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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star is Victor Davis-Hanson.

That's why it's called the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

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

He has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is victorhanson.com.

I'll tell you more about that later on in the

podcast.

We are recording on Friday the 9th.

This particular episode should be up on the

15th, the day after Ash Wednesday.

Victor, there's lots to talk about, too much to talk about almost, but we've got Nikki Haley.

We've got um dartmouth college ivy league dartmouth doing a 180 on sat scores tech millionaires in san francisco want to i don't know save the streets of san francisco and a couple of other topics we'll get your wisdom on we'll do all that right after these important messages

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

Victor, Nikki Haley, we're on the heels right now of the Nevada primary slash caucuses again.

Donald Trump won.

You still see some polls out there.

I think I saw one yesterday.

Wisconsin, you you know, Nikki Haley is up by 15 points against Biden,

you know, Trump and Biden are closer.

So there's some there's some info out there that shows her

on a national level as possibly noticeably more popular in a national vote.

But Victor,

I mean, the calls for her to get out.

She's saying she's going to stay until

at least Super Tuesday.

Does any of this matter?

Is this settled?

What's

so we may even be talking about the money.

There's a subtext there.

Yeah, there's a subtext.

She's not going to win.

If you're a

primary candidate

and you're running in your home state in which you were governor and you lose by more than 15 points, you're done, especially.

if you've lost every primary you've run in.

She had kind of a neat little trick, as I said to Sammy, I don't know, a while ago, that I finished second, meaning I finished last because there was no other person.

But my point is this, that she's also in a doom loop, that the further she gets behind,

the more strident she has to become to get attention and to hemorrhage Trump.

So we're watching a phenomenon where she's not gaining like she said.

She's either static or losing.

And then she's, to make up for that, she's getting more and more strident, which was not her trademark.

Her trademark was: I'm sober, and judicious, and moderate, and I'm a professional, and we don't need any more psycho-melodramatic Donald Trump.

But that's what she's doing now.

She's yelling and screaming, and she doesn't understand that we're in a historic moment where with Smith and Willis and Bragg and James and

Carol and this

special prose.

There's an asymmetry in the country.

It's almost breathtaking.

And she's on the wrong side of that.

Every time there's

a mention of the lawfare that's directed at Donald Trump, she thinks she has to sympathize with the prosecutors.

She says, well, you know, he got an, he's,

you know, he's, as he just thrives on controversy.

No, he didn't.

No, he didn't.

And this is the Democratic Party that faced George W.

Bush, they called him a Nazi, they did everything, but they didn't do this.

And the Democratic Party that went after Romney and McCain, they did everything, but they didn't do this.

This is new, trying to get people off the ballot.

And so

she should empathize with Trump.

And yes,

there's stories, Jack, that Biden has a war chest of $2 billion.

Trump is broke.

It's going, he's going to have to spend $150 million minimum to get out of all these legal

knots that he's tied up in.

And so they're going to do like they did in 2020.

People got to remember that the big money in the United States is not in construction, assembly, farming, mining, even oil.

It is in tech, finance, insurance.

the soft art, so to speak, offshoring, outsourcing, you know, finance, tech.

That's what Bloomberg is.

That's what Facebook is.

That's what the Google people are.

That's what Apple is.

That's what Bill Gates is.

That's where the big money, and it's all left wing, all of it.

And they're going to do everything they can to destroy Donald Trump.

So yes, she is wasting resources and taking donors who, no matter what they say,

80% of them, when they get down to it and they look at Biden and Trump, they will vote for Trump and they will give him money.

Maybe not publicly, but they know that Biden will destroy the country.

And yet she's siphoning that away.

She's going to spend millions of dollars to go through.

So what is she doing it for?

This is my windy way of saying what she's doing.

We know what her strategy is.

I wrote an article about two weeks ago.

I said the four strategies of Nikki Haley.

And the first is

that she thinks that as everybody gets out of the race and she keeps keeps saying that nonstop, then it'll be what she's always wanted, one-on-one, and then she'll debate Trump and she'll win.

That's not going to happen.

Strategy number two

is

that

she just kind of limps along like a little wounded coyote and just kind of goes through the motions and like George H.W.

Bush did when he ran against Reagan.

Remember,

he went through the whole primary and he did a respectable.

So if she gets 25, 30% of the vote, she campaigns well, she goes to Trump at the convention and says, I have a lot of independents and women.

And look at how well I campaign.

You saw me do this for months.

I would be an ideal vice president.

And then she thinks privately, Donald Trump is 78 years old.

Right.

And he can't run again.

And so he may not finish his term, but I will be here.

Now, that's number two.

Or number three, she goes full Armageddon and she just thinks, you know, I'm going to bust him wide open.

I'm going to slur him and I'm going to be nasty and mean.

And I don't care about my political future in 2028.

Or the most likely, and I'm getting to what I think she's doing.

Fourth choice,

she's going to stay alive because she believes there is a good chance that we've never been in this territory.

And these crazy left-wing prosecutors, crazy left-wing judges, crazy left-wing juries are really going to do in the criminal side of things what they did on the civil side with the Carroll $83 million.

They are going to destroy Donald Trump physically, psychologically, financially, politically, culturally, socially.

And at some point, one of these crazy prosecutors is going to say, no bail.

We're going to go and they're going to sentence him to three or four years in a federal prison.

And we don't know whether a president can still run from prison.

There's nothing in the Constitution that says he can.

I don't know the history of jurisprudence.

We don't know whether if he is convicted and he is elected president, he can pardon himself post facto.

I pardon myself.

And,

you know, that was sort of like, oh, gosh, there's been so many movies where the king pardons himself.

But my point is this, I think that's what she's doing.

She can say all she wants, but there's no other candidate now.

And if something happens and Donald Trump is not able to

continue, then she's going to say, well, Ron dropped out before I did.

I'm a Camilla Harris type person.

I'm the logical person.

I deserved the nomination at the convention or something like that or after the convention.

I don't think it'll work because she has gone down the wrong path.

You know,

and the MAGA people, you talk to me.

I talked to them.

I get maybe, you know, our website and personal email website.

We probably get, I don't know, 50, 60, 70 a day from people.

I read them and they won't vote for her.

I mean, if it's between Biden and her, I would vote for her.

But 20% of the MAGA people will not vote for her.

They don't trust her.

They won't vote for Biden, but they won't vote for her.

No, they'll vote.

They either stay home or they'll just.

They'll write in Victor, Victor Davis Sanson.

No, they won't.

at least a man knows his own limitations that would be the worst president

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You know, Victor, I heard, I just read that thousand degrees.

That kind of happens when there's a fire.

And when there's a fire, somebody pulls a fire alarm.

And some people even pull fire alarms when there's not a fire.

So this is a lead into Jamal Bowman,

the

congressman from New York, who

gained some notoriety for trying to disrupt the proceedings of the House by pulling a false alarm several months back.

By the way, he's a former teacher in New York, and he had on his in his classroom, in his middle school, and this was on video,

someone kicked it up the other day about his wall.

Some of them are real schmoes and dirtbags and murderers that he was teaching his students to glorify.

The wall, I'm reading from an article here from, I think it's from the Daily Mail, the wall also included former rep Cynthia McKinney from Georgia, a notorious anti-Semite and 9-11 truther, as well as black militant Matula Shakur, who served a long prison sentence for armed robbery, and Asata Shakur,

godmother of the rapper Tupac, and a radical activist and member of the Black Liberation Army, who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper.

She broke out of prison in 1984 and has been living in Cuba ever.

Since this is

a Bronx congressman.

So, Victor, I just, if you had any quick thoughts on that, but also a segue, you just told me something before the show began began about

you've seen some video from Newsmax about someone was in the Bronx.

Yeah, I mean, Maria Bartolomona, remember in their Sunday interview, asked Donald Trump, why wouldn't you campaign in the Bronx?

He said he would.

And so Newsmax, I don't know to what degree when they interview people on the street, they filter it, because I know that some do.

In other words, that when they don't get the types of responses they want, they may cut them.

So I don't know what the actual polling was.

But anyway, the reporter in question interviewed a series of African-American men and women, and they asked them, would you go to a Donald Trump

envisioned rally in the Bronx?

And would you go to a Joe Biden?

And every single one said, I would never go to a Joe Biden.

I'll get him out of here, but I would love to see Trump.

And they all said the same thing.

It was the economy.

Their lives were better off.

And they were better off because

this Biden agenda is geared for one constituency only.

Two, excuse me.

The bicoastal wealthy elite

that are obsessed with DEI and ESG

and radical environmental causes that affect everybody but them, the consequences of which.

And the subsidized poor.

And it's a war on the middle class and anybody who wants to be upwardly mobile.

And I saw Yellen the other day.

They were asking her about prices.

And they went through them.

I think it was Senator Kendi from Louisiana.

He just went through all of them, Jack.

You know,

food and rent and cars and applied, it's 20% to 30% higher.

And she said, well, wages have gone up.

That's true, but not to the same degree.

And not everybody got.

increased wages.

Maybe a plumber's wages went up a little bit, but not as much as 30%.

And people on Social Security or fixed income retirement surely didn't.

My gauge is: I buy Sport and Spotty and Gracie

and

gosh, I can't even, I'm getting to Joe Biden.

Sport and Spike and Spotty, my three S Queenslands,

I buy them food.

And it was before COVID, a can of dog food was 78 cents, and now it is $2.14, the same thing.

And that's just the way it is.

And I bought an Echo Diesel

and a type of bighorn thing and I went to get another one.

And I can tell you that it is $15,000 more two years later.

And that's everything.

And so they don't want to talk about that, how it affects people, but people are affected and they're angry about it.

Did you see that Stephen A.

Smith, the sports commentator, commentator, his rant about this?

I just, I don't know where I saw it on Bongino, but going through all these points, like, okay, yeah, you know,

many points.

One of them was, yes, inflation coming down, but damn it, everyone has to work two jobs and they're still paying seven bucks for a gallon of milk.

You know, you're crazy.

You know what's happening is that anybody who's

adjusted to this inflationary economy is

trying to help people that are friends and family that are not.

And I know that I know so many parents, I'm doing that with some of my children

and their and friends.

You're trying to do all you can because they are getting killed.

Every time I go into the store, I say to myself,

if this was me

in 1990,

when I was making $26,000 a year, period, and I was still as a professor, $26,000, $27,000,

and I was losing money farming, and I had three children.

And my wife was trying to work at the post office.

And I don't know how I afford this.

I couldn't do it.

I couldn't do it.

I don't know how people do it.

I really don't.

They have to,

you know, it's just impossible to go in and pay these prices.

And they're not going down.

And he keeps saying, well, inflation, we whipped inflation.

Yeah, you whipped inflation in the sense that you raised it by 30%

and now it's going up about 3.5%.

It's not going down.

And the price of that was pricing all the middle class out of homes when you took 1.8 30-year mortgages and put them over 7%.

That's just what happened.

And it's nice if you have money and you have an NT bill and you're getting 4% or 5% instead of 1%, but the people, most people are 50% are paycheck to paycheck survivalist.

So it's a disaster.

And it's just he.

Yeah, even Victor, even this news that, like from the other day, oh, you know, 300,000 new jobs, surprising.

It's not, it's people, it's not changing people's minds.

No, if you look at the jobs, about 90,000 of them are full-time, well-paying jobs.

The rest are part-time or less well-paying.

Right.

And this is.

you know, it's and then this is added on to

the

complete destruction of the criminal justice system and crime, and people are freaked out.

They look at the border and then they say, that guy that just crossed, they're going to give him free health care.

They're going to give this person a bank card, American Express card for 500 bucks.

They're going to give that guy a phone.

They're going to fly that guy without an ID.

And

I have to stand in line with the DMV to get a real ID coming up.

They liked him better than they do me.

And then they hear all of this about, if you don't give this to Ukraine, we're going to be fighting, Chuck Schumer.

We're going to send your...

I'm sorry, Chuck Schumer, but after what the military has done to people, and they kicked out 8,400 people, almost all of them with natural immunity to COVID, because they didn't want to get a very iffy booster that had more side effects for young men than did the virus itself.

And you kicked them out, and then you told everybody that you were going to hunt down the white supremacist and terrorists in your ranks.

And then you meekly issued a report in December of 23 that there was nobody there after you smeared them.

Then you went DEI.

They're not going to do it.

They're just saying, you know what?

I'm going to pass.

I don't want anything to do with it.

I don't want anything to do with it.

And so that's what's getting people angry.

They look at the military.

And you know what?

They look at the military.

They look at the FBI.

They look at the CIA.

They look at the DOJ.

They look at the IRS.

They say they're all weaponized.

Do not get on the wrong side of those people.

They're completely unaccountable.

They will sue you or go after you, and they will either break you in a lawsuit or they will act bureaucratically as judge, jury, and executioner and get you if they think that you're a nail that pops up and they have to hammer down.

And so people,

that's what he's done.

And

if Donald Trump is the nominee, And he can give some speeches like he did, as I said to Sammy, after Iowa, and he's got a lot more professional people around him.

He could win the Senate and the House, and he could win by six to eight points in the popular vote because there's so much anger.

Right.

I know a year is a long time.

But in

Joe's case, that's bad news because he is declining very rapidly.

Yeah, that line about revenge being, that success is revenge, I think

that Trump said it.

I don't quite understand what this.

These people are so

unself-aware.

The left, these

leftist elites, they say things they write every day.

Do you read these things in Real Clear Politics?

John McIntyre's great, you know, parallelism with one view, the other view.

I read it every day.

And it's

Trump, if he's elected, he's going to fire all these things.

He's going to overturn.

You think?

You think that's what Joe Biden did?

You think that's what Obama did?

They came in and cleaned house on the DOJ.

They got rid of everybody.

Anything that had Trump's fingerprints on it.

Secure border, get rid of it.

Calm Middle East, get rid of it.

Gas prices affordable, get rid of it.

Crime under control, get rid of it.

That's what they do.

And now they're worried that Donald Trump might do what they do.

And that terrifies them because they know what they've done.

And they think, you know, I keep saying this to everybody.

The left keeps thinking if I had done the crap, if the stuff that I did to Donald Trump was done to me, and I knew who did it, and he knows who did it, and I got back in power, I know what I would do.

And that's, so I know that Trump will do that.

I just know he will because I would do it.

And that's how they think.

And

we'll see.

Well,

you know, there are other ways they think too, Victor.

And we have Italian Americans, we have Swedish Americans, we have African Americans.

And according to some Democrats, they think we have undocumented Americans.

So we'll get your thoughts on that right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show recording on Friday, the 9th of February.

Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Do visit it, victorhanson.com.

I'll just keep it short and sweet here today.

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So Victor, my senator from here in Connecticut, Chris Murphy,

was

blathering the other day, as I'm blathering right now,

and he talked about undocumented Americans.

And like these people we need that just that phrase alone is

kind of nuts, isn't it?

They know what they're doing.

They all were for it.

They all got rid of the wall.

They got rid of catch and release.

They got rid of the refugee status in your home country.

They didn't say a word about Obadar.

They didn't say a word about fentanyl.

They'd stopped the wall.

And they got 8 million illegals.

And that was perfectly the idea.

And the idea was they were all going to stay down in Arizona and Georgia and Texas.

And they were going to flip these states.

Under these new lax voting laws, they were going to flip them blue.

Ha, ha ha, Texas.

You're going to have 70% 70% of your votes by mail-in,

something like that.

Georgia, Alabama, maybe back.

And guess what?

Finally, people said, you know what?

These are 550 sanctuary jurisdictions.

We're going to send these people up there.

And they did.

And they said, oh, my God, why should I ever suffer the ramifications of my own ideology?

It's toxic.

It's supposed to be for you, not me.

And now they're saying, oh, my gosh, this is one of the top three issues.

This could hurt us at the polls.

So first, what we'll do is try to get the Mitch McConnell naives and get them, lured them into a comprehensive, which is always amnesty, immigration pact.

And then we'll blame Donald Trump for it.

The fact that they see they have to blame somebody shows you there's a problem.

And fortunately, the Senate.

There are some great senators.

I really like the Republican senators.

They were, you know, Cruz and Rubio and Ron Johnson, those guys.

Mike me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All of them.

They just said, screw you.

We're not going to do this.

You guys screwed the border.

You live with it.

And if you really want to help stop the border, they called their bluff.

They said, then just build the wall and go back to the Trump.

And they won't do that.

So that was all.

They don't really want to stop this.

Because they think they can get immediate voters under the lax new voting laws of motor voter and automatic registration same day,

vote harvesting, third party,

all that stuff they love.

And if that doesn't really happen so quickly, then they see it as a long-term investment.

The only irony about all this is

we mentioned that news, Max, but I've had some people working, as I said, on the barn.

I'm talking to other people.

I do it every day.

And I tell you, I think I must have talked in the last week at the supermarket,

at a restaurant in town, getting gas,

at the post office.

I would say I talked to 30 Mexican-American men over the age of 40, and they came up to me and wanted to talk about Trump.

And they're going to vote for Trump.

I couldn't believe it.

This was not 2020.

And I think what's going on, I'm not sure that's going to happen because they're going to be bombarded with the Trump is a racist and they're going to have, you know,

the left's going to to have all the money and they're going to bombard the airwaves.

But I think what for now is happening,

they're getting tired of that whiny, left-wing, bicostal,

we know what's good for you.

You're going to do this.

You're going to think that.

You're going to get rid of your gas stove.

You're going to buy an EV car.

You're going to have transgendered restrooms.

You're going to talk about transitioning in your school.

You're going to, you know, have women and your boys.

boys.

They don't like they being the people.

They're sick of it.

And they associate that with Joe Biden and the fact that he.

I don't think we've talked about that, but one of the reasons of his unpopularity is not just that he was always, as you pointed out, and I have, he's a mean SOB before he was senile,

and B, that he's just tragic because he can't string together a sentence.

But what gets them really angry is he only gets animated.

You know what?

As I said earlier, Iran can kill people through their service.

He doesn't get angry.

Hamas, he doesn't get angry, not at all.

Putin, he says some things about Putin, but he's not angry about Ukraine.

No.

Houdies they can kill some Americans.

He doesn't get angry.

You mention Donald Trump or MAGA people.

His eyes get beady like lizard-like.

He gets grimaces like he's the joker.

He gets angry and he starts like at that press conference.

It's really amazing.

The only thing that wakes him up and animates him is pure hatred for Donald Trump

and the right wing.

And that bothers people.

They think he's a mean, henry person, and he is.

We talked about on a recent podcast, Victor, the

great

example of that was when Biden was recently talking at the black church, I think it was in South Carolina, and he just

became unhinged at yelling about Trump and bringing up that the lie that you know that Trump

defamed the soldiers who died as suckers, that he wouldn't visit a cemetery.

But it was he even though it was a lie, he believed it in his heart and he was screaming about it.

He's just

no, it's like he's back to back in your chains.

People forget about the back he's going to put you all in chains about romney in 2012.

he was addressing not poor people he was addressing very accomplished black professionals and he was telling these people

that you i joe biden know that they're going to put you back in chains as if you're a slave as if these people are not able to to protect themselves if they don't they understand they're very successful they have money they have influence and yet he was treating them like little children.

And then how he ever got away with that corn pop, I just saw that.

I listened to that the other day.

That thing is the most patently racist, lying, fabulous, horrific story.

I just told Cornpop I measured off some chain.

And I went down there and I said, corn pop.

It was just horrible.

And then he got into the golden hairs on his leg.

And you put all this together.

I mean,

it just, if you just stop and you just say, wait a minute i know donald trump says stuff but this guy blows on girls hair he goes on the tarmac in a finland airport and turkey gobbles a young baby and

he he just eyes people in the audience that are young women he calls them out yeah and then he you know it's you ain't black and hey boy hey boy

it he's he says stuff and it's crazy and he he walks off the stage and he looks around, and then he starts, if he gets off the teleprompter, and then you've got these obsequious toadies that come in and try to tell you that what you see and what you hear is not reality.

No, no, no, no, this is 1984.

You didn't hear him say that.

He didn't walk the wrong way.

No, no, he was just exploring.

And they don't like to be lied to.

You know,

but Donald Trump, when he tweeted, people said, yeah, he tweeted all right yep no doubt about it

and that was the way he was that's you get warts and all that was Donald Trump somebody the other day said did he say bird brain about Nikki Haley to me I was at camp I said yes he did he called her a bird brain shouldn't he have not said that no he shouldn't have said that that's kind of mean she's very intelligent Is he going to apologize?

I said, no, he's not.

He's not going to apologize.

That's Donald Trump.

And

that's Will Cain throwing his badge down in high noon.

That's

Steve McQueen and Ewell Blenner saying, we always lose.

We're the gunslingers.

That's Shane going, tell your mom that there's no more guns and I've cleaned them out, everybody.

That's who he is.

We wouldn't have a war in Ukraine or

you wouldn't have a war in Gaza.

You would not have the Houthis sending missiles.

You would not have China serially telling us that they were going to invade Taiwan.

That balloon would have been blown up in one nanosecond when it reached American space.

That's just the way Iran would not be doing what it does.

He would call Iran up and say, if you kill one more American vicariously through your surrogates, this is a target list.

And we wouldn't have any of this.

Nope.

And the Europeans would hate him and they'd scream and they yell.

Every once in a while, I used to talk to a European journalist and they said, well, you know he didn't make us spend more money and that really helps ukraine that kind of stuff secretly deep down inside they know he was better for them than obama well

but they will never say that because he's so crude yeah we'll sleep more soundly at night

with him as president than current clone i was when i watched tucker when tucker i think he tucker was just

he was just

you know sort of probing putin and he mentioned clinton and Bush, and then he mentioned the next president, Trump, and you'd think that he would light up.

Maybe he didn't want to say a nice thing about Trump because he thought it would hurt Trump, and he likes him,

or maybe he doesn't.

But when Tucker mentioned Trump, he didn't get too excited.

He said, yeah, I know him, I can deal with him.

But I think what he was saying is,

you know, Trump raised sanctions on us.

He killed 200 Russians in Syria.

He got out of the missile deal.

He sold those damn javelins to Ukraine.

He told me that if I went

into another country, he was going to look at the Kremlin.

So I don't think they particularly liked him.

I know that everybody believes Russian collusion, Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, but I don't think the Russians like, I think they like Hillary Clinton.

I think they like...

Joe Biden.

I think they like Barack Obama.

They don't like them personally, but they like their policies because they can take advantage of them.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

we're going to

let's tackle a higher ed.

We have

Dartmouth College doing a 180 on SAT scores, and we will get your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, as you know, many

Ivy League schools, maybe all of them, and any number of other prestigious colleges and universities, decided to forego using the SAT scores for admissions because racism, right?

And after four years of this

practice,

experiment, I don't think it was an experiment, I think it was just a practice practice that clearly showed itself to be terrible.

Dartmouth has come out saying that now it's going to

reinstate the use of SAT scores for admissions.

Duh.

Thanks for excuse me, not thanks, Victor.

Do you have any take on this?

Yeah, I mean,

it's sort of like an admission that after the George Floyd, we all went collectively and the COVID lockdown.

We went collectively crazy.

And we did things that are absolutely inexplicable.

After 100 years of using the SAT, which was designed to allow people who didn't go to prestigious schools or didn't have money, but who had aptitude that could be exhibited on an SAT score and would get in, we got rid of it.

And people forget that when you get rid of the SAT,

you're down to two

criteria.

There's the personal statement or extra,

the person, and then there's the GPA, and then there's the SAT.

And the SAT is used to calibrate the quality of the institution where you got your GPA.

So I went to Selma High School and I had a 3.999.

I was third highest.

I got a BNP and was not saledictorian.

Okay.

When I got to UC Santa Cruz, it was pretty hard to get in in 1971.

And there were people who had 3.5s, right?

From Palos Verde's high or Beverly Hills high or something like that or Woodside or Palo Alto High.

They were so much better trained than I was.

That 3.6,

I mean, I was reading all night long the first two years just to keep up.

Because I, you know, I played football.

I played, I wrestled.

We all, everybody went out and partied and it was like a rural, it was like,

you know, it was,

it was like American graffiti.

I was trying to think of the name of the movie.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's how I lived.

I mean, everybody cruised on Saturday night.

You talked to the girls and everybody goofed around.

And then you,

the curriculum was pretty easy.

And, you know, we read King Lear once, I think.

But the point I'm making is that the SAT could correct that.

So I remember thinking, if I'm going to get into this really hard place, I'm going to have to do the SAT.

So I would go around my, I'd say, mom, what does condine mean?

I remember that word.

And she said, appropriate.

I said, I didn't know that.

And I would write it on a card.

And then I would just get the, and

I didn't have the training to do well, but I just studied.

And even then, I stayed up all night, the night at a football dance and came home at four o'clock and went and took the SAT at six in the morning and came in late.

That's how the attitude was, but my point was it was used to adjudicate the GAA.

When you throw it out, you have no way of ranking these GPAs.

You have no idea.

And then you have the personal statement.

At Stanford, they let in a guy who said, you know, BLM, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, what, 100 times?

And then they brag that they,

of those who took the SAT optionally and got a perfect score, which you've got to be very, very talented or trained to do that.

It's almost impossible to get an 800 on the math and the verbal and the analytic.

And they did it, and

they rejected 60 to 70 percent of the people.

And they don't realize one great truth about this whole DEI.

It is admissions and hiring are not not the end of things.

They are the beginning.

Once you go down that road and you do not use merit

and you don't use equal opportunity, but you do prejudged opportunity result, you've got to completely adjust your whole system that follows.

Otherwise you get Eric Adams saying, everybody's chocolate here, great.

Or you get Fannie Willis says, I'm a victim of racism, or you get Claudine Gay saying, I'm a victim of racism,

because

there's no deterrence.

There's no merit.

There's no standard.

And so that's what's happened and Dartmouth knows that.

They let in students with no SAT and then all of a sudden they're very left-wing, brilliant faculty, their little hot house plants.

They went into a faculty senate meeting.

I'm just imagining because I've been to hundreds of them and they do something like this, Jeff.

Wow, you know, in my German upper division lit class, I don't want to say anything, but we just can't speak German anymore.

And it might be because we're letting in students that are not qualified, but I didn't say that.

I'm just suggesting it.

I'm throwing it out there.

And then,

you know, the classics professor says, well, I'm not sure that Greek should be required anymore, but I have some really unusual students, but they come from non-traditional, and I wasn't able to finish the Greek.

But it doesn't matter, but maybe we should water down the course, or maybe we should get rid of this D and F that are stigma.

That's what they do.

I keep saying that.

You either got to play the grades or you got to water down the class or you got to bring in new classes.

Well, and by the way, Jack, really quickly, there is a new science.

You know what that is?

I've been reading about it and I've been adjudicating papers on it.

It's called elasticity.

You have no idea what that means.

I didn't

Go ahead.

Tell us.

Tell us, Professor.

Elasticity is a good thing.

In

elasticity is a bad thing.

What it means is this:

that you look at courses and you look at student demand.

And when they want more sections of

the construction of gender, or they look at

six new ways of, you know, cartoons or Marvel comics or transgendered sports, those courses are oversubscribed.

And when you have something like Aeschylus' Persians in Greek, or you've got five plays of Shakespeare and you don't, and yet you don't change the curriculum because the students are wiser than you.

So they're inelastic.

But great universities, they monitor student opinion and student demand, and they know, the elites know, that when you have five sections of of one class suddenly and you have something like Schiller or Goethe and there's not enough people taking it, it's inelastic.

And why is that?

It's because the professors have vested interest.

They're elite.

They're out of touch.

It's not ever, no, they're 55 years old.

They know what makes a classical education and how to instill analytic skills, inductive reasoning, disinterested examination, classic prose skills, vocabulary.

They know what does instill that and what doesn't over time and space, the last 2,500 years.

So they're trying as adults to inculcate the students and not let the lunatics run the asylum.

But that's the big thing on the left, that all courses must be elastic.

And so they're just constantly changing.

They're just changing all the time.

The new names are coming in, new sections are coming in, and you've got to just drown out the old fogies that are fossilized, calcified, ossified.

Yeah, liberal arts give way to majors in video games.

But, you know, Victor, there's a professor who's in this sweet spot of what you've just been discussing.

I want to get your thoughts on him.

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former colleague at National Review.

And as you know, John teaches the journalism program at Hillsdale.

It's run by Jennifer Cabani, he's the editor of the College Fix, just a great, great, great

reporting site.

UCLA professor suspended after refusing lenient grading for black students, demands $19 million plus in damages.

So, Victor, this is

oh, I can't, I forgot his his name.

Gordon Klein.

Yes, and

I remember that.

I remember it.

Wasn't he was the business school or school manager?

Yeah,

and after the George Floyd decision, they asked him to please grade black students more leniently.

Yeah, you know, I can never figure that out because I remember when that happened.

I know he's been back in the news.

He was going to trial in two weeks.

Yeah, the university said, well, we never had an official policy.

I think some students came to him

and wanted leniency, and then he issued a mission statement, you know what I mean?

And says, I'm not, this is equal to everybody.

And then that mission statement was referred to to the university.

And they said he has no right to do that to address the students defending his rigid.

grade system.

I think that's how it happened.

Defending meritocracy, yes.

Yes.

And I don't think the university would be stupid enough to put that in writing because

it's racist.

But they went after him as a racist for having standards that were racially blind.

And the only way they were going to change is to be sued and to be sued big time.

And because they won't quit, they're wedded to this.

And

it's a very, it's all, it's, it's, everybody should realize that

the DEI, the whole thing feels a,

and I, you know, we owe a lot to Shelby Steele

for really articulating this but it's based on this white guilt this white guilt right this imperfection and this typical profile of the affluent suburban successful moneyed highly educated person who feels somehow that his life is empty maybe it's his lack of god maybe it's a lack of muscular labor maybe it's his self-chosen disconnect from the muscular chat classes maybe he doesn't want to be around the plumber, the electrician, he's afraid of them.

I don't know what it is.

But they manifest it in kind of a medieval penance.

And they say to themselves, I'm going to force this racist DEI stuff and then I'm not going to be subject to it because my kids, I can call the dean or the president and get them in or they go to special prep schools or whatever.

But I feel so bad that I'm going to support all these things that destroy the lower white white working class.

That's what they think.

And

it's not, it's going to hurt us.

So you're starting to see something, Jack, that when you see all of these stories, and I have no idea if they have anything to do with non-memocratic hiring, but there's a public perception that they do.

So you take the Boeing.

subcontractors that are sending these max 789s without sufficient bolts.

Right.

Or you look at these near-misses in airlines, or you look at confusion with

scrapes on the ground, and

you look at the DMV, or you look at government services, and the narrative that's going out is we are hiring people on criteria other than

analytical skills as measured by quantitative tests for hiring, admissions, retention, promotion.

And the result of it is that we have done it to such a great degree that this very system is now breaking down.

In other words, it's not a problem of that little lounge in the English department.

It is not a problem of which lawyer gets to go to Harvard versus Princeton versus

UC Berkeley versus, I don't know, UC Irvine.

It's fundamental and existential.

It's affecting the very way we live.

It's dangerous to live in America because you cannot cannot count on competent people because they are being hired and judged of all different races by criteria other than merit.

And part of it's this legal, critical this and critical that, the critical theory school from Frankfurt, that whole idea that there's no absolutes and everything is relative and based on Rakodian ideas of power.

So who are you to say that it's important to have math background to be an air traffic controller?

Who are you to say that somebody coming out of the military that, you know, landed an F-18 5,000 times on a carrier might have a little bit better

pilot training than somebody who learned on a simulator?

That's how it that who do you say?

And this is that relativism.

So

societies in the past have broken down when knowledge has not been transmitted from one generation to the other.

Look at Rome, look at Byzantium, look at the Greek city-state, look at the African.

Look at South Africa right now.

Look at the Mayas, look at South Africa.

They're falling.

Look at Zimbabwe.

It just doesn't happen.

Infrastructure crises.

Someone does have to know engineering

to be able to run the water treatment plant or the electrical.

It's happened in my field because we have not insisted on for a number of years in graduate school.

The only way you can really learn Latin and Greek is if you get an active vocabulary versus a passive.

What does that mean?

That means if you say you see Agathos or Kaulos on a page, you know it means fine or good.

But when somebody asks you, what's the Greek word for fine or good, you can reproduce it.

That's much harder.

The active vocabulary is about one-third the size of a passive vocabulary in most languages.

So what I'm getting at is when you get rid of Greek composition and

you don't force people to come actively and think of things, their vocabulary is ossified and it becomes entirely passive and you don't require the same number of courses.

And the result is that when you pick up a classical paper today and you look at the scholarship, you can't trust it.

Or when you go to a university and you see a classics major, it doesn't mean that person knows Latin or Greek at all.

If you don't know Latin or Greek at all and you're a classics major,

That means you have no real expertise to

be able to adjudicate why Aeschylus is different than Euripides or why someone

believes that Thucydides is a more scientific historian.

You can't get that from English.

You have to read it yourself and you have to look at the language and you have to compare it with other text you've read.

And when you lose that in a generation as we have in classics, then the field is just...

it's just becoming a few little mandarins in enclaves.

And that's true of all these fields, every one of them.

English major, you just look at the catalog, go to Stanford or Harvard or Yale.

Go to the bookstore.

When you ever go to a campus, go to the bookstore and look at the books that are being ordered for their main meat and potatoes classics.

So if you get studies in English literature, they're not reading Hamlet, King Lear, Othello.

They're not.

They're not.

The novel, the 19th century novel, they're not reading Joseph Conrad.

They're not.

They're not reading Dickens.

They're not reading the Bronte sisters.

The authors are based on their race and gender and their ideology.

And they're not.

In Victor, for the longest time,

you would have atheists teaching religion courses.

I mean, I think most religion professors at colleges are

not believers.

I thought, well, this is a weird oddity that's kind of restricted to, not restricted, but of religion.

But it's not.

As you just said,

you have classics majors who really hate classics, English majors who really hate English, right?

I mean, if you.

Well, I mean, you're not exaggerating because

Daniel Peralta, I forget his name, but he is a classics professor at

Princeton.

I'm pretty sure.

I wrote an article.

Go read my article in The New Criterion.

And he said that he wanted to see the field destroyed and he wants, you know, they don't want Greek to be a requirement.

They do not want classic.

He was classically trained and he was given great scholarships, but he didn't want to repay that generosity and magnanimity to a generation beneath him.

It was only the one on top of him.

So he didn't transmit that knowledge and scholarship.

He just wanted to be a needle for contemporary political advantage.

The other thing is, very quickly,

I don't know if people have this phenomenon or not, if you're outside of teaching, but it surely must be true in vocational training or law or something.

I've had this phenomenon.

It's really, as I got older, especially now at my age, it's really disturbing.

What I mean is this.

You have former students

that you, and I mentioned this to Sam, you spend a lot of time tutoring.

And most of them are what you would call today DEI.

And I'm talking about you're teaching four classes a semester and you're giving eight to ten independent studies of an hour a week.

So you're spending another 10 or 12 hours plus the prep, and you're trying to help people who are non-traditional backgrounds that

want to go to law school, MBA programs, teaching credentials, PhD programs.

And I did that for over 20 years.

And one thing you do is you don't look at a person's race.

So if somebody comes in, I can give you one example very quickly.

Two African-American people came in once to me.

And they wanted special education.

They had taken a class they liked.

I only gave independent studies in Greek and Latin because you couldn't get those, that type of expertise or Greek composition or Latin composition.

But every once in a while I do something as a favor.

Two African-American people came in and said, we both are HIV positive.

And this was like in the 90s.

And no one wants to give, but we think we can do the work.

And would you be, we like you.

So I gave both.

They were married.

I gave them an independent study and I did it for two semesters.

I liked them.

I think I really helped them.

And unlike others, they really appreciate it.

But my point is this, that when the DEI came, it was like the Say-them witch trial hysteria, you know what I mean?

Or the iconoclastic movement in Europe.

All of a sudden, and this happened to me for friends too, friends that I'd known for 20 years.

All of a sudden,

they were telling you that they...

they remember with really bad memories how they were discriminated against.

They weren't.

I can tell you that.

I know people, I had students that came from Southeast Asia with nothing, and they were given enormous opportunities.

When I had seniors or people applying to graduate school, people got angry at me, Jack, because I'd say, you're a white male.

We have a real problem and we're going to get around it.

And we're going to get around it right.

We're going to get a perfect SAT and we're going to study to you're sick of it.

But when people came in and they were female or minority, I said, this is going to be much easier.

And we're going to really use this to get you into graduate school.

I didn't like saying that, but my interest was in the student if they were prepared.

I never did that if they weren't prepared.

But my point is that that type of student in the last,

I don't know, five years, I must have had at least 10 to 12 instances where I've bumped into them or I've emailed them and they are angry.

Not particularly at me, but at the society, and they feel that they weren't treated right by society.

Or I've had friends that may be one one quarter of this or one half of this, and they've said, you know, I really didn't realize it.

It was really bad.

Or I've been in a workplace where all of a sudden people come out of the woodwork and said, did you know who I was, that I was here?

It was almost like a mass hysteria after George Floyd.

And almost everybody who had a careerist agenda came out of the woodwork and tried to get through it.

It's like before the whole thing collapsed, you know, I got to get this job.

I can be a diversity, equity, inclusion administrator.

I can be promoted, but it's a golden moment.

So I've got to say that I've been victimized by all you.

I too am a victim.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it happened.

And, you know, I put up with it when people would drive out to my farm and want a recommendation for this or that.

And then about two years ago, I just dropped out.

I said, nope.

No nick borcas.

I'm not going to do that.

So, you know what?

You got a wonderful classical education.

And you got it because professors like Bruce Thornton and myself spent hours tutoring you.

And no one had more attention to you.

And you got scholarships because you were in a disadvantaged class.

And I do not want to hear it.

I'm done.

Done.

No.

Anybody who mentions their superficial appearance is essential to your character and your career.

I'm done.

And it was a liberating moment.

It really is.

It just,

you know, I've had a lot of people.

I've had close friends and they'll,

I'll have close friends and they'll call and say,

you know, as a Latino woman,

I said, no, I'm done.

Bye.

As a white male, you want to hear that?

I'm done.

I don't like the tribalism.

And it happened.

And then you realize that once you say, I'm done,

you're not mad.

You just said, I'm not going to put up with this because I know the truth.

And you were given extraordinary advantages and opportunities in the best country in the world.

And you were not subject to systematic or overt or insidious racism or triggered warnings or any of this stuff.

And you're a careerist and you're trying to take advantage of this, and I'm not going to be a part of it.

If you really want to talk and you want to treat people according to their shared humanity, I'll be happy to do it.

And if you need help as a former student, I'll be happy to tutor you or write recommendations or dialogue with you, but I'm not going to sit here and listen to this,

oh, poor me, because it's the same thing as the baby boomer generation you remember the therapeutic movement in the 70s jack where all of a sudden people who you knew had wonderful parents and they were like came in out of world war ii and the depression and they worked 20 hours and they raised these spoiled kids and suddenly in the 70s and 80s they had this magic moment i woke up and i didn't realize that we were part of their

rat race And dad never really told me how much he loved me.

And

no, he was at the factory for 18 hours to make sure you had high top converse tennis shoes you know

i got so sick of that that therapeutic oh poor me my parents did this to me it's the same thing only in the di

Yeah, also, they sound like they're preparing for show trials or something, you know, by

I can't be affiliated with Victor Davis Hanson, you know.

So

that.

I mean, that I didn't even mention that.

I've had people

that the nice thing about that is I've had people call me and they're not even subtle about it.

They'll call me and say things like, I need a scholarship.

Could you help me?

And I said, yes.

And do you know somebody who helped me get a job?

Yes.

And I said, do you want me to write?

No, no, I don't want you to write.

No, please, please, don't write.

I don't want you to write.

I said, why?

I don't want your name.

I know that sounds bad.

I want your help, but not your name.

Please, please, please.

No name, no name.

Victor Cooties.

It's true.

It's true.

And

I don't do it anymore.

I really don't.

When people call me up or they write me, then they think

they were a former student or colleague or family friend and

they've now got taken the DEI

LSD capsule.

I don't.

I don't.

I think they're hallucinating and I just don't do it.

And it's no big loss to them.

They don't really want to go.

They don't, they're embarrassed anyway.

And

heck, I'm a Septician area now.

I can't do much for anybody anymore.

So I don't really.

Oh, mama mia.

Listen, Victor, you know, what you can do is you can make, you do very good sort of Thurston Howell imitations like you did earlier in the show.

Those are not imitations.

It's not my talent.

I'm just remembering them.

I have a good memory on like Joe Biden, and I can remember that voice because I heard it for 50 years.

You know,

all right.

Okay.

We have to, we have to wrap up because you're wrapping up.

Actually, it was, but I have a longer thing to read.

First of all, I just thank you folks for listening.

Thanks to those who, for me, go to Civil Thoughts,

read Civil Thoughts if you want to get it, civilthoughts.com, free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at Anphil.

I forget if I...

I talked about going to VictorHanson.com.

Go, subscribe, five bucks gets you the door, $50 a year.

Thank you to those who leave,

well, rate the show on iTunes and Apple, and those who leave comments.

We read them all.

And here's one.

It's a little longer, but I think it's worth reading.

It's titled Justice.

And it says, thanks for your treatment.

of the terrible assault on the American justice system evidenced by the left's weaponization of the courts against Donald Trump.

I practiced law for 50 years.

As a sole practitioner, I've always marveled that I could represent my clients in the courts of our great republic before judges and juries, having every chance of defeating powerful adversaries, including well-funded corporations and the government.

I've always told my clients that it is a myth that we have a, quote, right to justice, end quote.

We have no right to justice.

What we had, and this is a rare and precious thing, is the quote, right to fight for justice, end quote, with a fair opportunity of achieving justice if we do fight for it.

In seeking justice, we have striven to reduce the effects of bias and prejudice.

The objective is to create, as far as reasonably possible, a level playing field on

which to conduct the fight for justice.

Alas,

as you have so accurately narrated, the judicial persecutions of Donald Trump and other recent abuses of our system of justice may herald the end of the right to fight for justice with a fair chance of achieving it.

Revival is a theme in history as much as decay.

We are in decay and can only hope for its revival.

And that's written by a gentleman, Ed McGill.

And I think he's

very dead on and very appreciative of the wisdom you've been sharing, Victor, on these points.

To everyone else who writes, thanks very much.

Victor, you've been...

uh terrific we'll get to uh wanted to hope we could have talked about san francisco and efforts to yes we must do

but we'll do yeah we'll do that the next next, uh, the next episode.

Yeah, so thanks, Victor.

Thanks, everyone.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everyone.