Terrorists, Squatters, and Other Unintelligible Intelligence

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

The star and namesake Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Mashabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor is a syndicated columnist, farmer, best-selling author, military historian, classicist.

I'm sure I'm missing some things in there, Victor.

He's got a website, The Blade of Perseus, and its web address is victorhanson.com, a thing to which you should be visiting and to which you should subscribe.

And I'll tell you more about that later.

We are recording on Palm Sunday, March 24th, and this particular episode will be out on Thursday, holy Thursday, the 28th.

Important things to talk about.

And the first topic to get Victor's wisdom on will be about the ISIS terrorist attacks in Russia.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, pretty clear.

Terror attack, Moscow.

Hundreds dead, hundreds maimed.

ISIS claims credit.

Putin is the bad guy.

Putin has been a subject of their

some propaganda efforts in the last couple of years

again we're recording on Sunday this is Thursday we're not you know things might transpire between now and when when this episode is up but Victor what are your

your thoughts about what happened why it happened and I at the end if you might get to

why shouldn't it happen here with the emptiness of our borders well this ISIS-K Khorasan, I mean, they operate out of the

badlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and they were the ones, I'm pretty sure, that planned the killing of the 13 Marines and blowing up of injuring 150 when we were skedaddling out of Kabul

in August of 21.

And they've, I mean,

I guess they hate the Russians because Russia went with the Assad government and fought them,

ISIS, in Syria.

And then, of course,

the Russia, they didn't screw around in Chechnya.

They just surrounded Grozny and leveled it.

And

they've been fighting, I mean,

they brag about that they're more radical than al-Qaeda and more radical about normal ISIS.

So they're considered the hardcore of all the terrorist groups, but they've been fighting China, you know, Iran, Taliban, United States, Pakistan.

So it seems like they have a global reach in some ways.

And again,

if you leave in the way that we did, if we had kept Bagram Air Force Base,

then we wouldn't have handed over

$50 billion in weaponry to the Taliban arms merchants.

And we would have had that huge base, and we might have been able to control this group by bombing it.

But it hates us and Putin equally, apparently.

I guess, again, because of the Russians in Syria and Chechnya.

And they just pick a concert, and that's very popular now after October 7th.

What better forum to find a bunch of young people that really,

you know, they have parents and they have friends and at their pinnacle of life.

And you go in there when they're relaxing and

celebrating.

They did that in France, too.

Yeah, they do the same thing.

That's their mode of attack is killing young people at concerts.

And

it seems to resonate among terrorists and it really affects the host, the target.

And that's what they did.

And there was a, I mean,

we'll see if Russian, of course, Putin tried to use it and said they were either trained by the Ukrainians, which is ridiculous, or

they were on their way to Ukraine.

But if you think about it,

here is Putin,

and he's fighting the Ukrainians.

They're both Orthodox Christians.

They have a long shared linguistic history.

They have a long shared

territorial symbiosis.

They are basically Europeans and Russians.

So if you see a

Russian in a Ukrainian uniform, a Ukrainian in a Russian, you couldn't tell the difference.

And here they're killing each other, 700,000, 800,000 dead and wounded.

And then you hear some, here are people who really have an antithetical worldview.

I don't mean about territory or the Russian Empire.

I'm talking about religion,

territory, ethnicity,

everything.

And yet Putin's using all of his efforts to destroy Ukraine.

It doesn't make any sense.

And maybe he thinks he's going to get the food basket of the old Russian Empire back, and maybe he's going to get a lot of natural resources, especially in the Donbass, but he's got most of them.

He stole that under Obama.

It shows you, this attack shows you where his priorities are, and they're misplaced.

And the United States apparently warned Putin, and he made a fool of himself by saying, this is just trying to divide us when he should have taken it seriously, but he couldn't do that in the way that The Russians warned us about the Boston marathon bomber.

And apparently we didn't do anything either.

It's hard, I guess, for a former superpower to

give or take advice

in today's world.

But at some point, you'd think that

at some point, you would think that

Europe and the United States would look at Russia in the way that Kissinger did and say,

We'll use China to balance it.

We'll use Russia to balance China.

And that's what we need to do, rather than to

end up with an alliance that has Iran, Russia, and China that have nothing in common.

And yet

except hatred for the West.

Yes.

I'm not saying we have to appease Putin.

If you want to arm Ukraine to defend itself, more power to you, I agree with that.

Arm them.

But this idea that you have a Verdun, and we had Verdun 1, we already had the Verdun 700,000 dead and wounded.

We're into Phase 2, Verdun that never existed.

We're in the Battle of Somme, coming up to Somme territory, a million dead and wounded.

And without anybody talking about

arming Ukraine to make it clear to Putin that he can't take Ukraine and therefore he should quit and have some negotiations over the Donbass and Crimea.

But that seems to be a heresy.

If you say that, then,

you know.

back on ISIS,

our enemies who the men who flew the planes into

the

World Trade Center and the Pentagon and

field in Pennsylvania

were here illegally, trained here,

fly planes.

We've been down this road before where our enemies come into our country and then prepare to harm us.

I mean, this is,

you don't have a crystal ball,

but why shouldn't we think that what ISIS did in Moscow last week?

It's not a matter of

if, it's just a matter of when.

I mean, these four or five, or how many there were, I don't know.

They've caught four or five of them.

And the death toll keeps going up.

I think it's up over 130 today.

And they went into Russia, which is harder to get into than where we are.

And so when you have 10 million people and you have every day dozens turn up on the terrace watch list, and those are just the ones you apprehend,

and you see all these military-age males coming in from all over the world.

And we don't do anything about it.

That's the big thing.

It's not just that you let them in, but you let them in with the impression that you are afraid of them and you will not or cannot stop them.

When you saw that Bobbed Wire and they charged that Bobbed Wire and then they rushed into the next building and the

transport, whatever that center was, and they started attacking

Border Patrol people and you can't stop them and you won't stop them, then they have an idea of entitlement.

Again, I keep saying that on this broadcast.

If the first thing you do is break the law and the second thing you do is break it not just by entering, but staying here, and the third thing you break it is by getting fake ids then the pattern of illegality persists and it's no big thing and you actually think that the

you know that the authorities can donate one of the weird things in my life has been talking to people who i know are illegal aliens that have been here eight or nine years.

And I had this with a former student or two and associates I break.

I want to give any more, any more information.

And they say to me, Jack,

the IRS audited me.

Can you believe that blank, blank, blank?

And it's like, well, I came in here illegally and I have been residing illegally and I have fake ID.

How dare the IRS suddenly out of the blue enforce the law when it comes to me?

And that's the attitude.

And so,

you know, if you're, if you come in here illegally and you're residing illegally and all the money you make is in cash by by your insistence, I won't work unless you pay me in cash, and you don't report that or you have a little mart at the crossroads and you're selling clothes and food and fruit and you're not charging, you're neither charging sales tax on items like food or shovels or wood or lumber, whatever you're selling on the corner.

And then you're not reporting that as income,

then you've created a whole, I don't know, a labyrinth of illegality.

And I think people are just coming in here with no expectation that they're ever going to be audited, and they should not be audited, and they have a free hand to do whatever the blank they want.

That's the attitude of the immigrant.

I think everybody should realize the days of, oh, I'm so happy to get to the United States.

It was my dream.

This is the most wonderful country.

What can I do to help it?

I'm going to.

I mean, there's some people like that, but that's not the majority view view of these people coming in now.

It really isn't.

I'd like to think it's the view of legal immigrants.

I think it is.

It is it.

Absolutely.

It's the view of legal immigrants.

And we can, we could handle a half a million a year if we had to, if they came in legally with diversity, with English, with skills, with capital, more power to us.

That was their attitude.

And

it still exists, but not these people.

Not when you're breaking the law like this and you're coming from all over the world and nobody knows.

I mean,

we haven't talked about the Venezuela.

What do you call that, Jack?

Is it called an immigrant influencer on the internet?

Social media?

Well, we're going to talk about he's the squatter.

He's more than a squatter, isn't he?

His name is Leonel Moreno.

Moreno.

He's a well-trained Venezuelan migrant, espousing the good old-fashioned virtues of leeching off government.

Leaching on how to have kids and get them them paid for and how not to work

and how to squat and take over people's hard work.

You know, that's so funny because when I was in school and when I talked to people from Mexico, which is almost every day, one of their biggest fears is that when they go back to Mexico, you know, especially Chiapas or Oaxaca,

deep into Yucatan, that somebody is living in their family home.

In other words, they came up here and they like to go back every year and there are squatters in their home and they're connected with the cartels and the government either won't or can't do anything and they lose their whole home.

Right.

And I thought, that is, when I first heard that about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, when I was a student, when I was a professor, when I talked to students who tell me, hey, Professor Hanson, we got back from Mexico and they took over our house.

I thought, and I heard it not too long ago at the dentist office from somebody.

That is just, that was so foreign.

That was just, I couldn't even imagine that.

And today it's just, well, yeah, that's what squatters do.

Don't leave your vacation.

What do you say?

Don't leave it.

Don't leave it locked.

No, they're locked.

What do you say?

You can't have a vacation home.

That's too much.

You have a second home.

Would you be surprised showing up there one day and that there would be people in it?

And by squatters, they don't necessarily have to be people from Oaxaca.

They could be some schmuck.

The only time I've ever encountered squattering was when I was a college student and I had a sibling who had some writer friend and his wife who wanted, my parents had a tiny little house, 1,100 square feet in Santa Cruz.

They bought it for $23,000.

And the mortgage payment was $140 a month.

And they put all three of us, the whole point was to save money.

So they sent all three of us to the same university and we all

went to that house, stayed there in the little tiny three-bedroom.

And then we had two college housing.

Yes.

And then we had two renters.

And it was about half the price of the dorms.

And then they kept it.

But one of my siblings said to these people who were coming to California, they could stay there for a week.

Well, then they stayed.

And they stayed.

And they stayed.

And they stayed.

So after about two months,

you know,

my parents would get the power bill and they'd tell me, can you tell them to leave?

And so my job was to go over there.

I was living in Stanford, was to paint the house.

So I went over there with my little

rollers and,

you know, and I got the paint and I started painting the outside and they were inside looking at me.

And I'd say, would you get the F out?

And they just ignored it.

And so then I went in and I said, I got to paint the inside now.

Well, go ahead.

It won't bother us.

I said, would you get the F out?

And they thought I was so mean.

And then I just went crazy.

And I just went in there and I started throwing all of their crap out on the lawn

and screaming and yelling at them.

And

my wife started yelling at them and said, get the F out of here, you squatters and thieves.

Were you acting or were you?

No, I was angry because

I had no money and

my poor parents had this house and I

was living only 60 miles away and they were 200 miles away and it needed dire paint.

And I told them that for, and they were paying me, I don't know what it was, a fair amount an hour.

And I said, I will paint it.

So I was trying to go over there and paint it.

And when I did the outside, they seemed to stay inside.

And I would, I didn't know what to do.

And they said, we have a right to stay here.

We were told by your brother we could stay here.

I said, that's, he doesn't own the house.

And then when I kicked, they said, then finally they said, when I was painting the house, well, we're going to be gone.

So they would leave and go down to the beach.

And then they come back at night.

And I wasn't going to drive 50 miles back

each day.

So on weekends, I said, I'm staying here.

They said, well, that's okay.

You can stay at our house.

Gosh.

So I said, No, you're going to not stay at our house.

Then the weird thing was, is when I kicked them out, they drove back and they started unloading all the stuff they stole, like towels and sheets and stuff and books.

They just threw it on the lawn.

That was to get me, get me angry.

Oh, my God.

And I know, but it was, it was a true squatter situation.

And I had to,

you know, it was the only good thing about it was the neighbors.

They're all little houses right next to each other.

So they were like at an arena watching the whole thing.

And yeah, and they were egging me on, get them, get them, get them, Victor.

Come on, come on.

They're squatters.

We don't want them in our neighborhood.

So I pushed one of them, I think I remember.

And the spouse then said that I had,

well, he just said, I'm not leaving.

I'm not going to leave.

You can't get me out of here.

And I said, I can't get you out of here.

He said, nope, I'm not leaving.

We were in a courtyard, a little tiny courtyard.

I said, get the F out.

And I pushed him.

And this wow,

you struck my husband.

How dare you?

We're going to call the police.

If this was New York City today, Victor,

you had done that, you'd have been in handcuffs.

There's no question.

No question.

They weren't even renters.

They weren't renters.

They had no lease.

They were allowed to stay there, apparently, for a weekend.

And then they would call and tell my brother, who had no authority.

He didn't own the home.

And then they kept staying and staying and staying.

And the more that I kept going over there, I mean, I didn't, well,

I should be more honest.

This wasn't the first time.

I went over there three or four times to paint and they were there.

And I didn't get angry.

I just, because I didn't want to cause a family fight, I just said, would you please leave?

I'm saying, no, no, you're mistaken.

We called.

This is, we're here.

So I went all the way back.

I did that three times, as I remember.

And the fourth time, I just went ballistic.

And they knew it too.

They were lying.

Okay.

We've got a few more squatter-related things to

discuss.

And let's do that, my friend, right after these important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show recording on

Sunday, the 24th of March, and this episode will be up on Thursday, the 28th of March.

So, Victor, a few headlines.

And

it's not because it happens in New York that this is important.

You and I have talked about squatting

over the last year.

It just seems to be coming much more

pronounced and troubling.

So, one big headline was a woman in an apartment not too far from where I worked at National Review over there in the 30s,

down near Lexington in Lexington Avenue.

Her son called two days, wasn't no answer from mom.

And he called the super of the apartment building.

They went in, couldn't find her.

And then he saw a duffel bag sticking out of a closet, the empty apartment, and mom was dead in the duffel bag, had been murdered by the two squatters that were in there.

Then they fled and they've been found.

But you mentioned

this Venezuelan Schmo, Lionel Moreno, who has been in the news a lot the last week because of his TikTok video saying, you know, you,

you know, illegals, he doesn't call them illegals, you have the right.

to do this and there are these other videos that give all kinds of tips.

By the way, it's not only about people coming in the border over the border squatting.

It's about low lives here in America who are who are squatting and the various strategies to find out if a house is really worth squatting in and how you approach the house.

All of these laws, and especially here in California, are predicated on this idea.

that there's a housing shortage and there's abandoned properties.

And if you go, or there's neglected properties, even though you don't own them, and you just drive around, you say, oh, look at that old house.

Nobody wants it.

I'm going to go up there and with elbow grease, fix it up.

So then you just move into it.

And then you say, well, I've been improving it.

And the law is, you know, it says you have to do it, I think, for five years.

And

then you start.

Some of the most sophisticated ones start paying the taxes, you know, even though they pay it double.

They just want to have a cash, you know, a check.

And they'll say, I paid the taxes.

And they go and

now we have squatter eviction squads, you know, good gold capitalism.

There are private companies that will do it for you.

Yeah, I love it.

Squatter squad.

Follow it.

Squatter.

Yeah.

I don't know what they get, guys that are like seven feet tall or what, but they do, they, they do get, and you know, I take this back.

That was the second.

That was, there was an earlier squatter.

My dad, his little farm of 40 acres had where he grew up.

That was about 900 square feet.

And there was a family in it.

And my cousin had come back and he was farming.

And my dad said, you can live in this house.

But he had tenants.

So he said, but you can't lend to the

lease.

They had a one-year written lease.

So after the lease was over,

they said they would be leaving.

But the porch started to fall in.

It was really an old house.

So we went.

And

my brothers, two brothers and I, we went under there and

we were taking four sixes and building a support for the porch underneath the house it had kind of a root cellar you could stand out

and the woman came out and she got on top of the porch and she was very very heavy and we were trying to support it right so it was like an earthquake on top of our heads so we rushed out and said what the f are you doing and she she says to without even being what are you doing in my house who are you people get out of my house and i said my dad owns your house i need id

i said no you don't need id you need to get out you're here two weeks after you should be this is my house and i said i know my dad if i tell my dad you're not gonna like what's gonna happen yeah and so

oh i can i know you're so he came and it was not pretty you know he just told them I'm going to go down and have lunch and you're going to be out.

And when I come back, you don't want to see me.

And then they kind of got freaked out.

Your dad was a big man.

He's a big guy and he had a terrible temper, but he was one of the most soft-spoken, kindest people you'd ever meet unless you deliberately provoked him.

And they did.

And there were three of us and him, four of us, and we were all pretty big at that time.

No hunched over 70-year-old backs and all that.

And we were all full of, I don't know, testosterone in your 20s.

And we were half openly

wanting to tell them to get out.

And they did finally.

But the point is that there's an ideology behind squatting, and the ideology is on the left.

And the ideology goes back to Marx, that there is no such thing as property, that everything is held in common, and that certain exploiters of human nature, due to their greed or their craftiness or their cunning, get too many properties.

And they have the state, quote unquote, gives them title, but that's not moral title.

So the left comes in and says what's moral is that if there is a need,

a need, a genuine need, meaning they need a house and there is a house, there is a supply, then the two have to be morally connected and forget about these little legal contortions and gymnastics.

And so that's behind it all.

And California is the most left-wing state in the country.

But I can tell you one thing about the left.

They always make exemptions so that they're never subject to the ideologies of their own.

Amen.

I will guarantee you that the mansion in San Francisco or Napa and the other ones of Nancy Pelosi are not squatted in.

And I will guarantee you that Joe Biden's beach house and his Delaware mansion are not squatted in.

I will guarantee you that Bernie Sanders' condo, his home in Vermont, his seaside

chalet or whatever it is, his three homes, I will guarantee you they're not squatted in.

I will guarantee you that when Barack Obama is at his new mansion on the Hawaiian beach, that his Kalarama

you know, mansion does not have poor people from the inner city.

I will guarantee you that his Martha's Vineyard estate, it's got a lot of acreage.

I think it's 14 acres.

You could put a lot of tents and homeless people, not to mention illegal immigrants there.

But I guarantee you that he has patrols.

And he's not going to say, as he did as a youth, that we should go to the homes of bankers and scream and yell at them for not giving loans to poor people.

He's not going to say that.

And I can guarantee you that his Chicago digs are not now occupied by squatters.

Just not happening.

So it's happening to the little people.

Although I think that's what I've seen.

Joe Buddha's garage looks like

squatted.

Well, I think LeBron, I read today LeBron's neighborhood had a house right next to his that was squatted in.

Oh.

And the neighbors were really outraged.

I don't know if LeBron was outraged or not, but there's a lot of open, I mean, I've been down the PCH for years.

And there's a lot of big homes there on the beach, and they're not always occupied.

And you would think that the left would come out and say, who owns them and lives in them?

We've got plenty of room.

We can solve the illegal.

Just come on in.

I'm Barbara Streison.

I've got a whole yard.

Pitch your tent.

It's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen.

Take a dip in the past.

You know why it's not going to happen?

Because people should realize that left-wing ideology is not just naivete.

A lot of it is driven by guilt, that people on the left are not comfortable with poor people.

They're not comfortable with people that don't look like themselves.

They're not comfortable with admitting that they have a lot of material obsessions.

And one of the ways they square that circle is to craft an abstract ideology of loving and caring and giving and sharing, moral superiority that mask a quite selfish individual.

And there's no better example than the Obamas.

From the get-go, they were very grasping and materialistic.

And you go back and collate a lot what they did and said, whether it was Michelle Obama and her

jacked up salary at the University of Chicago Med Center trying to steer people away that they didn't want there, or the Tony Resco land deal to expand their lot.

It was all about themselves and material acquisition, which is fine, except that they created this cosmic, caring, sharing, leftist veneer.

And a lot of people you know,

it shocks all of you listening, but you think in your own lives right of all the hardcore leftists you've known and the loudest, compassionate people, and just how covetous they were of material possessions and how greedy they were and how they did not want to be around poor people or lower middle class people.

Well, Victor, before we,

this is an important free speech matter to bring up, but I did, I had wanted to piggyback onto the Moscow discussion, something I had come across

about the American intelligence community and its embracing of

wokeness, given all the serious threats we face.

But

this is from Just the News, which is justthenews.com, folks, is the

home of this website, of this podcast.

And here's an article by a woman, Charlotte Hazard, with the headline, DEI newsletter circulates U.S.

Intel Community promoting cross-dressing and woke language.

So while the S is hitting the fan everywhere,

the nabobs running our intelligence community are obsessing about this.

So here's what this newsletter says.

Just two things quickly, Victor.

I'm an intelligence officer, and I'm a man who...

likes to wear women's clothes.

Sometimes I think my experience as someone who cross-dresses have sharpened the skills I use as an intelligence officer, particularly critical thinking and perspective taking.

I have no effing clue how those dots connect.

And then this newsletter, again, this is our DEI CIA

folks.

They're getting into language, the importance of language and words, biased, words that shouldn't be used anymore.

Cakewalk or grandfathered

shouldn't be used by

intelligence officers.

Wait,

are they part of the Stanford Vocabulary Project?

Well, it sounds like it.

Do you know what's wrong with grandfathered or cakewalk?

They have ties to slavery.

I'm effing clueless on a lot of things, but this in particular.

Anyway, Victor, it was not the easiest, you know, a link between the Moscow,

what's happening, what has happened, what's happening around the world with the crisis of security, but within our own country, these people are just obsessing about this horse crap.

It's deeply troubling.

Anyway,

it's very strange about the transgendered because this gender dysphoria, when you look at earlier scientific articles about it, and it's very common in novels, as I pointed out, you know, it goes back to Petronius's satiricon.

But it was always a fraction of 1% that people who had this verifiable tragedy of having a persona

a female or male persona in the wrong biological body but it was very rare and suddenly this became a civil rights issue cross-dressing transvestism from vestis in latin was different people who were cross-dressers were not always homosexual they were they had that was a different that's talked and freud discussed it havelock s ellis discussed it.

But true

gender dysphoria was very rare.

And somehow we've conflated all of these transgendered,

transsexual, transvestism into one civil rights group that is enormous in number.

And it's not true.

It's very still a very small segment of the population.

And we've it's It's sort of like gay marriage.

In other words, the left wants to cause celeb, and this is the it,

but it

it doesn't mask with reality, it doesn't match with reality.

And we saw that when you see these campuses that have polls where 20 or 30 percent of young people say they are considering transitioning, and you know, it's part of the popular fad of a culture.

And then when you think what that entails, which is really mutilation of the sexual organs at the most extreme,

or it's the taking of dangerous hormones.

We all were told, you know, that if you're a male and you take testosterone, there are some dangers to it.

If you're taking estrogen after a minute, there are some dangers to it and vice versa.

But the way that this

phenomenon has just silenced or squashed all talk of the dangerous medical procedures and drugs that people are taking.

It's just, it's the weirdest thing in the world.

And you can't even discuss what transgenderism is doing to female sports.

It's destroying 50 years of effort to gain parity and destroying record.

And you think about what it's doing to, we had this whole idea that

our young people under 18 had to be protected.

The children, that's what we, and it was good.

That's what the left said.

It's the children.

Hillary said the children.

And we were out, you know, with the age of consent had gone up to, you know, it wasn't just 14 or 16.

It was 18 in some states.

And we were going to stop pedophilia.

And all of a sudden, you know, some person with genitals and a phallus can go into a women's locker room being with underage women.

And that's perfectly okay

because the person says that they are of a different gender.

And same thing with prison.

You can get a biological big male to go into a female present with male genitalia, impregnate prisoners, push people around with greater strength and physicality, and that's okay.

It's just like we've lost our mind with all practical sense and then you're not even supposed to talk about it.

what's going on.

And there's an easy solution.

All you have to do is just say, there's a special category of transgendered people.

If that's what they think they are, that's fine.

So in the prisons, we'll have a transgendered special wing.

In sports, we'll have a transgendered Olympics.

Fine.

And I don't think you'll see 30% of the population competing.

And I don't believe that the transgendered community believes that when one goes from one sex to the other, they completely are representative of that sex.

I know that because when men go to female status, they dominate sports and they're considered perfectly legitimate.

But if that were to be true, when women transgender or transition to males, then why aren't they winning since they're just like males?

Why don't they win male sports?

Why isn't the NFL full of transgendered athletes that are female?

biological females, born females, and now they've decided they want to be guards and centers and tackles in the NFL.

Because the same thing is applicable in swimming.

Why don't you see all of the men's records challenged by women who have transitioned to men, NCAA swim records?

You don't.

And that means you don't because there was a biological difference, even though they've transitioned.

And yet, if you say that about males that have transitioned to women and say they still have a muscular skeletal frame that's different and will never change, then that's

taboo.

It's so so illogical when

being driven by misogynists actually you know i think down deep these leotes

you know

if you think about it this dei and that's part of it the diversity equity inclusion

mania it's starting to affect everything i mean everything i'm just kind of yeah like national security yes that's what i'm getting at you brought it up with dei that you that this is a protected protected area of natural security, that people in the old days might be subject to, you know,

black mail, et cetera.

But now, no, no, you don't discuss it.

And it's the same thing with the military, short 40,000 soldiers.

You don't discuss it.

You just say, you know what?

Okay,

I saw all the demographics.

Latinos, fine.

They're joining in traditional numbers.

Blacks, traditional numbers.

Women, traditional numbers.

Even gays, traditional numbers.

Ah, white males.

They're not joining up like they used to.

Now, why would that be?

Oh, it's gangs.

It's drug use.

It's a tight labor market.

But they don't want to say why it is.

And the same thing

about

why all of a sudden do we have squatters rights?

Why do we have increased crime,

violent crime?

And the answer is that DEI says critical race theory and critical legal theory says that all laws are construct

and you are a victim depending on your superficial appearance.

And so we have all of these DAs letting people out for violent crimes, looting, smash and grab,

you name it, carjacking, can't talk about anything.

But that gets down to DEI.

Same thing with anti-Semitism.

Why is it spreading everywhere?

Because all of a sudden we're going to use the DEI

machinery to say that Jews are white settlers.

They're white settlers and they're victimizing people of color.

That's what it's about

in the Middle East.

If Hamas were a bunch of crazy blue-eyed, blonde-haired guys, I don't think there would be the same outrage.

I mean, there was outrage over in the Balkans when Albanians looked like Serbians, but not like this.

No, it's because Israel has been rebranded as white settlers and imperialist and neocolonialists in the DEI framework.

And it's

people should remember that once you start to

substitute,

you know, Merritt, just another little take,

if the CEO of United says that 50% of the people who enter his pilot training programs and leaves will be DEI, take him seriously.

And if Boeing says that that is one of their main agendas as DEI, that is the superficial appearance

of their workforce.

Take them seriously.

And we've talked about the seven near-misses or dangerous situations with Boeing planes and United Airlines operated planes.

And that was just last week.

Take them seriously.

And

there's not a good...

If you go back through history very quickly, you know, and think about it, Jack, Soviet Union was surprised by the Nazis in 1941 in June.

And they had commissars and they executed people who said, the Germans are coming.

We know that.

Intelligence says they're going to surprise attack.

We even know they're going to do it on June 20th.

They executed them because

the commissars and the party line, the ideology was you're just trying to foment

trouble between us and National Socialism on behalf of the Churchill imperialist in England.

And And then they lost 5 million people.

And guess what?

In April, I think it was 42, excuse me, I think it was October.

They said, no more.

No, no, no, no.

Battlefield efficacy.

Let Zhukov go.

Let him do what he needs to do.

Don't tell him what to do.

Don't tell Koniev what to do.

And suddenly they wanted Stalingrad.

And, you know, when Napoleon

took over,

everybody wanted to know why for 18 years he was so successful.

Well, he remodeled the French army.

He made it, he used scientific principles.

It was, you know, it had a sophisticated logistics and medical corps.

But one of the reasons was that he got rid of the old Bourbon aristocratic officer class.

In other words, you were promoted based on your last name and your birth and your estate.

And he got rid of the ideological from the Jacobins, that you were just appointed because you were a radical Jacobin.

He actually did have the marshals of France with the first really meritric

officer corps in Europe.

I'm not saying they all were,

human nature being what it was, but he picked people who came both from the aristocratic class and from the very poor.

And he didn't really question their ideology.

It was their merit.

And that's what was so.

unusual.

And the same thing in reverse was Mao.

If you think of 66 to 76, he ruined China.

And that revolutionary dogma of the little red book, it overturned economic, social, cultural, military.

You know, I was in Libya and I was asking about Qaddafi's green book, you know, when I was there.

And these guys, people in the Libyan government were saying,

well,

we had to have a chicken in every house.

He said that we had to be self-sufficient.

So we had them in our bathtubs.

We had them in our showers.

We had them in our kitchen.

And then we had to get rid of all Western influence.

So we burned all the violins and the whole country ran on ideology.

And I said, well, when did it start to get better?

And he said, when he started to

loosen up a little bit, and he got rid of the Green Book ideology, and we started to hire people on merit, but it's still not going to get better.

And I said to this government official, you mean it's not going to get better.

Why?

If you get rid of this crazy green book, he said, because then we get back to what we were doing before Qaddafi and what they do in the Middle East.

And I said, now what would that be?

Well, we hire our middle, we hire our first cousin for jobs.

And we always hire the worst first cousin.

And his

point, you know, it's kind of like, why was the South so backward?

Because they were pledged to defend this un-merocratic slave system.

And then Jim.

Jim Crow deprived them of a lot of talented people who were not allowed to participate.

And then they had this labyrinth of kind of an anti-DEI czar where they were checking everybody's bloodlines and

marriage certificates and one drop rule.

And it was just a drag on the economy.

And you lost all these talented blacks from participating in the economy.

And again, it was overriding, it was a commissar-like system.

So when we look at all of the stuff about trans, all the effort, think about all the effort, the millions of hours that thousands of jobs were doing in security transportation the universities and nobody no

there is not just no product productive

result there's no goods and services that are being produced by these people these commissars but they're suppressing productivity and that's and right finally mao got rid of them And finally, Stalin got rid of them.

And finally, the South was liberated from slavery and Jim Crow.

And it started to boom.

There's one of the reasons that the South was booming, and they got rid of all of that stuff in the 60s and 70s.

So

this has got a bad historical.

What I'm trying to get about,

all of

this transgendered rules and regulations and

the DEI and the admissions and promotions and the separate graduations, the separate

dorms predicated on race, the special training program for pilots, the

going through the ranks of the Pentagon and the military to see who's a white supremacist and who's not.

All you do is encouraging, you just encourage the clouding gaze of the world, the grifters and the opportunists to come out of the woodwork.

to take advantage of the Comosar system.

And then

you punish the talented people like a Roland Fryer,

the brilliant economist at Harvard who said, I'm not going to play the DEI game.

I'm going to succeed as an economist, not as an African-American economist, as an economist.

And then she goes after him.

Right.

And

that's so typical of history.

And you'd think everybody would know that when they started this whole crazy thing.

Well, Victor, some of those crazy things have been happening.

at Stanford.

No news to you.

And I thought we might be able to talk about free speech, an issue, but we'll hold off on that because more pressing is a story of this

infamous Stanford professor, Joe Bowler, who is now, it's a she who's now in certain crosshairs.

And we'll get your thoughts on her right after these final important messages.

We are back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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So Victor, again, our friend Eli Steele, Shelby's son, but I think a very sound

emerging public intellectual in his own right.

He tweeted slash X'd.

I know I get criticized for not calling it X, so I still don't know what to call it.

He focused on this Stanford professor, Joe.

uh bowler who who's not a mathematician but teaches has some mathematic education education

seat at the School of Education there.

And she's the person basically responsible for racializing

the teaching of math and removing mathematics from certain grade levels in California, at least, because it's racist.

And I'm not exactly sure

what happened to precipitate her.

getting in crosshairs, but she has ruined a lot of lives and she's made a lot of money in the process.

You've tried scriptures before.

Yeah, I think about the fourth year I got to Hoover when I retired from Cal State, she was in the news and she was at Stanford and she was a math education person.

And if I could, I mean, she wrote a lot of books, but if you summarize all of them,

it is that

Disparities in mathematics based on race and gender

have

are a result result of culture and the way that math is taught.

In other words, math is not just a neutral subject.

It is male dominated, is white dominated, is power dominated.

And therefore, if you were going to change the way math was taught and get rid of certain things that are not, you know, maybe diminish the importance of algebra and stuff, but

change the way that it is taught and not make it so results orientated, then naturally people would be interested in math.

The critics said, well, yeah, if you just make it easy and you just dumb it down, everybody's interested in it.

You get an easy A.

That was the criticism of her.

And they had a big scandal and they claimed that all of her data was.

Oh, that's it.

She did.

She referenced articles, but then she lied about what she was referencing.

Yes, but that happened.

I remember it happened in 2006.

It went way back.

And Stanford closed ranks behind her.

And they got angry at the other mathematicians.

One of them, I think, was on the Stanford faculty.

And then she was exonerated.

And I think she went somewhere and came back.

And then when she got back,

she got a lot of prominence because her work was, it was kind of like Kendi and, you know, being anti-racist.

It just...

dovetailed into the DEI agenda that you've either got to water down, we've got to let all these people in these universities on the basis of race, and we've got to get rid of the SAT.

And the SAT math does not really record ability or aptitude or anything.

It's just a construct of a bunch of white male supremacists.

So when they were looking for support, her work became very prominent, especially once you started, we're in the third year of repertory admissions.

So when you bring students in,

and at Stanford this year, according to Stanford statistics, 21% of the faculty, the incoming class is so-called white, and the demographic nationwide is about 68%.

And if you look at the disparity between men and women, you're down to 9% white males of the whole class.

There's roughly, I don't have the statistics, but there's roughly usually 2,000 students, 2,100.

So when you're nine, you know what I mean?

You're about 180,

you're about 180 students, 9%, 10%.

And so you only have 180 out of that.

And out of that group, then

you have athletes and legacies, et cetera.

So you don't have, basically, if you're a kid and you're a merocratic and you had a perfect SAT score and you've got straight A's, but you don't know anybody at Stanford, you're not the child of a dean or provost, your parents are not wealthy, and you're not going to get in, no matter how good you are.

It's just not going to happen.

Okay, so you're getting a lot of students who, according to, and this is the key thing to remember about all, and her career, because I've followed it, is that when you let all of these students in,

And you don't require the standards that you established, that's the key point, Jack, that you established.

I didn't say,

Jack Fowler didn't say in

2018, I want the average SAT score in math of Stanford students at 740 or something, right?

And I want a 4.3 GPA with all this advanced placement.

I want it from one of the top, I want that high school rate.

That's what they told us, that you had to have that type of background to do Stanford work or Yale work or Harvard work.

But when you throw all that out, And you start admitting on quotas, then that's not the beginning of the challenge.

I mean, excuse me, it's not the end, it's the beginning.

So then what do you do with all these students that come in that don't have the standards that you establish to create your curriculum and your faculty?

Well, enter Ms.

Bowler.

She's there.

Well, I can help you.

We need task forces.

We need task forces to

study the curricula and find out where it's wrong and what it's doing to these students and taking away away their confidence and ruining their Stanford or Yale or Harvard experience.

There's a big article in the Stanford Daily about these task forces.

And they don't say what I said, but of course, it's: we're trying to make

give equity to mathematics.

There's no reason why physics has to be intimidating or turning people off.

We have to find language in which physics can be communicated to people without the traditional quote-unquote prerequisite experience.

But read

between the lines, honestly and objectively, unlike the way it's presented, and you will find out that these universities have let a lot of students in that, according to their own standards, would not have been able to do the work as they defined it just four years ago.

And they defined it by the type of faculty and classes and grading schedule.

So now

they're trying to inflate the grades, they're trying to add new courses, and they're trying to water down the workload.

And they are meeting a lot of resistance from the students

because it's not enough, Jack.

It's not enough.

And here comes Ms.

Bowler.

And now you're exactly right.

These accusations have resurfaced from 2006.

But now they're misrepresenting, you know,

what was the word that it's an anonymous complaint because I don't think anybody wants to come forward because the guys that came forward before were really attacked.

So it's

reckless regard for

accuracy.

So anyway, that's where we are with that.

And she's representative of a whole cast of characters whose main job is to show that when you let people in

that don't meet the standards that you established and you do not want them to leave or to fail, then you need an expert to come in and explain why your standards are the problem that you established.

And she's here to help, just like Kendi's here to help.

And the DEI is here to help.

And when you talk to faculty, as I said before, it's, well, should I inflate my grades for the new student?

Should I offer new courses?

Or should I just cut my workload in half?

Well, I'll do all of them, but I'm not going to die in the standards of alter.

I'm not going to be cited as the DEI of having a persistent, pernicious standard of grading unfairly for people

that we would call the other.

So that's where she lives.

Victor also points to

another

problem

that

somebody

would be seen as a math guru,

but really is not, knows,

not much about math, but still is

dictating how math should be taught.

It would be like somebody at the Stanford School of Education being a classics

expert, having zero clue of the classics.

Well, it happens.

It happens.

Classics at Princeton, Greek is no longer required to be a classics major, and Stanford is heading in that direction.

In fact, a prominent classist, I don't want to mention his name, I have high regard for his work, but he is on record that he wants to abolish the classics department

as one of the prominent classics professors at Princeton wants to do.

And why?

Because we were all taught when I studied, started classics 53 years ago, 52.

Yeah, I had just turned 18.

The idea was that Greek and Latin were the center.

So you would study Greek and Latin, then you would read original sources.

You would understand how they used language.

You would understand, you would get your mind into the ancient world.

And then from that, once you mastered these languages, and parallel, you know, you didn't have to do it all first, but it was the first big requisite, then you could branch into ancient art and history and archaeology and epigraphy and manuscripts.

But without the language, you were lost.

So I went to a philological

I had professors that came from Yale that were all philologists, and then I went to graduate school in an old-fashioned philology department.

And then you could go into ancient history or anything, but you had to be master Latin and Greek.

But if that's too hard, and it can take anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 hours for a student to be okay in Latin and Greek each, then what do you do?

You just say, well, you know what?

This was an old aristocratic tradition in Western, going back to the Renaissance.

It was just a bunch of white people.

that said you couldn't study the ancient world unless you had their little code.

You know, it was like, you know, Greek.

I know Greek, therefore therefore I get to study classics.

No, no, no, no.

No, everything's translated.

There's AI now.

You don't need to know where the accent, whether it goes on the ultima or the penultima.

You don't need to know the difference between the optative and subjunctive mood.

You don't need to know the vocabulary of Latin.

It's much more egalitarian.

That's what it is.

And the quality, if you look at the quality of scholarship and you compare it with 30 years ago, it's kind of like the Dark Ages.

I mean, the stuff that's coming out is highly politicized.

I don't want to disparage it, but it reminds me a lot of when I would read the classics journal called Irene.

It was called Peace in Greek, but it was a Czech, I think it was a Czech, it was the Warsaw Bloc journal.

And you can imagine

what were the articles.

Land redistribution in antiquity, the Marxists,

the forgotten Marxist-Leninist ideology of Spartacus.

And that wasn't Corey Booker either.

It was real Spartacus.

And, you know, if you go into 1934, 1936, 1938, and you look at German scholarship, it was

the racial bloodlines of the Hellots.

the Aryan spirit and the Spartan ecclesia, things like that.

And it was completely worthless now.

And that's what's going to happen with this because all the articles coming out are the transgendered of this and the exploit, the poetics of masculinity and transgenderism and da-da-da-da-da.

And it's not based on philology or training.

Well, my friend, you have given us a lot of wisdom today, as you do on every episode.

I thank you for all that you shared.

I thank our listeners for doing just that, listening, especially if you're new here.

Thanks for joining and

avail yourself of Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus.

Dive into the archives.

Yeah, go ahead, Victor.

I would just like to end.

Did you happen to see, hear, and read that crazy thing that James Carville wrote in the New York Times?

Yeah, about it's like grandma running around naked.

You can't drink beer.

You can't watch football.

You can't eat hamburgers.

It's not good for you.

Everything you're doing is destroying the planet.

He was attacking his

Democratic bicoastal elite.

The Monster he helped create.

Yeah, and Monster he is creating too, because he hates Donald Trump and the MAGA people a lot more than he hates those people.

But he's just worried that.

My only point was that all this stuff we've been talking about turns people off.

And he's a Democratic diehard.

And he basically, if he had listened to this podcast today, he would say,

wow, these guys who are attacking us are for the weaponization of education or the weaponization of sports or the weaponization based on ideology.

And it's turning off the in their right.

And we've got to be careful about it.

Yeah.

But he's not going to be able to, he doesn't understand ideologues.

They do not stop until they implode.

So we haven't quite seen their implosion, but they're going to take the transgender thing.

You said the CIA today, it's going to go beyond that.

They're going to take DEI, so there's no qualifications or no merit at all.

And I'm really worried about it.

I mean, even Macrone said, did you see Macrone the other day said he wasn't going to fly a you Boeing plane?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Airbus is Airbus is tickled to death.

You know,

what's Carville's wife's name?

Mary Matlin, it was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When I was way, way back when I started at National Review, and I was at some Republican conference, one of those like getaway things covering it.

And she was there,

and she's a Republican strategist.

And

I think she had a drink in there, and I forget what it was about, but she looked at me and she said, Do you want to get into a pissing contest with me?

And I just thought it was such an unfeminine thing.

The imagery of me and her in a pissing contest, an actual one was kind of weird, too.

Yeah, I remember her.

I liked her.

She was kind of a working class.

She was trying to make the argument that Republicans should be more working class.

And

she worked for Dick Cheney, I think, a lot.

And Bush, I remember, I was on a cruise with them.

They were very pleasant.

The only thing is, I was speaking on World War II, and he came up to me and he wanted to talk about tanks.

And he just gave he gave the standard you know t-34 was the best tank which it was and i was trying to nuance it and i mentioned there were advantages to sherman tanks that people like him were not aware of i did in a polite way yeah you know was he was he on the cruise as a lecturer uh i think

i i i think they were with another group Okay.

But they came up to him and we had a pleasant talk about

he was he was kind of a World War II buff.

and he was telling me how brilliant the Soviets were.

And I tried to mention the Christie suspension came from the United States.

I tried to say a lot of irony was that some of German designs were put into the T-34.

It was a wonderful

tank,

et cetera, et cetera.

But I said there were some advantages with

the reliability of the Sherman and the ability to fix it very quickly and swap out its engine or transmission.

And of the five people in a Sherman, on average, when they blew up, three of them got out.

So it wasn't as bad as everybody.

It wasn't a defense of the Sherman, but I said something to the effect that, well, you got to remember that the Shermans were made in the United States, and you got to remember that the United States was 3,000 miles away from the front.

So it wasn't like you're going to make a 45-ton

tank and put it on a crane and take valuable space and ship it all the way over there, whereas a T-34 rolled off the line right into the front.

Right.

But I was trying to give nuance, but he was very interesting.

And

although we had

a polite argument, but I didn't find him as obnoxious as he later became, I guess.

Yeah, well,

I think there's

a streak of Kennedy,

not RFK Jr., but old school Democrat in him that's got to be weeping about what the

show that's going on.

I think he is, but I think he's such a strong Democrat that his criticism

is supposed to be internal and constructive.

And when he can't do that, then he goes public to make it constructive, even though it's external.

And then when people on the other side think, wow, he's right, well, he's like a cobra.

If you go and pet him and say, you're absolutely right, he'll bite you.

Right.

So be careful.

Yeah, he ain't your stop clock is right twice a day.

Whatever differences he has with the squad pale in comparison with what the differences he has with a MAGA crowd.

And that's, you know, I think he would appreciate that comment.

Well, Victor, again, all the great wisdom you shared today is most appreciated.

And some folks who listen to this podcast on iTunes and Apple can rate the show zero to five stars.

And nearly everyone gives you five stars, Victor.

They'd give you 10 if they could, but they can't.

So they max out at five.

Some leave comments.

We read all the comments, whether they're on the

Apple

platform or on your own, your website.

We read those comments.

And here's a short, sweet one.

Tremendous show.

Thank you, Victor, for the sanity you bring to our lives.

My husband and I really enjoy hearing your views, which mirror our own expressed in such a calm and precise manner, praying for our country.

M.B.

Brown.

Thank you, M.B.

Brown.

Folks, I want to thank folks who write me, and I get a couple of emails a week from folks who have signed up for Civil Thoughts, which is the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anfil.

When you get Civil Thoughts every Friday, you get a little bit of

a a little bit of a spin, but then you get links to 14 articles and excerpts from all 14, articles that I think you'd really enjoy reading.

So

I had one correction I wanted to say.

Oh, go ahead, Victor.

Once again, it's your show.

I said on a podcast he went DEF CON 5, and I think a reader pointed out I meant DEF CON 1.1, correct?

Yeah, and I did mean DEF CON 1.

I didn't mean that.

Who went DEF CON 1?

Who were you talking about?

Oh,

I said something to the effect that we have to be careful about attacking

targets inside Russia.

Oh, yeah.

And because we were very sensitive about Russia interfering with our sphere of influence in Cuba.

And when they...

when they put missiles that had nuclear warheads in, we were at DEF CON.

I think we went, we were between four and five.

And what I meant to say, we were two getting near one.

And I don't, I think it's,

but I'm glad that a reader

and

he, I'm glad he, and he pointed it out to, I think his name was Mike Murray, and he pointed it out in a very polite way.

Good.

Because, you know, not every correction is is polite as possible.

Well, when you talk too much, like I do, I guess, on podcasts and read and you write a lot, you have to be very careful.

I try to double-check everything, but sometimes when you're just speaking extemporaneously, you have to be careful.

But DEF CON one

is

nuclear wars, just either broken out or it's on the edge.

Two is you're getting close to it.

Three is you got to beef up your forces in case it happens.

And then four is you watch your enemy.

He's starting to bother you.

And then DEF CON 5 is just normal.

Victor, your DEF CON sins are forgiven.

Okay.

All right.

Thanks for everything, Victor.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

We'll be back soon.

Oh, and happy Easter to those who are celebrating this coming Sunday.

We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone, for listening.