to, both in the quality of their curriculum, but more importantly, what those universities stand for.

And I'm speaking to someone who was the seventh person in my family that went to Stanford.

And I got a degree from Stanford, PhD, and I just don't feel.

And that was a very different Stanford.

It was a wonderful Stanford when I was there.

The faculty were superb.

The students were superb.

There was none of what we're talking about.

But I feel that the degree, it's something I don't talk about.

I would never say this.

Oh, I have a degree from Stanford.

So I think we have to get into a complete reset of our values and our minds.

Say these places have become toxic.

They're illiberal.

They're anti-civilizational.

And they're very expensive.

And they're subsidized by the government through student loans, through tax-free endowment income from huge federal grants.

And we, as students, don't want to participate in it.

And to the degree we have a political boss, we have to stop it.

I think that's the only thing we can do.

I think that's right.

Yeah.

Well, I know that we have a lot of Stanford alumni that listen, and sometimes people take issue with that.

But if you want to save Stanford, And I'm very loyal to it.

My mother got a BA in 1943.

She got a JD in 46.

My

first cousin, my nephew, all of them went there.

And if you really want Stanford and want to save it, then you've got to speak up.

And one of the ways you can speak up is don't write them a check.

Do not write them a check until they change.

And I hope that would have some and speak up.

Everybody, I think you're right.

Everybody has to speak up and maybe it'll stop because that's not the majority of people.

who despise Israel and are anti-Semitic.

In my experience, the majority of people are just the opposite.

They look at Israel as our strongest ally, if not just in the Middle East of all our allies.

And And they have great admiration for Jewish Americans for what they've accomplished and their values.

And this is an aberration that was allowed through appeasement to grow and grow and grow.

And it's reached a point now that it's toxic and dangerous.

And everybody's got to come out of the woodwork and stop it.

Precisely.

It's not a Jewish problem.

It's an American problem.

It's a civilizational problem.

It is.

It is.

And it can happen here.

Remember that.

It can happen anywhere.

But if if we don't stop it, it will happen.

Well, Kevin, thank you very much for coming on.

And maybe we'll have you back in six months for an update and see if things got better at Stanford.

I'd love to.

Thanks so much for your time.

Thank you.