The Backwardness of Modern Progressives

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Hello, ladies, hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the star namesake, that is Victor Davis-Hanson.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow with the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today's episode is being recorded on Friday the 12th.

It will be out, I believe, on Thursday the 18th.

And Victor, so much to talk about.

Anthony Fauci appeared

before Congress and seems to have memory problems still related to our great COVID gods.

There's Peter Zazak,

the middleman on all this CRAPOLA, who is still, still getting U.S.

government taxpayer money for finding

new, I guess, new diseases that will be perpetrated upon mankind.

We have promised Victor that we're going to talk about the slam job.

on Hillsdale College and we will get to that and maybe some DEI things.

And we'll do all these.

We'll get the ball rolling right after this first important message.

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Victor,

Anthony Fauci has memory issues.

He doesn't remember who did why, or when, or where.

The grand man of

put on pedestals by our cultural elites is really taking quite a fall here.

Victor, related to that, there's news stories about that.

Peter Dasek, who runs the non-profit, was the middleman to get so much of this federal dough, your taxpayer dollars, my taxpayer dollars, to fund gain of function research is still getting federal money.

Is there a judgment day for him,

Victor?

Is there a judgment day?

I don't know.

Anthony Fauci.

Well,

there are three people who were the primary people.

They were Anthony Fauci, who was the director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease, and there was Francis Collins, right?

NEH, NIH.

And then there was, I guess you could say, Peter Dasick at Echo Health.

And from their correspondence right after the COVID news broke that it was coming here, in fact, it had been here, we can see from their internal communications that they all felt they had exposure, either through knowledge of or complicity in

gain of function research, which was barred in the United States as illegal.

And they were subsidizing, maybe with a wink and the nod of the CIA or the U.S.

government.

We don't know.

But they knew about it and they wanted to craft a different narrative.

So they basically used the amount of money that was at their disposal.

We're talking 50, 60, 70 billion dollars in grants.

And they made it very clear that if you adopted the virology lab source origin of COVID, you were going to be in big trouble.

And they demonized people.

And then concurrent with that, the second part of that narrative was simply,

in addition to that,

there was the social distancing the masking shutting down the economy and waiting for the

vaccination the pfizer and moderna life laugh that's what we were told

there was an element in that jack that they did not like donald trump and they felt that this

complete shutdown would kill two proverbial birds with one one stone, as did the left.

It would destroy the economy.

Trump was just boasting and bragging in December of 2019.

He'd had lowest peacetime unemployment for minorities in history, near record low unemployment for everybody.

There was low inflation.

There was low, we've never had low interest rates, low inflation, low unemployment.

Biden has high interest rates.

But we had all three,

and the world was quiet abroad.

There was no Houthis doing this.

There was no Iran doing this.

There was no Hezbollah.

There was no Hamas war.

There was no Putin

in Ukraine.

There was no debacle in Afghanistan.

There was no Chinese balloon.

And so

this thing led to all sorts of disasters.

George Floyd locking 300 million people in cubicles, their houses, their apartment.

It was a disaster.

And now we know all of this data that has come out that in terms of of missed appointments for medical procedures, surgery, screening, scanning, in terms of spousal, familial, alcohol, substance abuse, suicides, lost work, lives ruined,

the reaction to COVID did more damage than the COVID virus itself.

And now we learned as well that the vaccinations still being told as the gold standard were very valuable for older people in the initial round to protect them from the most virulent initial variants.

But there were side effects from this untested mRNA

technology or development or protocol that we had not anticipated.

And then we found out that it was no longer because of the widely mutating nature of the corona-19 virus.

It was no longer a guarantee that you wouldn't be infected or you wouldn't be an infection.

So somebody like me who was a big believer in getting the vaccine, I had a good friend, we all know Rebecca Mercer, she called me up and said, Victor, don't do that.

It's unproven technology.

It's not a vaccination.

It's genes.

It's genetic engineering, making the cell produced by.

And I said, ah, come on.

Don't be that.

And she was absolutely right.

And I was a stupido.

And I got the two vaccinations.

And I've had

three cases of COVID, one for a year and a half.

So it didn't do what it was supposed to do.

And they tried to lie about that.

So now

all of their demons,

the people that they tried to vilify-Jay Bacharia, John Yannidis,

Scott Atlas,

Michael Levett,

the Great Barrington Group, Dr.

Courier,

Martin Kuhlandor,

Stephen Kway we had on the show.

All of these people were right.

And what did they say, Jack?

They said, well, the vaccination may have utility.

Let's kind of concentrate on older people that will have severe problems with the breathing and stuff if they get it.

Social distancing, masking, it's got a lot of problematic side effects.

It's never been proven very useful in a pandemic or quarantine.

But you you know what, if you're older and you have this droplet, then that's okay, but we need to isolate older vulnerable people.

Otherwise, we need to get out and have social intercourse and keep on to keep the economy moving and to keep people psychologically

stable.

And they were proven right.

And they were all vilified.

Their careers were nearly destroyed.

And it was horrible.

And so now the verdict is at end.

We know that from studies in Europe that sometimes the vaccination, people who were fully vaccinated are no more likely to have lived longer during this than people who were not vaccinated.

Some suggestions in Germany may be just the opposite.

We know that people who get booster after booster after booster after booster do not seem to get increased immunity.

We know that

we know the economic toll and we know the psychological toll.

I think the entire DEI, George Floyd, the whole thing was accelerated by the lockdown.

And so these people know it, and they're not very well liked now.

They're not well liked because they gave us the wrong advice, but they tried to cover it up, two, and three, they tried to demonize their critics.

And so Fauci was a hardcore partisan.

And he lied.

He lied.

He would say there's masks have no utility.

One mask has utility.

Two masks are better.

We don't know where the virus, it couldn't be from the lab.

I never said it couldn't be from the lab.

That kind of stuff.

It's probably from a pangolin or bat, even though we'd not had one animal case before a human in the world.

And so

they lost all credibility.

Now he's 80 years old, and he finally stepped down.

And I think he knows that when people take over that, they're going to see how he ran it, how he used grants to leverage consensus that would favor his point of view.

I think Peter Dasik is going to be completely discredited.

I think Francis Collins is, what is he on an apology tour now?

He just wants to tell everybody, I kind of forward it, kind of sort of feel, maybe just quite, I don't know, but there's a possibility I might have been a little bit too tough on my critics.

Maybe I kind of suppressed speech when I shouldn't, but I don't know that.

That's what he's doing.

So they've they've lost the argument and people are very upset.

The only thing to remember is that if

we got something similar to the first variant of COVID, a very virulent form, these people would do the same thing if they could.

Depending on who was the administration, if it was the Biden administration, they wouldn't want to hurt it.

And I'm not just making this up in a conspiratorial.

It was Gavin Newsom who said that the lockdown gave us an opportunity in California to have a more progressive capitalism.

And it did.

The income income tax rate next year is going to be 14.2.

And we had Hillary Clinton say, This is a chance to get single-payer health care.

We've always wanted it, but COVID may be.

And then remember Klaus Schwab said that we should never let this go to waste.

This is a wonderful opportunity for a great reset.

Well, Victor,

the most shocking thing out of everything you just said was you're self-referenced to be El Stupido or something like that.

So don't ever, don't ever say that.

Well, I mean,

I try to do the good thing.

I'm, you know, I was raised to follow the experts and I, you know, I went, I always admire what people do research, disinterested papers.

I didn't think,

I know people say, Victor, where the hell have you been?

You're in a corrupt profession.

Come on, wake up.

Yes, Lancet had a, remember the Lancet medical investigation, Jack?

Yeah.

Where Peter Dasik rounded up some of his cronies and they went over to China and China stuck them the middle finger and said, nope, we're not giving you anything.

And then they came back and said, well, they were kind of uncooperative, but we kind of

substantiated the fact that it came from an animal.

And then now they had to withdraw that.

They lied.

They lied, lied, lied.

And then look at all the people who wrote.

Was it Nicholas Wade, the scientific writer for the New York Times?

He wrote a very eloquent article, very well-reasoned.

People attacked him mercilessly.

You know, the low point for me during this whole cycle drama is my daughter called me out and i have a very disabled um

she was eight then uh granddaughter and she's missing two genes i think it is the type of syndrome she has and she's subject to severe meltdowns and she cannot process process stimuli change in light change in motion

And she

very clearly looks like she has Down syndrome, but it's a little bit more severe.

And my daughter was walking down the sidewalk, Santa Cruz, of all places, on a windy day.

There was nobody within 100 yards.

They didn't have their mask on.

And one of this, Karen, if I could use that pejorative woman, came out and started screaming at her, You're going to kill people.

You better put a mask on that girl right now.

I'm going to call the police.

That kind of stuff.

That was very common.

This vigilanteism, these self-righteous people.

So,

well, something very weird.

I think I'm too old, but a historian could write

a great history of that bleak three years.

It was very, very strange, Jack.

I remember in a period of seven days,

you wouldn't think it.

My, our washer and dryer quit.

Our refrigerator quit, our dishwasher quit.

Our hot water heater quit, and our stove quit.

All of them.

And we needed all of of them and everything was locked down.

So I got online, I tried to order.

And then there's these guys were like heroes.

They came out, you know,

they didn't have masks.

They were just, I'd say, how many are you doing?

Oh, man, we can't keep up.

Everybody's locked up.

They can't go by.

They won't let you go in home veto.

We're just replacing.

And they were,

they just brought them all out.

They came every day.

They were heroic.

And then I thought,

that was before the great inflation.

And then we had all these guys in Zoom that that were making millions and millions of dollars.

You know, just all of the cerebral classes were really benefiting from COVID.

They didn't have to go to work.

They could do everything at home.

And yet the muscular classes were out there exposed to the virus, and yet

they weren't like the people who were not.

What I'm getting at, clumsily so, is the people who were making a lot of money and had very less exposure to the actual infectious virus were the very ones that were judging everybody.

And the people who weren't making any money, but were keeping the country running and who were exposed all the time to the virus were very lackadaisical in the sense they didn't judge other people.

It was, and that was, that was

maybe that's how the world breaks down.

They're doers and they're judgers.

Yeah, that was why that was my big takeover.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, there's an interesting story.

An article written by a professor, former professor of MIT.

He's written it for the free press, and it gets into MIT and DEI.

And those are

two dangerous acronyms, but it's worth getting your thoughts on this.

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

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

I'd like to remind our listeners and inform our new listeners that Victor has a website, The Blade of Perseus.

Its address is Victor Davis.

You would think, Victor, after all the years I've said this, I would know.

Victor Hansen.

I mispronounce my name, too.

I did call you Victor David Hansen once.

I know that all the time.

It was in front of Sarah Palin when we were up in June.

Yeah, I got people come up to me and they'll say, you of all people have a tripartite name.

That is so.

And I say, you know, it was just because I came home one day.

I was always Victor Hanson.

I came home one day.

My thesis had Victor Davis Hanson on it to separate.

And my mom said, oh my God,

finally somebody gives the Davises some credit in this family instead of all this Swede stuff.

Hansen, Hanson, Hanson, Hansen, Hansen.

Victor, would you do me a favor?

I want you to use that name in all of your books.

You don't have to be called that.

Just do that for the Davises.

How can you say no to your mom?

And I said, well, why?

And she goes, because

my father had three girls and there's no Davis name left anymore.

You've got to perpetuate it.

I said, okay.

Where am I going to go?

Be a Welsh nationalist?

You know?

Well.

VictorHanson.com is a website.

And you should go there, folks, and you should subscribe.

You'll find links to everything Victor does, the archives of this podcast, the ultra articles that are exclusive Victor writings you love what Victor writes and you want to read everything you better subscribe because you cannot read the ultra articles unless you subscribe five bucks gets you in the door $50 discounted for the full year and you will find a link there to Victor's uh forthcoming book which Victor, I can never remember the title of it.

You're going to be the end of everything.

Okay.

I'm sorry, my friend.

It's out in May.

I'll get more clarity as we get closer.

Okay.

Now,

the subject at hand is a professor, a former, Jack, get your notes together, Maurizio Karchmer, who is a computer science professor at MIT, and he is Jewish.

And he never really, didn't really care about politics.

He was, I guess, a computer geek, right?

And then October 7th happens, and he is shocked.

And not only by what happened that day, but by the school's putting out a statement, but its inability to say like that what happened is brutal murder.

And then the DEI officer at the school puts out something,

a message which is titled, now I'm looking at his piece he wrote about his story for the free press.

A time for community support of each other.

That's how the DEI office of MIT initially responds.

And then the next day,

as he writes, I'm not going to read this out loud, but the kids on campus start with the

gleeful chanting of the

Free Palestine and from the river to the sea.

And then a few days later, MIT's teachers start

posting, tweeting, or I should say X-ing

statements

attacking Israel.

A faculty newspaper comes out thanking the protesting students.

There's an editorial, this I'll read, called Standing Together Against Hate from the River to the Sea, from Gaza to MIT.

So he's like, what the OTF?

This is MIT.

I'm out of here.

Very

go ahead, Victor.

Well, there's two things here.

First is people are waking up to DI.

That was because of October 7th.

Because remember, the IDF did not reply to that murderous genocidal raid until October 20th.

So we had a good look for 13 days at the domestic scene, and we discovered something.

On news, that 2,000 to 3,000 gunmen had gone in and tortured and raped and dismembered, committed acts of necrophilia.

They tortured people as they rape.

It was horrible.

And yet we had people on our campus that said that they were exhilarated as the Cornell professor.

We had people who were taking pinatas at UCLA and said, beat the effing Jew.

It was not any,

it was like it was liberating for them.

So suddenly they didn't have to say, oh,

I'm anti-Zionist.

I'm not anti-Semitic.

They just said, I'm anti-Jewish.

What do you want to do about it?

They were open in their hatred and their bigotry.

And that was deeply embedded with the DEI people.

And then people got angry.

And they looked at the university, they looked at the curriculum, they looked at what was offered,

and they said, we don't want to pay for this.

And the university said, well, we're private.

And he said, no, you're not.

You're not paying income tax on your endowment.

You're getting millions of dollars in federal grants for research.

You're getting a whole $2 trillion subsidized student program that feeds university students into your higher than the rate of inflation inflation tuition each year.

So it was a whole, it's a whole learning experience.

And what we learned wasn't very good.

And out of that, people are pushing back.

And they know it.

Claudine Gay would not have been fired before October 7th.

They wouldn't even, you wouldn't have even dared look at her.

Everybody knew at Stanford she'd only written four articles.

She was not qualified.

Everybody knew that she fit the DEI paradigm.

And I'm not saying, everybody, that she was a black woman only.

The DEI paradigm is that you have to be a marginalized person in more than one category, but you have to be branded by the white liberal elite as acceptable, which means you have to have an IV league or a comparable degree behind your name and you have to have some kind of upper, upper, upper bicostal cachet.

that's what they want

and everybody looked at it and they said you know what

i'm sorry she's a plagiarist she's going to have to go and harvard said you're a racist we're going to sue the new york post you know whistleblower you can't be anonymous it was just duplicative language it's just a little copy and they said oh come on you're just disgracing yourself and they fold it And then all of a sudden, Chris Ruffo

was not crazy.

And all of a sudden, everybody starts looking at these people and they say,

we don't want

the Memorial Cemetery in Los Angeles on Wilshire.

We don't want to deface.

These people fought in three wars.

They're dead.

Why would you spray graffiti on the monuments?

Why would you shut down

the Golden Gate Bridge when people have emergency vehicles on it?

Why would you do that with the Manhattan Bridge?

Why would you deface the Lincoln Memorial?

What's wrong with you people?

And they started to feel that.

And now

you can see that they're fighting back.

So Stanford has, where I work, the professor who separated Jewish students.

Remember him, Jack?

He said, you Jewish students, you get over there.

Leave your packs there.

We're going to make you see what apartheid's like.

And they relieved him.

He was the mentor.

Didn't have a PhD.

He was just a...

graduate student from Berkeley who was Colin Kaepernick's mentor.

Well, now there's a big petition to bring him back.

The students are trying to bring him back.

He's a popular guy.

They like him because he went after Jews, apparently.

That created a whole fan base.

And yet he hasn't come back.

And we saw this with Judge Duncan right on the eve of all this at Stanford, where they shouted down.

So they have overreached.

That's what happens in American politics.

You're kind of, if you overreach and you show your underbelly, people will kick it.

And they're angry at this DI because it is racist.

And all the word sophistry and all of the excuses, circumlocutions,

you can't hide it.

You are giving racial preferences to people based on their superficial appearance.

And you can't even adjudicate the rules of your own.

You don't know who is black or brown or not or quarter or six.

You are embracing the racial categorization of the old Confederacy, the one-drop rule, the 116th rule, all of that crap.

You are bringing us back to segregated housing.

You are having segregated workshops, segregated graduation.

So it's a bankrupt concept.

And I think it's going to, and then when you get the Supreme Court ruling that ruled against it, and now you have an election coming up, and it's hurting the left.

So I think that there's

people are saying, you know what?

We got to do something with the Oscars.

It's a mess.

And then Disney, what happened to Disney?

All of a sudden,

we're losing billions of dollars, but light, dude, we don't want to be like that.

And all of a sudden, the army is saying, oh my God, we don't have enough soldiers.

We better have some new commercials.

So people are starting to push back and they're finding out they're powerful.

They're not weak and they're not doormats as if the DEI thought they are.

And everybody wants to continue.

She should use the words that are accurate, not euphemistic.

You should say to the DEI people, you are racist.

And we are 65 years past

the civil rights movement.

And

we are in a society where, if you think about it, Jack,

there's 16 ethnic groups that make higher per capita income than so-called white Europeans, whether they're from India or whether from Middle East or Asian, they're making more money.

And then in addition to that, and I just looked at this before I came on,

if you look in terms of suicide rates over the last 20 years, there's one demographic that's committing suicide at much higher rates than African Americans and Latinos, and that is the white, poor, male working class.

If you look at drug overdoses, they have now in the last 15 years, they have the highest rate of overdoses.

If you look at decreased rate of life expectancy,

they have really fallen.

So a white male on average will live less than a Latino male, somewhat more than a black, but the rate of decline is the sharpest.

So to say that that rubric is somehow privileged is crazy.

It's just absolutely insane.

And then to have all of these people come out of the woodwork and say that they are DEI victims when they're like clouding gay, when she says she's afraid to be on campus after the, doesn't feel safe after George Floyd.

Go down to East Palestine and see how safe you can be when they have a toxic fume.

Or be a Jewish student at Harvard, but

you don't even have to be a student, be a Jewish person.

Yeah.

And go to the San Francisco City Council meeting and have people yell and scream at you like it happened yesterday.

And it's just that is the biggest, that's a very good point because that is the biggest thing that has shown how

biased, racist, illiberal this whole DEI thing was from the very beginning.

It's a backward pre-civilizational tribal hatred.

And when they went after Jewish people and they got away with it, and they and

we've run this a long time.

Remember the knockout game, Jack, in New York?

Yeah.

Go after traditional Orthodox Jews.

Nobody did it.

Sucker punch them.

Yeah.

So you have 2.5%

of the population are Jewish, and they have 60%, 55 to 60% of hate crimes.

And guess who is overrepresented in hate crimes?

Is it these white males that are deplorable?

No, no, no, no, no.

It's African Americans who are twice as likely.

And when you go into the specifics of age and gender, African males between 15 and 40, they account for way over their proportion of the demographic, the DEI constituency.

So everything about this DEI is not being spoken about.

And

if you said that DEI represents, is trying to undo systematic racism, then you would have to prove certain things.

We've never had a black president.

We've never had a black vice president.

We've never had black Supreme Court judges.

All of our sports, the really lucrative sports,

blacks are underrepresented like they were in the 1940s and 50s.

It's just not true.

It's not true.

Blacks are killing themselves at higher rates than whites because in despair.

No, it's not true.

Blacks are being sent over as cannon fodder to Iraq to die.

It's not true.

And so, yes, there is racism.

There is racism among all the groups and there's disparities.

But this DEI mantra that all marginalized intersectional people are victims of this white, white, white, white, white, white.

I don't think it's going to work anymore.

I don't think those crazy people, the women on the view, that's all they talk about is white, white, white.

White privilege, white privilege, white rage, white.

And they don't understand that if you just substitute any other group, you would be considered a racist if you just said that.

And I think people are going to, I got to the point where they're going to say, you know what?

There are about 260 people who, 60 million people in the census who identify as white.

And you're trying to tell me that they're all the same, the same religion, same class, same politics?

No, they're not.

So you have no business stereotyping them all as some kind of pathological class.

And then the logic doesn't make sense.

White people dominated the United States.

It was 92% white until 1960.

And look what...

And you think, well, that, okay.

Why would you want to come to a country like that?

And

was it so terrible that those people that won world war ii and got out of the depression and bequeathed it what did they do wrong and who will be judged in this generation

i don't know i think they built railroads better than the high-speed rail

i do

yeah yeah oh my gosh if it ever gets finished by the way out your way i think that you know jfk was a better president and so was harry truman than joe biden barack obama

speaking of Democratic presidents.

Speaking of one of them, by the way, Victor, and we should talk about

one of America's actual founders, William Penn, but the current Democrat president, this came up while we were recording.

It just popped up on my phone.

Joe Biden visited a school today, and he had another kid-sniffing incident.

where he goes up to a little, well, little girl.

It's a middle school, so it's not like a four-year-old girl, but I guess a teen, early teens,

and says, oh, you look with the whole lean over, lean into, creepy whisper, you look just like my, my daughter, something like that.

When was this?

This was today.

I guess I'm exasperated because we had just gone on on our last podcast, Jack, about this.

Biden family that it was fixated, you know, Hunter was fixated

on courting scandal and disasters and he couldn't stop.

Don't you think people have told Joe Biden, you were on a tarmac, is it in Finland, and you turkey gobble that poor girl's neck.

And then you, that people come to the White House and you get, you, you grab their shoulders and you try to sniff them.

And you had that woman in Las Vegas, remember during the campaign that asked for an apology that he was doing that to her?

And he does that.

Don't you think they could keep women away from him?

Well, not when you're a kid in the classroom and Uncle Joe comes up to you and you've got nowhere to run to.

So

it's really sick.

It really is sick.

If you were a teacher,

I've been a professor and academic for 42 years.

If I went into a classroom and I put my hands and gave a little back rub, you know,

In fact, I won't even say that because I had a colleague, I won't mention his name, he's a very good person.

And he was a a Spanish instructor.

And he gave a student, I shouldn't say student, an adult student

that was probably within 10, 8 years of his range, probably in her 30s or 40s.

He gave her a little back rub, right?

As she was in class, he walked by and kind of massaged her shoulder.

How are you?

It's good to see you.

Yeah.

We put him on leave, and he was ineligible for any sabbatical or any extra thing.

Oh, gosh.

And just for that, one time.

And

my gosh, what would you do with Joe Biden if he was a professor?

We were talking about that.

He was a professor.

Don't forget, Victor, he was a constitutional law professor.

Don't sell him short.

He never had a class.

He never taught a class.

Well, what is so strange, though, because Sammy and I were saying the other day,

It was a good point, I think, that

if you were all you guys out there that drive trucks, could you put Joe behind the wheel

how about all you guys in the pharmacy that makes prescriptions and you know compo you know compound could you trust him or would he be like the pharmacist remember and stick out to full life yes

would any of you policemen like to have him in a partner and patrol oh how about you generals would you like to sit with him at the joint chiefs and have him make a decision about what we should do with the chinese balloon or afghanistan so but point is would you like to have him as an airline pilot?

Or a lifeguard?

How about a CEO?

Yeah.

How about, I don't know, Bill Ackman, is that his name?

Would Bill Ackman like him to be on his firm and make strategic decisions?

But I guess the president is the only job in a country where there's no qualifications needed.

It's easy to do.

Anybody can do it because you wouldn't turn him loose anywhere else.

He couldn't run a 7-Eleven.

And a 7-Eleven is hard to run.

I have, you know, I see people every day out here driving tractor.

I don't think he could drive a tractor.

But he said he's a good person.

He says he can be president.

He can be president.

Yeah.

All right.

Hey, Victor, William Penn.

Let's talk about him for a minute.

Get your thoughts on this bizarre controversy.

Now, of all the founders, the one that I think even the DEI folks, Abraham Kendi or Abraham Kendi or the 1619 lady

Jones, wouldn't

William attack William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, who was renowned for his

tolerance, religious tolerance, his

affection towards

the Indians.

And so he's states named after him.

There's a statue of him in a national park, federal park.

And all of a sudden, no

rhyme or reason, well, there is a rhyme or reason, that statue and I believe it was a replica of his original home were going to be taken from the park, removed, disappeared, to use the new word.

And

the park service was going to create some sort of Indian-related, Native American-related

displays.

And then finally, people like, what the hell is happening here?

William Penn, you want to hang on?

He didn't own slaves, any of this.

So there was immediate pushback when the news of this came out.

And the National Park Service

relented.

Oh, it wasn't fully, it hadn't been fully vetted yet, or some BS like that.

It would be lovely to know, Victor, who actually made these decisions.

And that's one of the problems I think we have on the right when it comes to some journalism, putting names and faces to the culprits behind this.

Because people don't,

they operate behind the shadows, and then they don't, when any pushback, they blame other people.

But

it also brings up this other asymmetrical argument, and that is the people who are doing this, what is the message, maybe the subtext or the overt message.

It is something I think like this.

Maybe people listening can correct me.

It is,

he is a white male from, I think he died, I don't know, 1720, 1810, 1710 or something, but he was a man of the 17th century.

And we are morally superior to him.

So, and he was a white male.

So we're going to go back and we're going to apply our superior standards to him and we're going to judge him wanting.

And therefore, we're going to end all commemoration of him and the present because he doesn't meet our present standards.

But what is left unsaid in this paradigm of the DEI people, the woke, is

And we have an asterisk.

And that asterisk is, you are not able to go back

in the past and apply our standards to intersectional marginalized people.

For example,

you can't talk about the 30 to 40,000 humans that were sacrificed at Tenochland

at the Templo Mayor.

and the hearts that were ripped out and the cannibalism that occurred.

You can't talk about that.

You can't talk about why the Tlaxcalans wanted to join the Spanish to destroy their Nahutu brothers, the Aztecs, because they didn't want to be harvested every year and have their hearts torn out in the Great Pyramid.

You can't talk about what the Zulus did and the genocide that Chaka Zulu committed.

Can't do it.

No, no, no, no, no.

You can't talk about what the Lakota Sioux did when they created their empire and appropriated, or I could call them settlers, settled other people's land.

You can't talk about what the Ottomans did

in a series of wars in Eastern Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Can't talk about it.

And number two is,

since you are condemning people on the basis of you cannot talk about other groups collectively.

We did that in the racist period in the South.

That's what they're saying.

Now we're allowed to do it.

against other people, but you can't do it against us.

So you cannot talk about

what is the rate of illegitimacy, What is the rate of assault, felony per capita?

What is the rate of rape per capita?

What is this?

What is that?

What is the rate of high school dropout?

All of those.

Can't do it.

No, no, no.

And I think people are going to say, you know what?

Those were your rules and we never ratified them.

And now you've taught us a new credo, and that is that

you think that you're going to group people by their superficial appearance and then you can make sweeping judgments about the past so i guess we have to too so we're going to look back and maybe we're going to take down a statue of some indigenous leader who led a whole party that killed and butchered innocents or maybe we're going to look back at some type of riot where they destroyed all of this and that.

Or we're going to look at what the Zulus did and the Aztecs did and the Ottomans did and Tamerlane did and Timor did and what Mao did.

We're going to look at all of those things.

And then we're going to look in the present too.

And somebody's responsible for Detroit that hasn't, it's had an African-American mayor until recently.

Somebody's responsible for what has happened in San Francisco.

And we can say it's ideological there, but maybe we're just going to lump together all these people.

And do we really want to do that?

And I think people are getting angry at the point of doing that.

And they say, if you're going to stereotype people by their superficial appearance and always in a pejorative manner and go erase the great past of this country based on someone's race without any knowledge who William Pyn, the guy didn't, he died honest.

He'd had no money when he died.

He did a lot of great things.

But, you know, if you're going to do that, then you're going to have it done to you.

And it's not going to be pretty.

Do we want to cancel all these great people?

You want to say, we can't have Martin Luther King.

He was a serial pledger.

He plagiarized his thesis.

And he was an inveterate womanizer.

And even had he allegedly assaulted women.

Does that make him a bad man?

Do we just look at his weaknesses, his foibles, and not his greatness?

Because that's what you guys do.

on the DEI woke side.

So I don't know if we really want to do that or not.

But that's what they're pushing the country into, a racially class, ideologically polarized society.

That's what leftists do.

They always do that.

You'll create tensions and trauma and crises and then to step in and seize power.

And it's got to stop.

You got to stop.

You got to stop.

Yeah.

Interesting.

You mentioned his name before, by the way, Bill Ackman.

And,

you know, it's...

It's interesting to see this guy.

I didn't know who the heck he was until all this broke out about Harvard.

And my initial thoughts about, who cares about my thoughts, but I'll share them anyway, about him and other donors to these institutions was, okay, I'm glad you're pissed off and stopping, but didn't you know what the hell was happening while you were giving millions to these institutions?

Nevertheless, he really seems to be emerging kind of like along with Elon Musk and who would have thought that a few years ago, as leaders in this cultural pushback, I'm curious, have you followed, he writes some monstrous.

I read it.

He wrote a very, I think it was 4,000 words.

Any thoughts about him?

Well, I had a couple of people.

I had a person who has a small biotech, I won't mention any names, wrote

and said, basically, Victor, you got to be very careful.

These people don't know who they're dealing with because of all the buccaneers on Wall Street that go after companies or they don't they're they mean business he's one then I had another person write and said he's a he's a very brilliant guy

but he's a winner he doesn't stop at anything until he wins and he's very capable so I guess what I'm saying is that all of these academics are not let me be blunt jack sure academia does not attract the top brains in the country

you don't get great novelists that are professors You don't get great poets.

You don't get great musicians.

You don't get great inventors.

You know, you look at Edison or Alexander Graham Bell or you look at Conrad or you look at Shakespeare.

They don't come out of the universities.

But they think they do.

They act as if they do.

So when they say that they're going to get Bill Ackman or they're going to be angry because he had enough, I don't think they understand who they're screwing around with.

I do do think that he's going to get some brilliant researchers and go through the entire MIT faculty with all sorts of word programs to see if they've plagiarized, just like they did to his wife, I guess.

And I think they're going to, he's going to organize a lot of people.

They've already lost over a billion dollars.

Yeah.

And I think they're going to continue to do that.

And I think it's going to be contagious.

And I think a lot of people are going to do that.

So I don't think they didn't have to do that.

All he said was, can't you show some deference to Jewish students?

Why do you have to demonize them after October 7th?

All the Harvard Corporation had to do was say, what do you suggest we do as a prominent donor?

And all he was going to do was send some recommendations, and then Claudine Gay would meet with him and other people who were concerned about anti-Semitism.

And she could have come out.

But you know what?

The weird thing is she hasn't done anything.

Before she quit, those students that were, did you see that former Stanford Daily editor that pushed that guy at Harvard?

He's the head of the Harvard Law Review, pushed him

and physically assaulted him.

Right.

People, they haven't done anything to those people.

They haven't done anything.

They haven't expelled anybody.

And

believe me, they would have expelled them had they done that to other groups.

Dang, they would have.

Yeah.

So it's,

I don't know.

I think that I kind of admire people like Ackman and Elon Musk because these are the people who do stuff.

You know what I mean?

They make changes.

They're fearless.

They're very bright.

And

you have to make allowances for them.

You need people like that in your society.

History is not made is what I'm trying to say by people like me that are professors, academics, bureaucrats.

They're not.

They're not.

They're essential in some ways to education and the

conduct of the government and all that.

But if you really want new products or new methodologies of efficiency or new inventions, then you go out into the free market and you see people that

are just, I use that word, buccaneers.

They fight with each other for ideas, for status, for reputations.

It's a Nietzschean-like

rivalry, the arena.

They get in the arena is what I'm saying.

Right.

And the same thing.

The military, the military,

every once in a while, they attract some absolutely brilliant William Decumpus Sherman, Ulysses S.

Grant, George Thomas,

George Patton, et cetera, Matthew Ridgway.

And so we've got to make a, we've got to acknowledge that, but the mediocrity that we saw at the universities with these three college presidents and then what's happened since with all these timid college presidents.

Right.

I guess their attitude is, oh my God, I kissed ass so long.

I was the assistant dean, then I had to move over and become the associate provost.

And then I did this, and I finally made it.

I make $900,000.

I'm not going to say something that's going to endanger this.

Right.

They need, we need, you know, we need two people to run Harvard.

That's I Hayaukawa and John Silber.

Right.

Oh, wow.

I was interviewing a candidate once from BU,

and I was a hiring, a chairman of a hiring committee, and he said that

he said, well, I got to get out.

I had to get out of BU.

And I said, why?

I thought John Silber really made it a different type of place.

And he said that his advisor had said this to him.

He went in to complain to somebody about

John Silber, to complain about a colleague, right?

Right.

And then John, and usually you just, you know, how college president, very interesting.

And as he was talking, John Silver picked up the phone and called the other guy.

Look, I got a guy here in my office, and he said, you have been unprofessional.

Now, you get your ass down here, and you two sit here, and you're going to tell me 10 minutes, and then the other guy is going to tell me 10 minutes, and we're going to solve the SOB right now.

Come on.

I thought, well, what kind of college president would do that?

He ran for governor and it blew up because he was so caustic about commenting about some reporter and he was on the cusp of being the governor of he got very close to winning.

Yeah, Billy Bulger was

his

guru at the time.

All right.

Well, anyway, Victor, we have one more thing to discuss, and it's still, it's also in the academic realm, and we'll get to that right after this final important message.

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ctmobile.com slash ISP for details and exclusions.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show, and I have to read a little ad here, Victor, but it's kind of appropriate.

I'd like to take a minute to welcome back our sponsor, Hillsdale College.

You know, dear listener, that Victor is one of the professors in three of the over 40 free online courses at Hillsdale College.

That is correct.

The first course, course, American Citizenship and Its Decline, is based on Victor's book, The Dying Citizen.

Then there's the second course, which is The Second World Wars, based on Victor's best-selling book by the same name.

And the third course is Athens and Sparta.

I say that with a Bronx accent, Sparta,

which is partly based on Victor's book, A War Like No Other, How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Yes, I did that with Paul Ray.

He's written a monumental seven volumes of history.

Oh, yeah.

And we did that together.

He did

Athens and I did Sparta, as I remember.

Well, no, excuse me.

I did Athens and he did Sparta.

Same thing.

These courses, I'm sorry for Hillsdale.

These courses are seven to nine episodes long and they are self-paced, so you can take them whenever and wherever.

Go right now or go after this podcast.

And to hillsdale.edu slash VEDH to start.

It's free and it's easy to get started.

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We thank Hillsdale for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

And speaking of Hillsdale, Victor, here's a New York Times magazine hit piece from January 8th.

It's by reporter Danny Hacken.

This piece must be 4,000, 5,000, 6,000 words.

It's a big

New York Times magazine expose, I guess.

How Hillsdale got mixed up in the 2020 election plot.

The subhead, the Conservative College has become quietly involved in many political fights, including Trump's attempt to overturn his defeat.

This article is an attempt to kick Hillsdale in the Guilleons and to kind of leave Larry Arn, your friend,

the president, who's turned Hillsdale into quite a successful institution, to leave him

bloodied and bowed.

Victor, your thoughts about this.

Yeah, I did read it, and it was sort of preconceived by that.

I mean, it was deductive.

They had the principle that they were going to say that the legal counsel, whom I know at Hillsdale, was an election denialist.

And therefore, he drew on his contacts at Hillsdale who were election denialist.

And therefore, the whole principle of Hillsdale is flawed or it's a toxic place.

But they couldn't find very many.

I think they found like, I don't know, a very tiny little group that said that it was too political.

But it's the thing about Hillsdale, it doesn't take any federal money.

I wish Harvard would do that.

And then Harvard could say, I don't want your money.

federal government.

Don't give us the grants.

Don't give us the,

it doesn't.

And so it's free.

And there's a lot of dissension as far as different views go.

I've met students of all different political arguments, they tend to be center-right,

but my gosh, they'll come up to you and give you the libertarian or the neoconservative or the evangelical

argument.

So it's a very richly diverse in the proper sense of the word.

And then, you know, the historian Suetonius has a great line.

I just thought of it in

his life of Augustus.

He wrote something called the Twelve Caesars, starting with Julius Caesar and then

going

down through to

Julius Caesar and then Augustus, of course, and Tiberius and

Claudius, Caligula, and Nero, a whole bit, and then we get into Vespasian.

Okay.

And when he sums up Augustus, he said

he inherited a city of mud brick and he left it marble.

And I said this publicly, and a guy got very angry about, I said this about Larry Arndt, a former official there.

So he didn't do that.

But I had gone to Hillsdale in the 90s to give a lecture and it was a very wonderful place then.

It was under George Roach and it was, they didn't take federal money, but they didn't have a lot of exposure.

They didn't have a lot of capital.

And

it was, it's a rough climate there and it's isolated and they didn't have a lot of beautiful buildings.

But my gosh,

when Larry Arndt got there, I think it was 1999,

and he's going to, if he, I think he's planning to stay four more years, he would be the longest-serving Hillsdale president, Jack.

I couldn't believe what I watched over 21 years.

I went there for a month for 21 years during my vacation and taught at the

I didn't have to be at Hoover till late September, and I went there in late August and taught.

And

he raised a billion dollars, and the buildings are beautiful.

The student union is beautiful.

The church is beautiful.

Everything is beautiful.

And the faculty are paid commiserately as well as anywhere, even though it's very cheap to live in Hillsdale.

And the admissions, it has one of the highest rate of acceptances.

So if you get an offer to Hillsdale, almost 80% of the people take it.

And yet with this woke now,

so many thousands are applying there.

That's a kind of a

they have a problem of plenitude.

They have so many students that they have to reflect that their mission statement of smaller government and freedom and liberty.

And a lot of these kids that didn't get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford, they look at it and they say, wow, it's safe.

And they allow you to have free speech and you can associate or do what you want, but it's very rigorous and it really focuses on academics.

I want to go there.

But, you know, I'm left-wing.

So I think Hillsdale's, that's their only challenge as I see it.

They have to be careful to preserve the flavor.

You don't want to have an ideological litmus test, but you would like to have people that reflect the traditions of the college.

And then the people who graduate,

you just meet them all the time.

They tend to be better spoken.

They are more analytical.

They write well.

Their personal conduct is above reproach.

They're taught ethics.

I can attest that I employed many Hillsdale graduates at National Review.

I think one time we had five.

And

just aces, every single one of them in every way as a human being, intellect.

They're a wonderful place and why the country and Biden and why these

The state of Michigan goes after them, the government goes out, why they wouldn't want to be proud of them and have more of them.

And

so

I read that thing and I thought, wow, you don't even have the distance from what you're writing about just to say, okay,

you think they're too right wing and you think that there were spin-offs from the campus that got involved in trying to question a purely legitimate election that shouldn't have had any questions about the outcome.

Okay.

But even if you believed all that, don't you look at the campus?

Don't you look at the quality of the student?

Don't you look at where they end up?

I mean,

let's face it, we're going to be in a big revolution now because under DEI and WOC,

forget the Supreme Court, they'll find a way around the Supreme Court ruling borrowing affirmative action.

They always do.

But they are letting people in that don't have SAT scores.

And their GPAs are not comparatively ranked, and they're using DEI statements primarily, and they're not going to be able to offer the coursework and the grading systems that they did in the past, which they said was a critical to maintain their competitiveness.

But Hillsdale is.

So is Pepperdine, so is St.

Thomas Aquinas, so is a lot of schools.

But the difference is, I think we're going to see, Jack, is what I'm getting at.

I wish the reporter in question would write an article about in five years, Hillsdale

is the old Harvard and the old Stanford and the old, it's going to get like that because it's got to right well if if if if the school name is a brand

uh

it matters hillsdales

maybe it wasn't 30 years ago but it is a brand now and it and it and it has meaning it has quality and character it has quality and the other schools

they don't have quality they don't and there it was an attack on uh

Larry Arndt, but I can tell you, I've known him for 30 years.

He's center-right, but if he had been in that,

if he had been in the seat where Claudian Gay is and some tough left-wing

people said, do you allow anti-Semitism on campus?

And do you allow people to push Jews and things like that?

He would have said, no, we don't.

And if that occurs, I will ensure that I can stop it.

And he would say that.

And he would say that about black students or latinos too

and yet he's considered conservative and an object of vituperation from the new york times and they whitewash claudine gay that permits her campus to be turned into an anti-semitic rallying crowd right it's uh

i don't know it i didn't like the article at all i expected it i've never seen anybody from the mainstream media speak highly of hillsdale just because the one thing the left cannot stand are people who are conservative.

The right said, Yeah, live and let live.

You go do your thing, we'll do our thing.

We don't need you, you don't need us, we don't need your stinking badges,

to quote the guy in the treasure of Sierra Madre.

Just, we're not going to do it, we're not going to play your game, we're just going to, in this little place, we're going to do what we think we're going to do.

And you do what you do, and may the best college win.

And now it's being pretty, it's pretty clear that Hillsdale's on the ascendance.

It's being copied by a lot of schools.

It's got a vast

Hillsdale Academy paradigm for K through 12.

And it's pretty clear that Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princetons are in descendance.

And that's what prompted the article.

It's like, oh, wait a minute.

This is Hillsdale.

We're still Harvard.

We're still Yale.

No, you're not anymore.

You're not anymore.

None of the students today that are first-year students at Stanford or Harvard or Yale could do the work at those universities 15 years ago.

Well, Victor, we've come to the conclusion of this other wisdom fest by you, and we'll thank our listeners for listening, which is what you do when you listen.

No matter what platform you do this on, those who do listen to the Victor Davis-Hanson show on Apple, iTunes can also rate the show zero to five stars.

Many do.

It's an average of 4.9 plus.

we thank those who take the time to do that and then on top of that those who take the time to write and leave comments we do read them all and here's one it's titled academic support in appreciation of vdh supporting rigorous academic standards that are systematically being corrupted you are applauded for your continued support for research to be able to present various themes for inquiry without political suppression.

It was extremely upsetting to follow the data destruction of various scientists such as Dr.

Atlas by ignorant politicians.

Unfortunately, aviation is also experiencing quality standard degradation.

Thanks from a Super Sabre pilot for remembering us.

Sammy and I talked about that, Jack.

We really did on

the avionics and what's happened to

the dangers that DI will will pose to pilot performance if people are selected for pilot training or air traffic control work on the basis of their superficial appearance and not their past merocratic record.

I'm going to take a car out to California, Victor.

Anyway, you've been terrific.

Thanks, Victor.

Thanks for watching.

Hey, everybody.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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