No One Worries about the Tlaxcalans and Other Ironies

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Hello, ladies and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host, but the star, and then the namesake, that is Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

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

and,

I don't know, put upon traveler, I think, right?

Put-upon.

Quite put upon traveler.

Grumpy Travor.

That's all right.

He's got a website, very active website, one you should be subscribing to.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

The web address is victorhanson.com, and we'll talk more about that towards the end of this episode.

I want to begin the show, Victor, with a question that a listener sent about Taiwan and then have another foreign policy matter based on an essay you've just written for the new Criterion.

And you've got some news to share about Stanford University.

Today, we're recording on the 25th of February,

has just announced its forthcoming class of 2027.

So you can break some news here we'll get to all these things Victor your thoughts and intelligence right after these important messages

at a time when Americans are more divided than ever Connecting America is a place where everyone can gather and express their opinions with no disrespect And what better place than a Jersey diner to host this show?

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We are back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor on Facebook,

this Vivek, who is a,

not that Vivek, another Vivek, but Vivek is a really, really

a big fan of yours and regular listener.

He sent me a question.

I thought it was a pretty good question.

So I think I'll pose it because it's, well,

we'd like to get your thoughts on it.

And here's what he wrote.

Ask Victor if he thinks China will target Taiwan with the goal of taking it before October of this year, which will mark the 75th anniversary of the proclamation of the People's Republic of China.

I think that if China could take the island Shanghai-shek fled to, which has been mocking them with the old Republic flag since 1949 and throw a victory parade on the anniversary, it would be too good an opportunity to pass up.

Interesting question, Victor.

You have any thoughts on that?

Well, I think it depends a lot

on, as it always does, on a cost-to-benefit analysis, and we can break that down.

So

there's two scenarios, and we're not going to talk about they're never going to try it because I think they are going to try it.

The one scenario is you just wait in hopes of Joe Biden being re-elected.

And then what you saw in Ukraine, what you saw with Hamas, what you saw with the Houthis.

And by the way, most of the major transit corridors in the world,

the Red Sea that leads to the Suez Canal, the Black Sea that goes through the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles,

the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the Middle East, the Gulf of the Straits of Hormuz by Iran.

They're all under contest now.

We have lost the ability to protect the navigation sea commercial routes in those places, the choke points.

And it's going to get worse.

So if you're China, and South China Sea, of course, is one.

So if you're...

a Western ship and you go into the Straits of Hormuz, or you go into the Red Sea, or you go into the Black Sea, or you go into the South China Sea, or you go into the Eastern Mediterranean, you better be careful.

And so the world is getting very, very dangerous under Joe Biden.

And I think they're thinking,

well,

what we saw in the first term, if the guy gets re-elected,

it'll just continue and we'll get even more chances and he won't do anything.

And they've depleted their artillery shells.

They depleted their missiles.

They're overextended.

They've given all this stuff away.

So it depends on what they think is going to happen in November.

If they think Joe Biden is going to win, then I think they'll hold off because I think there's going to be, it's going to get even more opportune.

If they think he's going to lose

and Donald Trump is going to be president, I don't think they're going to try it with Donald Trump because they have no idea what he'll do.

I don't have any idea.

And our listeners don't have any idea what he would do, but he would do something and they wouldn't like that something.

So if they think

in October,

as the reader, the listener suggested, if they think that Donald Trump is going to win, then they would see this as a window, October to January 20th

of 2024 to 25 would be an opportune moment because they don't feel anybody's in charge and they don't think anybody would take responsibility for losing Taiwan.

And in a cost-to-benefit analysis, they would think for all the turmoil, for all the stuff that happened to Russia, all the stuff that happened to Hamas,

they feel that the West won't do anything, that Hamas

will get away with it, and Ukraine will, I think Russia will get away with a lot of what they wanted.

And I just think it's not, I'm not saying it's 51% likely, but if it's going to happen and they think that Joe Biden is going to lose the election, then sometime

before January 20th from now until January 20th of 2025, they might see a window that they'll never get another opportunity like it.

Victor, you have talked before about this group you oversee at Hoover Institution, the military group you have, I think you've told us, you have a big thing coming, a big event

conference coming up.

I'm wondering,

I have to assume that the issue on the forefront of most people in that world, and you'll correct me, is the war, the ongoing war in Ukraine.

But does the threat of China compete with that as a part of the

we pick a topic

and you can go to Strategica, that's with a K,

online, and we have a topic and we try to get a disinterested, nonpartisan essay, and then we try to get two short essays, one that agrees with the historical essay and one that disagrees.

And then we have other commentary, and we have a poll and further reading every two and a half weeks, three weeks.

And then we have a conference where we get the original core members.

There's about 30 of us.

And I mean,

the core members, I mean, they're people of widely diverse political views.

They can be Andrew Roberts, Neil Ferguson, H.R.

McMaster, Jim Mattis, Ralph Peters,

Edward Lutwack, Mark Moyer, all different types of people.

And then we invite observers and participants.

So we have another 10 or 20.

I think we have 70.

And it's kind of like in a concentric circle.

So we have the inner group, and they joust on the, and we have an overall theme.

And this theme is proxy wars.

And everything is off-limits to the public in the sense that no one can be quoted what they say, and nothing leaves the room.

And that really encourages candor.

And I, all I can say last year, which was on Ukraine, I won't mention any names or what was said, but I will say there was a lot of

expertise

on Ukraine, the Donbass and Crimea, by historians, by military personnel, by Europeans, by Americans.

And there was a lot of people, Jack, that warned us that that euphoria, it was last March, this is going to be a month from now,

that that euphoria about the so-called spring offensive was misinterpreted and there was not going to be a successful spring offensive because given the nature of the Russian corridor of defenses, tank traps, mines, drone kill zones, artillery kill zones, it would be very, very hard to break through with

the wherewithal that the Ukrainians had.

And especially, and this was what was really prescient, we had two people who were very, very pro-Ukrainian, and they were very worried that they did not have the manpower to sustain an offensive, an armored offensive, i.e.

like Patton or Gwadarian or Ramon, break through there.

And they instead were wondering why they didn't stay on the defense and let the Russian Ram beat his head.

And they turned out to be exactly right in a very tragic way because Ukraine lost people they couldn't afford to lose.

So this time we're talking about proxy wars in three areas, Taiwan

and also Ukraine, but especially Iran and the United States.

vis-a-vis and Israel, but vis-a-vis the Iran and the United States, or the Iranian surrogates

versus the U.S.

interest in the Middle East.

We have some really great speakers and I'm really looking forward to it.

Victor, that event will take the place, I assume, on the grounds of Stanford University.

Yes, it'll be at the Hoover Institution on the 22nd of March.

Well, it was a kind of a lead-in to Stanford University.

Yes.

We just talked about, you told me before the show began about about that Stanford is

the college is announcing its forthcoming 2027 class.

Victor, why don't you tell us about that?

Well, everybody remembers that the universities were just terrified of that Supreme Court case against Harvard, you remember, that just was decided.

And so

I think everybody should look at

that students, I think it was called the students for fair admission versus Harvard, in which the students for fair admission, Asian students primarily, but not all, won.

So, this is the last class in the United States that is not subject, was not subject to that Supreme Court ruling.

And it will be very interesting to see how these universities change their demographics if they do.

And I doubt they will.

I think they'll find ways to cheat.

So, we were getting the information on a lot of schools on the class of 2027.

The Stanford Review, which is albeit a conservative newspaper, you know,

it really breaks it down.

It breaks it down from data that Stanford supplies.

And Stanford's very proud.

I'm just not picking on Stanford.

It's no different than Harvard or Yale, but

they only admitted about

less than 4%

of the people who applied.

Think about that.

Less than 4%.

And

less than half, Jack, submitted an SAT.

It's optional.

Less than half.

We talked with Sammy that people are going to, they're starting to reinstate it, but they didn't this year.

And I think they probably will do it next year.

But what I mean is

there was almost 54,000 people who applied, and they only let in about 2,000.

And

They had, you know, the 2,000 that they let in, 80%

agreed to come or they wanted to come.

But what we're talking about is that

these are repertory admissions because,

however, you, I mean, there's a one of the things we don't know about when you get into this racial

identity politics quagmire is what we do with people who are of mixed ancestry, mixed.

But anyway,

so-called whites make up 22%.

And because of the imbalance of male-female, we're talking about 9 or 10%

white males.

They make up about 35% of the country.

Somewhere between 67% and 70% are so-called white, depending on the census.

And males are about 50% of that.

So 33% to 35%.

Okay.

Does that include

athletes?

Yes, it does.

It does.

So what you're basically saying to the united states is stanford is going to only let in by design

nine

or ten percent white males and out of that white males they've got to get all of their athletes they've got to get the legacies that is people whose parents grandparents great grandparents went to stanford and they've got to get the donor class and i mean

They get calls where I'll give you 5 million, I'll give you 10 million, and they've got to get the children of the provost, the president, the chairman of the department.

And so what it really means is if you're not submitting only less than half submit SAT scores and get in,

well, it means if you're a white male guy and you live in Billings, Montana, and you're a straight A student and you've got a perfect SAT

and you've got all these, you play the violin and you've traveled the world and you've worked at the soup kitchen or you've built, I don't know,

some type of new invention, whatever they do for extracurricular activity, you're not going to get in.

There's just no room for you.

Not when you have 9% white male.

And so when you go to repertory admissions, and that is you let, it used to be proportional representation that whatever the national demographic was, these Ivy League and Stanford University like it tried to reflect.

So they would let in 33 to 40%

white.

Now it's down down to nine, nine.

I don't know how the Supreme Court is going to,

that decision.

My experience in 50 years of academia is that academics have absolute contempt for the law.

They believe they're brighter, they're more moral, they're more sophisticated, they're better educated, and the law does not apply to them.

And therefore, as self-declared, ingenious people, they will figure a way to break the law.

But this will be the last class that they won't have to make that effort.

And so I don't know,

you know, it's just if you're not asking SAT and you're not rating, as we've said earlier, Jack, you're not comparing the GPA quality of a high school and they're not, then what are you evaluating people on?

You're evaluating them on their race, essentially.

And there's a

and that's not the end of it.

Everybody should realize that's not the end of it.

That is the beginning.

Because once you do that, then you have to make adjustments.

You can't let somebody in without an SAT score and from a high school that is not ranked or compared, that the GPA,

even if it is 4.2 or something, it is not as

competitive as another one.

You can't let that student in and a lot of those students in of whatever background and then expect the old 2015, 2012 curricula and grading standards to sustain itself.

They can't.

So you're going to have to say

something along the following.

Oh, about 2010,

people at Cal State Fresno or they had SAT scores or GPAs that were not competitive.

But now, and they had these courses, and now,

our selectivities now

theirs, because we have no idea how any of our students would do on the SAT, at least the majority of the more than 50% we let in.

And we don't really want to look at them anyway.

They're only optional.

And we don't really know the quality of these GPAs.

So we're just letting students in.

And we're going to have to make some adjustments.

And that means we either inflate the grades or we water down the courses or we make new courses.

And that's happening as we speak.

And if you don't want to do that, then and you want to stick to the standards that Stanford imposed on you, because Stanford used to say, you're not going to get into Stanford unless you get 1,500 minimum on the SAT, 750 in each, and you're not going to get in unless you got a four-point from a really good high school.

And if you didn't have either one of them, you better be a superb athlete, or you better be a concert pianist, or you better have invented a new computer program, or you better be the son of a Silicon Valley

mover and shaker, or you better be the daughter of a provost.

And if you're not that, you're not going to get in.

Well, now,

according to their own rules, they don't exist anymore.

So the grading and the curriculum and the standards and the work requirements were based on those rules.

And those rules don't exist anymore.

So you're going to have to change

everything to adapt to the new new rules.

And you can see it happen.

The new rules will be things that I just got my alma mater, okay,

the Department of Classics

in Stanford University.

And it's a very good, I'm not, you know, I'm not, I'm not at all criticized.

Is it an annual, an annual

alumni thing?

Yeah, and I'm just curious because when I look at

the coursework, and I don't want to you know I don't want to just one-sided criticize it but when you look at the coursework and what people are studying it is it's just something that that would be unimaginable when I was a student there

you know it just sure

you know when you look at seminars

Okay, I'll just read some seminar.

What's the problem with Eurocentrism?

And to be clear, this is the classics department at Stanford University.

Yeah, I mean, that's a conversation.

Or if you wanted to go to another panel toward a harmonious transnational feminism, women, love, lock, lack, and antigone.

Or you can go to a presentation, Income and Wealth Inequality from the Stone Age to the Present.

Or you can go to

classics course?

Yes, you can take a course called Refugees, Race, and the Greco-Roman World, or you can take one called African Archive Beyond Colonization.

And there's a new book out by one of our faculty, Untangling Blackness and Greek Antiquity.

Oh, my.

And Economics of Weaving, Women, Labor, and Textiles.

And I can go on.

I'm not trying to make fun of them, but I'm just saying that when I was a student, the courses were things like the manuscript tradition of Aeschylus' suppliants or

the foundational documents of the Athenian Empire or great issues in the Peloponnesian War or the use of language and style and Sophocles' plays or

lost ancient comedians.

I'm not saying that they were broad, but they were all intended for one reason, to make sure that you knew Greek and Latin very well, to make sure you knew the main authors of antiquity, and to make sure

you had been trained how to cite evidence, to know whether Diodorus was a source as valuable as Herodotus.

If you're going to make an argument based on Plutarch writing in 100 AD, you would need to know

which life of Plutarch is dependent on which particular source and what that means.

Is the the life of Cicero as valuable as the life of Democrats?

It was a very scientific approach to the use of language.

And then, of course, everyone had, when you, we had a professor, I'll just give you one quick example.

He said,

if I wanted to know something about water and antiquity,

how would I know about it?

And then you would say, well, here are the major sources.

This is Herodotus, Thucydides, Sophocles.

And this, I remember in this this particular book they talked about an aqua duct, or they talked about water and a religious sense.

And then you'd say, okay, so you look at literature, yes.

And then we look at epigraphy, documents on stone.

And somebody would say, well, you know, in my research, I realized that

on the island of Samos, they built an aqueduct in 500 BC.

Okay, so we can get information on that.

And then another student would say, there's another part of the triad.

It's not just literature.

It's not just documents on stone.

It's archaeology.

Another person will say, well, you know, I excavated at Corinth, and I remember that we found

a aqueduct or a

dam during the reign, the tyranny of Polycrates.

Oh, what was it?

And then another person will say, well, you wait a minute.

You've forgotten numismatics, coins.

And so we were taught that any question about the ancient world, you would get a PhD.

And if you got a PhD, you would emerge with the tools to research and to discourse and to answer questions because you knew how to find the answer and the answer was found in 53 million words of Greek literature it was found in 20 or 30,000 inscriptions written on stone contemporaneously mostly from the Athenian Empire if you were a classicist that specialized in

Hellenism and then in addition to that you would be acquainted with the major archaeological excavations going on and where you could read about them.

And

you would also know something about coins and papyri.

And I don't think the courses or the panels or the discourses that I read will inculcate that ability.

I just don't.

And one of the reasons I left classics in 2004 as a professor is that I must have hired, I don't know, seven or eight professors over 20 years because I was a single person classics department for three or four years and we're just two of us and then finally we had I think four

but my point was I I started interviewing people that didn't know Latin or Greek very well in fact I got in trouble because I asked some person to translate

from Lysias I think it was and she thought that was unfair and said that you're not supposed to do that as a potential hire her and an applicant shouldn't have to perform right to know basic Latin or Greek.

So that's not,

I'm not suggesting Stanford is unusual.

I'm just saying that is now what people are being interested in.

And people should remember that this happens all the time.

If you go look at one of the problems with classical scholarship during the Cold War, and I used to really be interested in farm size and ancient agriculture, still am, and land tenure and inheritance.

And some of the most brilliant people were writing in Czech and Polish journals, sometimes translated, sometimes with synopses in English.

But the point was, you couldn't trust the findings because it was all about, at the end, you'd see, and therefore the proletariat, and therefore the exploitive capital class.

So, in other words, all of the evidence was leading to class struggle in Marxist terms.

And then there would be a SOP

line about, you know,

Marxist revolution in the 20th century.

And if you wanted to read about the Hellots

or

Sparta, do not read anything written in German from 1935, maybe even 32

to 1945.

It's completely worthless because it'll all talk about the racial component of Hellots or Spartans or their racial ancestry or Arianism in the ancient world.

It's just completely worthless.

And so my point point is anytime that ideology permeates a field and it starts to govern the title of a panel discussion or a PhD thesis or a book or a course, and i.e.

DEI and various modes of oppression as defined by your race or your gender or your sexual orientation, and that will be the primary focus of research that's acceptable, then everybody comes out of the woodwork and think, oh my God, I'm 25 years old.

I've spent eight years of my life undergraduate and graduate.

I'm getting this esoteric degree and there's hardly any jobs.

But if I write something about military strategy during the Peloponnesian War, or I write something like,

I don't know, metallurgy and mines and the importance of iron mines in the Roman Empire, I'm not going to get a job.

Or if I will try to find

Aristotle's poetics that's lost, if I write something about papyrus and its contribution to reconstructing the poetics of era, I'm not going to get a job.

And so I better get a topic that has something about diversity, equity, inclusion, or race, or gender, or

trans or gay issues.

And that can be fine, but when you're all doing it, you're doing what has happened under the Soviet and other systems, and it won't last.

Well, Victor, you talk a lot there about, obviously, is scholarship and rigor.

One thing I'd like to get your thoughts on would also be the knowledge of the incoming students.

And let's get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

First, Victor, I want to say that our God-given freedoms are facing unrelenting attacks.

It's a battle for truth.

And the only way we win is if we stand together.

And thankfully, Alliance Defending Freedom has been defending our rights for 30 years and winning.

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Now, Victor, this is not a backwards way into promoting your book and your website, the Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

But I, as you know,

you and I have

done a little work for an interview piece that we're doing for AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, for their terrific magazine about the forthcoming book, The End of Everything.

And I wonder, this has to do with

knowledge,

not the skin color of the incoming student, not the wimpiness of the graduate student and the LAMO courses that they're being taught, but the actual knowledge that the student has after the accumulation of 12 years of

K through 12 education.

And I'm wondering if the four main cases you present in your book, The End of Everything, are the annihilation of

Carthage, Thebes, the Aztecs, and Constantinople.

And would you think that even a quote-unquote smart student would not have a clue about any of those historical events?

I don't think so.

I don't.

When I reference the Aztecs as a professor, if I do, people have no idea what they were about.

I mean, they were very sophisticated in terms of astronomy and architecture and engineering, but I mean, there were somewhere between, who knows, 25,000 to 40,000 human sacrifices a year, as well as ritual cannibalism, institutionalized.

And that's the only reason Cortez won,

because when he invade from 1519 to 1521, he had the help of the Tlux Calans and other allies, and they didn't want to help these foreign barbarians.

They helped them because they thought they had the ability to dethrone the Aztecs that were harvesting tens of thousands of

their population every year in these so-called flower wars.

But I don't think anybody knew about that.

Nobody knows about that.

They don't teach that in the universities.

As far as Alexander the Great and what he did,

I don't think anybody knows that in the universities these days.

Constantinople, to the degree that people understood on May 29th, 1453,

a little afternoon,

Constantinople fell.

It would be more or less pro-Ottoman and Islamic, that maybe the Byzantines were a thousand-year interlopers or something.

And on Carthage, the destruction of Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus, why Rome destroyed Carthage.

And by the way, I'm not taking just a Western, I'm very critical of Alexander the Great for destroying Thebes.

There was no need for Scipio Aemilianus to destroy Carthage or even start the Third Punic War.

The Carthaginians had met every crazy demand.

The only demand they didn't meet was to destroy their own city and move it

12 miles inland.

They weren't willing to do that.

But everything else they had done.

And I wasn't, I'm not, I didn't say that the Byzantines were perfect and that Ottomans were awful.

It was inevitable what was going to happen given demographics and this dynamic new religion of the last

800 years had been able to transcend tribal loyalties, everything in Asia and

North Africa.

So it was a very dynamic system that the Byzantines were not up to.

And then, of course,

The misfortune of the Aztecs were that they didn't meet the pilgrims.

What I mean by that is if you look at patterns of colonization, North American colonization had families and they were a lot of, in many cases, Protestant refugees, and they were not military people that were going to the east coast of the United States.

If you look at the patterns of immigration from northern Mexico to Chile,

and include the Caribbean, it was largely a monopoly of only people could immigrate with the permission of the Catholic and Spanish government.

In other words, if you wanted to go and take your family and you wanted to move to the coast of Colombia or something, you had to get a permission from the Spanish government.

And that was not given to you unless you were a subject of the Spanish Empire or were given some kind of quasi-citizenship and you were Catholic.

And the point problem here was that Spain, as you know,

1492 Columbus to 1521,

Cortes take, and then the Incas up into the 1550s with Pizarro.

This was the culture that had been doing what?

It had been fighting religious wars non-stop

and would be fighting religious wars non-stop with the Protestant Reformation.

But more importantly, it had just come out of the Reconquista.

And so when you look at Spanish conquistadors who went to the New World, you're talking about people whose ancestors or grandparents, they had been fighting for 200 years,

fighting to unify Spanish speakers and reclaim the Iberian Peninsula from Muslims.

And they had been fighting in North Africa.

And they had been fighting a new threat called Protestantism.

And so when you unleash those people

to colonial indigenous people, they were not there to get, you know, mom and dad and grandpa and grandpa and get in a wagon and go farm 40 acres.

They were there for God and glory and gold.

And they were, and the point I'm making, the Spanish Empire in 1500

was at its zenith.

It was just starting to get huge amounts of silver and gold bullion from the New World.

But more importantly,

if you look at military technology and the and

what was coming out of toledo spain as far as the quality of it had been from roman times but the quality of steel swords or you look at the tercio the spanish uh phalanx formation or you look at the quality of uh spanish uh breastplates span and you look at

all the way into the 16th, 17th century, and you look at Don Juan, you know, at Lepanto, 1571, and the quality of

the Duke of Santa Cruz, those people won the Battle of Lepanto.

I mean,

they were very, very fierce fighters, is what I'm trying to say.

And they really did believe.

They believed that

Christianity was the savior of mankind, and it was threatened on various fronts.

It was threatened by apostates within the church called Protestants.

It was threatened by Islam, and the only way it was going to survive is to conquer people and convert people and win souls.

And so, what I'm getting at is people are still baffled how Cortez, who had various, his army shrank and

increased over that two and a half year period, but it was never larger than 1,500 people.

So, how did 1,500 people destroy an empire of 4 million?

And part of the answer was the Tlax Callans.

And what I'm getting at is there's no San Diego State Tlax Callens, is there?

No, there.

That's true.

Quite true.

No, I used to, I used to have a, I have a lot of, I had a lot of Mexican-American students and what they were very interested in the Aztecs.

And every time I would say to them, why aren't you interested in the Tlaxcalans?

Because the Tlaxcalans were brutalized by the Aztecs and fought back and destroyed it.

And if you look at the last, if you look at Seo Gun or Bernal

Diaz or any of the contemporary chroniclers, the problem that Cortez had when he unleashed the Tlaxcalans in those last days of the fall of Tenochtitlan, he couldn't restrain them.

And I mean, they wiped out, one of the reasons there were no more Aztecs wasn't just the destruction of the capital city and Cortez, but it was the Tlaxcalans took an enormous revenge on them.

And they were promised special concessions under the new Spanish control of the Mexica, which is what they called.

Aztecs were never known as the Aztecs.

They were were called Mexico.

Well,

don't give the whole book away.

I don't.

Anyway, it's no, I got off on a tangent.

Yeah, yeah.

That's it's it's a good any tangent you go on is a good tangent, Victor.

That

you can go, folks.

I'll get it in now.

The Blade of Perseus, go to VictorHanson.com.

You'll see a link to that book.

It comes out in May, the end of everything, and check out other things there and subscribe while you're there to the Blade of Perseus.

Victor, we have a little time left, and I thought maybe I should

get your thoughts on some of this talk that's been going around, talk and images about Google AI.

And let's get to that right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Again, we're recording on

Sunday, the 25th of February, and this particular episode should be out on Thursday, the 29th.

So, Victor, last year, I was at a Coolidge Foundation event earlier in the year, and

your Hoover colleague, John Cochran, was there, very interesting guy.

And the subject of AI came up, and he, I'm just, I'm not picking on him.

I'm

just using him as an example of many people

on the right who say, you know, there's a lot of good that's going to come out of AI.

Don't, don't be afraid.

And I have to take their word to some extent on that.

So

good.

All right.

This is going to open up new realities for the economy somehow or other.

On the other hand, about AI, now Sean Davis, he runs the Federalist,

and he's very active on Twitter, and he puts this up the other day.

If you ask Google's AI whether, quote, whiteness should be eliminated, end quote, it says the answer is, quote, complex and multifaceted, end quote, and tells you to study critical race theory and immerse yourself in whiteness studies.

But if you Google...

If you ask Google's AI if, quote, blackness should be eliminated, end quote, It says the very question is, quote, deeply concerning and harmful and perpetuates violence and discrimination.

Victor, this is part of,

I'm sure our listeners have seen also some of these AI requests of, you know, show me an image of the Founding Fathers versus

create an image of the Founding Fathers.

So the woke, the woke, there's something woke about in the DNA of

Google AI and maybe other AIs.

I don't even know.

There is.

So it gets back to that story I beat to death when I was a kid.

I was talking about

that

we had a big electric pump.

My grandfather had a centrifugal pump and he put a

turbine pump in and it was getting, he was just freaked out with the water table in was about 60 feet and we were getting on a 15 horse about 1,500 gallons a minute.

I said, wow, this is so different.

And then as we walked back, we washed up and he had a little hand pump that was the original

his grandmother had built.

And so when the water, he pushed the lever down, he said, so the water's different, Victor?

And I said, no, it's the same.

It washes our hands.

He said, exactly.

What his point was, is the mechanism, the delivery system changes, but the essence doesn't.

So AI is a delivery system, it's like internet.

It's a much more dangerous one because it's much more effective, but knowledge is the water and knowledge is unchangeable.

And so

AI depends on the quality of knowledge.

So if you put aside AI and you say, who are programming AI

and what type of knowledge are they using and where do they come from?

Then you would come to the following conclusion.

I wouldn't trust those people as far as I could throw them on any question of the environmental environmental sciences or sociology or race or equity or inclusion.

However,

on things like medicine or science, I don't think they have been corrupted, i.e.,

if I ask AI what it was the race of the founders, I would probably get an instant delivered

analysis that came out of the brain of some nerd who was a DEI idiot in Silicon Valley who coded that or did the program to tap on all of similar minds like his own imbecilic mind.

However, if I had lymphoma and I typed into AI

what would be the best treatment for the eighth week of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, then I think the person who had you know, what the knowledge would be drawing on and the ability of AI to decipher what would be more valuable than not and go through millions of words would be very helpful.

It reminds me, since

I kind of have one liability in life, I memorize a lot of stuff.

And one of them was Shane, our favorite movie.

Remember?

Yes.

You remember that part where he's shooting and Gene Arthur Marion comes out and says, oh, no, oh, what are you doing, Shane?

He says, you know, says something like, a gun is a tool, Marion.

It's no better, no worse.

Doesn't he say something that in any other tool an axe or something and a gun i remember this proverb a gun is as good or as bad as the man using it yeah and so ai intelligence is as good or as guns can be very dangerous uh depending on the man using it or woman using it and a uh ai can be very very helpful or very very dangerous depending on the people who create the programs that empower it and if you know Silicon Valley and the people in Silicon Valley are its offshoots or its surrogates or its spin-offs, and as I have spent

20 years of my life living in that area during the week, I wouldn't trust those people to be disinterested or intellectually honest on any question involving the social sciences or the humanities or contemporary politics or culture.

I would trust them because they want to live and they know there's certain scientific laws about computer science that they can't alter.

And they would like to be able to find out when their mother gets them an angioma brain tumor how they can act.

So I would trust AI, as John Cochran points out from what you told me.

And he's a very bright guy.

I like him a lot.

He

won the Bradley Prize last year.

good colleague of mine, very smart guy.

I think what he was trying to say is that,

I shouldn't say he tries to say anything, he just says it, but I think what he's saying is that it's going to be very good for questions of engineering and science and the STEM and medicine, because it will save us millions of hours of research where we don't have to go through this article and that article.

And hey, everybody, did you know that in the

Journal of Philippine Science published in Manila, there was an article about this off-use,

this off-label drug of this common drug that on the off-label use, it really stopped

pernicious asthma or something.

And no, I didn't know that, but here it is.

AI has incorporated it.

So I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I think it'll be very valuable in the hard sciences and very dangerous in the humanities and the social sciences.

Yeah.

I think I'm going to ask one of these AI AI things to come up with a picture of various pictures of Victor Davis Hansen and

doing various things.

By the way, one of them is walking around his property listening to AK-47s.

Another is

looking at your new, your barn being fixed.

Oh, my barn is almost fixed.

It's all, I just have to paint.

And I had the...

Some of the bravest guys I've ever seen

up at 35 feet above the concrete building a truss in situ.

But

I'm not saying it was a wise thing to do, to take a 150-year barn that has no ostensible purpose given its shape and volume.

But

my attitude was, well, I'm the fifth person here, and I have an obligation to pass it on to somebody, even if it's not my family, better than when I inherited it.

But it was very expensive as far as I call expensive.

And I can't see any,

what's the word, investment in it.

It's not going to make me more efficient.

But it's going to, what it basically says is you have,

I don't know, 1,800 square feet that's 35 feet up in the air, and now it's built better than it ever has, and it looks better than it ever has, and it hasn't changed its shape or appearance since 1870.

How's that?

Well, how's a classicist who sees old forums and Roman theaters standing, I think, would be predisposed to keeping a home barnett going.

Yeah.

Victor,

this,

I mentioned already about your website.

And as we're talking,

you may have concluded, but you have so far a three-part series on your

fixing the barn.

And you can read them, folks, if you subscribe to the website.

They're wonderful pieces.

But it prompted

a

comment.

So this is, we're at the kind of at the end of the show here.

So here's the comment and it's not from iTunes and Apple.

And thanks folks who do that and rate the show.

And appreciate it.

Victor's got a 4.9 plus out of five average.

And again, we do read all the comments there.

But here's a comment from your website, Victor, someone writing about your Barnes series.

It's from Terry Hanus.

It's a tiny bit long.

I love your articles,

especially about the past, as I will turn 80 in May.

And I've always hated change.

I love old barns.

And living in the foothills of the central Sierras, I'm fortunate to be able to see several old barns that are still standing.

I grew up in Santa Cruz in the 40s, 50s, and early 60s, before

UCSC was built and decimated our town.

when it was still a rural, quaint little fishing and resort town and Italian retirement community.

It was one great place to grow up back then.

I think every property we lived on had a chicken barn or two.

And my dad converted one into our home, which, by the way, still looks the same with less property and is now worth $1.5 million.

Talk about change.

So I learned very early on to love the past.

I'm so happy that you are not replacing the barn with one of those ugly metal ones that have popped up all over the place.

I totally agree with your reader who thanks you for all that you do to protect not just your home, but our home, USA, from the ravages of time and those who seek to return our civilization to the authoritarian beginnings.

And that's from Terry Hanus.

That's a wowful

thing.

Very well written and composed.

And, you know, I have two more

sections coming on Tuesday and Wednesday in the finale about that rebuilding the barn and pictures of it.

And you know what's weird about that?

I'll just finish today's with this, is that the guy who

he's done all the roofing.

He's the head of something called integrity roofing in Fresno, but I won't mention his name to embarrass him.

But we discussed what it would cost, and I thought I could get away cheaply with fixing a rafter.

And we got on the top of the barn, it was no way.

The trusses, there weren't were never enough of them, and they had to be rebuilt, and then they had to have.

more trusses and then the side and then we just kept going you know siding uh reinforcement you know if you want to be able to walk on a barn, not a metal will feel slide.

So let's put on plywood and tie it together.

And let's not just put any plywood.

Let's get thick plywood.

And let's get 100-year-up, lifetime-guaranteed shingles that look like wood.

So we did everything, and we talked about the price.

But then after that, it was funny.

There was no more talk about the price at all.

It was every time I went out there, and I went out there once an hour, talked to the guy, it was always, can you look at this?

Look what I'm doing.

Look at this here.

Mr.

Hansen, I want to do this.

Can I do this?

And it was like,

let's tear off the old redwood siding that's been there 150 years.

No, no, no, please don't tear it off.

Let's fix it, repair it, let's hammer it in, and we'll put siding over it.

So nothing changes.

So it's the same old barn, but it's all been rebuilt.

And so every time I went out there, a guy came up with an idea.

And

one guy said to me, Oh, I got to leave.

I don't want to leave.

I don't want to leave.

And what he was trying to say is, and he did say it explicitly, all they do is build these McMansions, these beautiful custom homes.

I'm not making fun of them.

I'd like to have one.

You know, the cathedral.

You know how you go to the 5,000 square foot California home.

They have a cathedral ceiling 30 feet high and they're huge.

And they do all of the sophisticated scissor trussing and everything on them, T-Truss, everything.

But they're always in town and they're always doing the same thing again and again.

And this was a challenge to them to take an old barn that was 150 years old and figure out how to make it as strong as a metal shed.

But without...

These picture craftsmen.

They were.

They want to.

Yeah, they were artists, man.

They were artists.

They came up with so many good ideas and they were courageous.

They were way up there.

And,

gosh,

when you look at what they did, I have a picture at the last one.

The siding looks like it's perfect.

There's not,

it's just, they actually had a laser and they tried to get the siding so it was just perfectly square.

And then they kept all of the eucalyptus poles that are still there.

You can see them.

that were the original struts that held it up.

They didn't have any money for wood, my great-great-grandmother, and

they went and got blue.

They call them blue gums from Australia, and they built it out of blue gum.

And then I had tried to do it repaired 10 years earlier, just some interior walls.

And they looked at that and they said,

no, you're just doing this and that.

And you look at, you know what's so weird when you look at the 1x12s up way up there, there's stair pieces that were from a stairway.

You know what I mean?

They just had no money.

They took scrap labor from inside the house and they just threw it up there.

Anything that would, they had no money that would keep the roof on.

And then they got got World War II,

war surplus metal and everything.

So they just, when they got done with it, it was, it looked like a piece of artwork.

The trusses were beautiful and they were so strong.

And you walk up on there and it was like walking on cement.

It didn't give.

And when I went up there, I thought I was on, when I went up there the first time, I thought I was on a trampoline.

It was so dangerous.

And I had started to see the whole thing twist in the last storm and it was starting to get off the foundation.

I wasn't going to, it looked like it was, like he said, he said, it looks okay until it doesn't look okay, meaning it was going to collapse without any warning.

Like America, right?

I had 15 knots the size of my fist in it.

So anyway,

I have, it costs a lot of money.

I didn't, you know, I'm going to have to make up, but boy, I don't have to worry about anything.

And if some, when I go, my two children can decide what to do if they want to live here.

But even if they don't, they want to sell it.

It won't be a burden.

They won't have to say, oh my God, what do I do with this?

It's beautiful.

And it's stronger than a metal shed, I think.

I hope none of your neighbors' AK-47 bullets go through it.

Well, I had one of my solar panels is mysteriously not working.

And so we looked up there, and I think that's what happened.

There's

a couple of holes in it.

Okay.

New Year's Eve, taking their AR-15s, or just target press shooting up in the air.

And everybody forgets when you shoot up in the air, the bullet comes down.

The bullet comes down at a velocity that's pretty fast and dangerous.

Well, you've been terrific, my friend.

I think next time we talk, I don't know if I mentioned at the beginning, you've got a piece, an essay, The New Criterion on Israel.

And I think it's really important.

We'll get to that maybe in the next show.

I want to thank everyone.

for listening and I want to thank those who have signed up for what I do, Part of what I do, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Anphil, and it shares a dozen plus recommended readings.

Here's a link, and here's a long excerpt of really, really good pieces I've come across the previous week.

So, if you go to civilthoughts.com and sign up, you'll get it free.

And we're not selling your name.

So, that's that.

VictorHanson.com.

His

Twitter handle is at VDHansen.

We have

what else?

One last thing.

The Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, great people run that on Facebook.

If you're on Facebook, check it out and do join.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone, for listening again.