Gaza War and Gay Resignation

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

We would like to welcome not just Americans, but we do welcome Americans, but also friends of the civilized and civilization, because ultimately what we seem to talk about here are things that look at the fraying of civilization in our cultures across the world.

So

today we have

Claudine Gay, Dr.

Claudine Gay,

up

first on deck, and then we will turn to the war with Hamas.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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

He's the author of 27 books and has a new one coming out, The End of Everything.

Is that what it's called, Victor?

Yes, it is.

Yeah, the end of everything, about the complete demise or instances in history where there is a complete demise of a civilization for one reason or the other.

For one reason, war.

Oh, for one reason, period.

Okay.

Yeah, it's not about natural disasters or gradual decline or plagues.

It's when war is aberrant and it detours into total annihilation.

It's not that common in history, but I try to look it for case studies and then get an archetype or a paradigm that might

give us some warning in the present current world about which types of wars or which types of countries might be vulnerable to annihilation.

Yeah.

Well, that might be kind of

current in the sense that the Gaza war,

at least for the Israelis, they can't have that Hamas in existence anymore.

And while I don't imagine it will be the annihilation of Gaza, of course, it will definitely be a strike against a culture in Gaza, hopefully, that will change it for the better for Palestinians and everybody involved.

Israel's made a diagnosis that

Iran very soon will have two to three bombs and is very capable of using them and it doesn't believe that its 70 or 80 bombs or more than that will deter the Iranians, at least the Iranian government.

And that sort of Damocles they're not willing to have over their head, you know, 80 years after the, 75 years after the Holocaust.

and then they feel given that threat, that they have unleashed Hezbollah with rockets on their northern border and Hamas,

on their southern border, eastern border, and the strategy is to make life so tense, so disruptive,

so

threatening that it will destroy Israel's economy or way of life, and that has to end.

And that will end by first destroying Hamas

and then dealing with Hezbollah, and then hopefully at some point dealing with Iran.

But, you know,

that's an existential problem for Israel given the size and distance

and wealth of Iran.

It's not Hamas and it's not Hezbollah.

No.

Well, since we're on the subject, recently

news about that war, we see that one of the heads of Hamas in Beirut has been killed, Sahil al-Aruri, I hope I said his name right,

and

that there's also been a terrorist attack at a funeral in Iran of a general who was killed in this war.

And then finally, and you can talk on any one of these, Mia Sikhim, who was held captive by the Gazans, has come out to talk about her experience as a captive in a family home in Gaza and spending 54 days basically in the dark in a room threatened the whole time.

So I was wondering any of those things on the current war?

Well, we'll start

first with the captive.

She said that she was not raped not because of the reluctance of Hamas, but that to disperse the captives, they outsourced them to individual civilian homes that had, I guess, Hamas affiliates.

And she was kept in a dark room, kind of tormented, not fed, told to shut up.

But the males in the house were living there with their wives and children, therefore, it was hard for them to commit a sexual act with her,

a violent act, when their children and mother were there.

So the idea would be: we're going to embed these within civilian families.

But her point was that didn't stop them from psychological torture.

And

as far as the targeted assassinations,

Israel has a list of 10 to 12 people who planned this, knew about it, had it funded,

and they're going down the list, or maybe they're going up the list.

But they have taken out Iranians now in Damascus.

They've taken out Hamas people in Beirut.

I don't know if

there's a red line with Ghatar because of its wealth and its Western ties, etc., etc., but it hasn't gone after the people in gutter.

That would not be, I think, a drone or kinetic bomb attack, but it would be

more

espionage-like.

But they will eventually get all of them, and they expect to have retaliation against them.

One thing people should realize about Iran, though, is

Iran threatens people every day and kills them.

They blow up people, they've blown up Jewish people in Argentina.

They've tried to kill Saudi diplomatic people in Washington, D.C.

They've threatened people all over the world.

When you get in a lawsuit with Iran, if you're another country or you're lawyers, they are threatened.

So this is not new.

What's new is that people like the Israelis are saying, you crossed a line and now we're going to retaliate.

But the elephant...

that's missing in the room is the United States because they could put an end to it tomorrow.

They did not, they had a hiatus, at least as far as anti-American and anti-Israeli acts, when the Trump administration, especially Secretary of State Pompeo,

made it clear that Solomoni was not going to get a blank check to kill Americans anymore after what he'd done during the Iraq War.

And they took him out.

And then they made it clear that if the Houthis act up, they're going to be dealt with.

And they they behaved, if I could say that.

And Biden came in and he thought, you know, I'm going to lift the terrorist designation off the Houthis and they will interpret my magnanimity as kindness to be reciprocated.

And they said, nope, he's senile, he's weak, he's decadent.

We're just going to go to town.

That's what happened.

And for everybody who feels that

Trump started a war, he didn't.

He didn't.

That was the only time Putin didn't go into a country in the last 10 years.

I should go back all the way the last 15

was when he was president.

People have to remember that Vegetas' warning, if you want peace, prepare for war.

If you have overwhelming deterrence, people will not want to do something stupid.

And they want to do something stupid, even if you have overwhelming military might, but you will not ever use it.

And they feel that after the humiliation in Afghanistan or being tied down

in

Iraq and Afghanistan for years, or the 34 trillion in debt, whatever their calculus is, they feel the United States will not do anything.

And they're right so far.

And that deterrence is going to have to be reachieved.

Yeah.

Well, you know, now that you're talking about it, I was wondering what your thoughts are on,

given that our president probably has a hard time deciding to even brush his own teeth at night or in the morning, What significance do you think it is that he probably most likely is not making decisions right now and that other people are?

And so how important is the President's mental abilities to the continuance of our government?

I think every day Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor,

the Joint Chiefs to some extent, but Anthony Blinken and Jake Sullivan talk to the Obamas and people around them

in the Democratic Party.

And they're not communicating every single moment with Joe Biden.

They can't because he's not able to analyze the situation and offer a solution.

So they're talking to other people on the left.

And that, I think, translates into a lot of the bizarre foreign policy that we've had.

We've had a porous border.

We've had illegal immigration.

We have never, since the 19th century Wild West days had no border.

It does not exist.

They destroyed it.

We're going to have 10 million people cross that border by the time he leaves office in his first term, if he does leave office.

We'll have 20 if he stays in there.

It's the highest number of foreign-born people and both in numbers and percentages, 55 million that we've ever had.

It's chaos.

He doesn't even know what's going on.

And abroad, we've never had a country like Iran have its surrogates attack American installations over 120 times with just anemic responses.

We've never had the Iranians announce that the Eastern Mediterranean will be theirs.

We've never had the Houthis say, you can't stop us from making all the world's shipping go out around the Cape of Good Hope and not through the Red Sea.

We've never had that happen.

Do you think that's because they perceive him as unable to make decisions?

Or,

you know, is that the reason?

They feel that in general the left, whether it's Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama

or

Joe Biden, feel guilty about America's power, its history, its values, that

it's not enough equity in the world, there's not enough diversity in the world, there's not enough inclusion in the world, but we're the bad people.

And they sense that.

And that's why they needle them.

They say, oh, you know, look look at what you did to Iran, Mossadegh, Mossadegh, Mossadegh.

Look at all that.

They go back all of these post-colonial issues.

And they try to poke the United States and say, you're guilty, you're guilty.

You owe us.

You do this.

And bit by bit, piece by piece, they erode deterrence.

And we don't have a president that will say, listen, I don't have to give an account to you.

Not you theocratic thugs.

We are better than the alternative.

And we don't have to be perfect to be good.

We're a hell of a lot better than any other country, and we have nothing to apologize.

And you screw with us again, and our friends, and you try to disrupt the world's commerce, its shipping,

you try to shut down the Red Sea, and that's what you're doing, and you try to destroy Israel, you're going to pay an enormous price.

And then I think they should communicate diplomatically, and they can just say, look,

this is what we're going to do.

We don't want to do it, and we're not going to talk about it ever again.

But if you keep hitting Americans, or if you think you're going to shut down the Red Sea to world shipping, or if you're going to arm Hezbollah to send another thousand rockets into a democratic state like Israel, here's what we're going to do.

The first thing we're going to do is take out all of your military, your bases, your missile, everything.

We have two carriers.

We have 150 planes.

We're just going to do that.

And we're not going to tell you that we did it.

We're not going to tell the world.

We're not going to brag.

If that doesn't get your attention,

then

we're going to take out your grid.

That doesn't get your attention.

We're going to deal with your nuclear deterrent.

Or maybe you should do that first.

And we won't even talk about it.

The worst thing in the world you can do

is to be weak.

and loud.

You can be loud and strong.

That's not good either.

But it's best to be quiet and strong.

But we have the worst of both worlds.

We are weak and we're loud.

And we always, you know, this is intolerable, this is unacceptable,

you know, all these lectures, just like Obama.

If I see WMD, that's a different situation.

That's a red line for me.

No, it never was for you.

Tell Vladimir that if he just gives me some space, I'll be, this is my last election, and I'll be flexible on this little defense if he gives me space.

So all of these things that we do encourage people to do something stupid.

Yeah.

Oh, go ahead.

And you know, war is just the laboratory

result or experiment of miscommunication and ignorance.

So in a rational world, there is Iran.

There is Hezbollah.

There is Israel.

There is Hamas.

There is the United States.

Nobody would ever screw with Israel if you were Hamas or Hezbollah.

Nobody would screw with the United States.

But when you lose deterrence

and people don't understand how much more powerful you are than they are, or how much more powerful Israel is than, then they try to do something.

And then you have a war to what?

To show what is real.

So if you're Hitler and you're Mussolini and you're Japan and you look at your total population, you look at your GDP, you look at your munitions, you look at your technology,

you would be very stupid to start a war that involves the British Empire, the United States, and the Soviet Union all on one side.

But if the Soviet Union is working with Hitler under the Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 and the United States is isolationist and the British are appeasing, then they send a message they either can't or won't do anything.

And then you do something stupid.

You start to attack them.

And then you poke them too long, and then you get annihilated.

The logical trajectory of a war that has to be,

it'll reveal real strength will be something like the March fire raid on Tokyo, or it will be the destruction of Berlin or Dresden, or it will be the end of Mussolini's Italy.

That's what happened.

And so we have to prevent going all that way with all that destruction by telling Iran, you seem to be confused.

We have no animus toward you, but you seem to have animus toward us and the world order and our interest, and you keep pushing.

So we're going to have to remind you that you're weak, but we're not going to brag about it.

We're not going to tell anybody.

We're just going to do it.

And that's what we need to do.

Yeah, that would be sane policy.

You seem to be saying to me that despite Joe Biden's cognitive

dissonance, that

his policies or Barack Obama's policy and position on the world stage was as weak as Joe Biden's and that the cognitive disabilities are not of any significant importance, that it was left-wing policy that is anti- It's a force multiplier.

But during the Obama Hillary Clinton, when she was Secretary of State, he was president, Putin invaded the Donbass.

He invaded,

took over Crimea.

We had North Korea starting to brag about, that was the beginning of we're going to nuke your West Coast stuff that they passed on to Trump.

And we started to have this red line, and we invited the, what?

We invited the Russians in after 45 years hiatus.

That was John Kerry.

Come in here and help us with WMD.

Oh, Putin.

Okay, if you want me to.

I'll be happy to.

I'll be happy to take over Syria and the airspace surrounding Israel.

That'll be great.

And then we decided, we're going to destroy Libya because of the Arab Spring.

There's this Islamicist and that Islamicist and that terrorist, and then there's that crooked Qaddafi, and it's a mess.

But you know what?

This guy thinks he's going to have democracy, so we're just going to drop a bunch of bombs and they're all going to go into

something like Philadelphia, you know, 1776 and declare a republic.

And then they're going to have a constitutional convention.

That's what we'll do.

Oh, it didn't work.

Let's just get out.

And that's what they did.

I'm not saying that the Bush administration going into Iraq and Afghanistan for 20 years was that much better, but at least they had a plan, or at least they did something.

At least it was clear they were trying to advance, they thought, American interest.

I don't think these people in the Biden administration think like that.

They don't sit down and say, what is in the interest of the United States and its allies and what they believe in?

I really don't.

They think like they do on a campus.

How can we be inclusive?

How can we listen to the voices of dissent in Iran?

How can we

take seriously and really try to understand why Hamas hates us?

What is Hezbollah hostile about?

There must be a reason why they're hostile to us.

Let's think about it.

How did we alienate China?

We used to be friends.

We must have done it.

China's China.

So they always start with the

first principle that we are culpable.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk about Dr.

Claudine Gay.

Stay with us.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Welcome back.

So

I said at the beginning that we're always on about the civilized and civilization and that it frays at places and in pockets that you wouldn't expect.

And so this one pocket is obviously Harvard University.

She recently resigned and I would like to just make two points that she makes in her resignation letter and then you can go ahead and talk a little bit.

She says that her presidency will be remembered

as, quote, a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity.

And the second interesting thing she said in her letter was that her presidency heralded to the world that Harvard, quote, welcomes people of talent and promise.

And that was her resignation letter after being caught for so much plagiarism.

I was wondering your thoughts on her resignation.

There's two issues here.

There's her as president, and then there's the Harvard Corporation and the fellows, the board members that hired her,

that stood by her,

and finally under pressure asked her to resign.

So let's start with her.

So she wrote a resignation letter, and it was interesting for what, first of all, she has a record of plagiarism.

So the first thing I thought was, did she really, is this all her original ideas?

Or did she take cut and paste?

But that's another question.

But did she say

I

violated the oath of my office or I violated the creed of my discipline by appropriating ideas, text

that were not mine?

No, she didn't say that.

I

am in this position because

I was not forthright under oath to Congress when I said

I

would decide whether whether to punish behavior or speech calling for the genocide

of the Jewish people and the destruction of Israel as hate speech, maybe, but I have to context that.

That wasn't accurate because in the past, I have expelled disciplined, sanctioned faculty, staff, and students who engaged in what I call hate speech, even though we have the First Amendment on Canvas.

But I didn't apply that standard to one group and one group only.

Maybe two, white males and Jewish white males.

So she didn't say that.

And she didn't say the following.

I

feel that on campus I did not evaluate people.

I did not treat people

on the basis of their ideas or their character or their academic research.

I acted in ideological fashion.

So if if people oppose me,

then I went after them.

If

Professor Sullivan wanted to, in his private life, defend Harvey Weinstein, I went after him.

If Professor Roland Fryer

found that there were good evidence, according to his research, that the police did not engage in systematic attacks or harassment or shootings of blacks, I found a way to attack it.

And I'm sorry for that.

And then she should have said, and I also am sorry that I didn't tell the truth.

I didn't tell the truth, at least in four major areas.

Number one,

I said that I always adhered to the highest standards of scholarship.

But in fact,

I have been a serial, systematic, and characteristic plagiarist.

I have plagiarized my own dissertation.

I cut and pasted

speech, wording, wording, prose that wasn't mine.

I use data that

I can't support.

I can't show you where you can get the data that I cited or I used.

I don't want to talk about it, but I did something wrong there.

I'm sorry about that.

I also only have 11 articles.

I understand that if you only have 11 articles, you're not going to be president of Harvard, especially if those 11 articles that I now admit have somewhere between 30 and

50 instances of plagiarism.

And I'm sorry for that.

And I'm sorry about the way that we termed plagiarism.

And I'm sorry the way the Harvard Board did.

Plagiarism is not duplicative language, as the Harvard Board, with my consent, characterized.

It's not.

It's theft of ideas and of words.

And it's not,

as the Harvard board said in describing my departure, it's not, quote, missteps.

Plagiarism is not a misstep.

I expel people.

I've expelled 40 or 50 students, or at least chastised them for plagiarizing.

It's not that.

And we don't, we at Harvard do not unleash our law firms to go after people.

who make charges that can be substantiated.

So I want to make an apology to the New York Post.

We had a law firm that went after you and threatened legal sanction against you if you pursued investigation of my plagiarism.

And I'm sorry for that.

I'm also sorry

that we erroneously suggested that people whom I plagiarized from,

if they did not object, then it wasn't plagiarism.

So in the latest cases, yes, I took at least six

passages that I did not cite and I just either rewarded them or cut and paste them verbatim from a professor at the University University of Wisconsin.

And the fact that he, either out of intimidation or because of goodwill toward me, said he didn't mind that I stole from him doesn't excuse my theft.

So I'm sorry for all that.

That's what she should have said.

And then the board should have said the following.

We are going to resign en masse.

And we are going to do it for a variety of reasons.

But we have hurt, maybe irrevocably, the Harvard reputation that was built over 400 years.

And how did we do that?

We hired Professor Gay

on the basis of her race.

So when we were looking to hire a new president in the aftermath of George Floyd

disruptions, riots, his death,

and all the condundum that followed, We essentially did not allow white males to be considered seriously.

And that's against the law, and we broke it.

We're sorry about that.

Second,

we did not apply to Professor Gay the standards that we apply to almost everybody else who is not black or female.

And that is, you to be a Harvard professor, a full professor at Harvard, we expect at least 20 or 30 peer-reviewed articles.

They all have to be free of plagiarism, of course.

And we expect three or four books.

We offered her tenure without a single published book, not one, and we're sorry about that.

We applied a standard to her that we do not apply to other people.

When these

charges surfaced, we misled you,

not just by creating euphemistic language of misstep or duplicative language.

or sticking law firms on people, but we said that she had proactively addressed this.

She did not proactively.

She did not go through her corpus of work and find areas that she was uncertain about or that she was

felt that she was culpable for and therefore proactively changed it.

No, she only was reactive.

She only reacted to change her original wording or citations when somebody else made the allegation.

a believable one apparently or it wouldn't have forced her action

to be reactive and change it.

And then finally,

we said in our letter, and we want to apologize in our resignation today,

that

racial climate, a racial climate,

racial vitriol, had led to her resignation.

No, we fired her.

We fired her.

Let's make that clear.

We fired her for a lot of reasons.

We had to.

We didn't want to.

But she's cost us over a billion dollars in donations of of people who do not want to give to us given her behavior and two

we had to fire her because we are either are preeminent or we have a plagiarist at president we can't be both

and so we fired her

that's that's very clear and

and then they could have also said

and we all so want to apologize apologize to the taxpayer, the public, because we, in a very snarky fashion, said these allegations got into the public domain

and they were used by people.

No, you're in the public domain.

You're not a private university as if you think you are, even though you have the word corporation.

You are a public entity, and you're that public entity, to quote, I don't know, maybe Elizabeth Warren, you didn't build that Harvard.

But if you want to be outside of the public realm,

then please pay the IRS

about $2 billion a year on your income from your huge $50 billion endowment.

You pay no income.

You take that from us, the taxpayer.

And then please give back the hundreds of millions of dollars you get in federal research grants.

We didn't ask you to apply for them.

You ask us, the taxpayer, for the money.

And finally, do not use $2 trillion program of guaranteed student loans for your own students.

You have a $50 billion endowment.

You can back your own loans.

And then if you do all of that, then you can be snarky and say that this problem got into the public domain when it shouldn't have.

But we are the public domain because you came to us and asked for breaks and perks and concessions and exemptions.

We the public.

And that's all they had to do.

Yeah.

All they had to do.

Yeah, which they couldn't do.

They can't do.

So they're going to have to.

I guess I said they went from the frying pan into the fire because now what happens?

They have a board that's still there.

Is it Ms.

Prickster?

Mix Prickster?

Pritzer?

I don't know.

She was Obama cabinet secretary.

Transportation, was it?

She's from the billionaire family, the hotel family in Chicago.

Penny.

And she's going to have to resign because

they were dishonest.

They kept saying that

she hadn't plagiarized.

They hadn't plagiarized.

They do everything to say that.

They said that if you don't object that somebody stole from you, it's not plagiarism.

If you take language, it's only

duplicative language.

It's not theft.

It's only a misstep.

That's a complete lie.

And now what do they do when they lie like that?

And they say that she was dismissed because of racial hostility, when she was hired because of racial preference.

What do they do?

They have a professor now of political science in the Harvard Political Science Department who has admitted

or

has not refuted an allegedly almost 50 instances of plagiarism.

Again, systematic serial characteristic of her.

And everybody knows, A, that you're not a full professor of political science at Harvard with 11 articles.

Sorry, you're just not, unless they're world

shattering in the academic world and they weren't.

And two,

you're out if you're a student, if you're a graduate student, if you're a lecturer, if you're a TA, if you're anybody else with three or four allegations, but not somewhere between 25 and 50.

So now they have to do what?

They just have to say this.

We're not going to talk about it.

We're going to sue you.

Don't ever mention Professor Gay's plagiarism again.

We're just going to forget about it.

And we have a new standard.

If you're a black and a woman,

you're not going to be subject to the same rules that apply to others.

So what's going to happen?

Because Harvard is a very competitive place.

And academics are not known for their integrity, to tell you the truth.

So they're going to get some whipper-snapper or assistant professor on the make,

and he's going to be brilliant, and he's going to fudge a little bit.

That's happened, hasn't it?

We've had people,

you know, I mean, think about it.

Who are the plagiarizers that can't say a word?

Can Barack Obama say anything?

He made up the idea that he wrote a true story of his life, Dreams for My Father.

He didn't.

It was completely made up, as David Garrell pointed out.

Joe Biden plagiarized in law school and then he plagiarized Neil Kinnock's speech.

Doris Kearns Goodwin,

Pulsar Prize-winning historian, plagiarized, admittedly plagiarized.

Baring Dowd plagiarized.

Late Stephen Ambrose plagiarized.

Farid Zakaria plagiarized.

And they all at some point were called up.

I mean, if they were on the left end of the spectrum, they were excused, but there was some consequence.

So people do that.

And if you have her in that department plagiarizing in the past, what are you going to tell the next student you catch?

What are you going to tell the next professor?

Well, we've looked at your plagiarized work and we've decided it's only duplicative language.

Or, you know what?

Yeah, you took a whole paragraph here on this page.

You didn't put a footnote in that page.

Your data doesn't really make sense here.

It's a misstep.

So we're just going to keep paying you, forget about it.

I don't think so.

And so they have made it very,

very much worse for them.

And more importantly,

she didn't say one thing about the anti-Semitism.

So

do you think that the radical Palestinian pro-Hamas DEI coalition intersectionality at Harvard is going to say,

hmm.

We better behave.

We better not say, you know, kill the Jews or from the river to the sea, sea, no Israel, or we better not push Jews that we see walking across campus.

We can't do that anymore.

We can't shout down, we can't take over the...

No, I don't think so.

No, things aren't going to change.

Heather McDonald in City Journal wrote an article about that.

She said the title is Why Nothing Will Change at Harvard.

She basically said that they have in their charter that they have a commitment to excellence, inclusivity, and free inquiry and expression.

And she goes, just forget the last one, right?

There is no free inquiry.

And then she says that inclusiveness and excellence are exclusive as the case shows here today.

They should ask themselves why brilliant people at the largest beer Anheuser-Busch company in the United States, or at least it used to be,

saw what was going

with Bud Light.

or this multi-billion dollar conglomerate, Target, or Disney.

And at some point, did anybody say,

if you keep going with these ads that are insulting, if you keep putting cod pieces on children's underwear, if you keep having stars that make fun of the Disney tradition and the nuclear family and heterosexual, if you keep doing that,

there's going to be 75% of the country wants nothing to do with you.

But they don't.

So when Harvard keeps doing this,

and they're rated almost at the bottom of universities on tolerance of

dissent, free speech, by FHIR,

the organization that often calibrates this.

And they have a 17% drop in early admissions.

Those are the best students usually apply for early admissions.

And they've had all, does any, can you think of one news story, left, right, center, I don't know, that said Harvard's a great place the last year?

I can't.

Anything the last month or two that said anything other than it's a disgrace?

So they have destroyed their name and they don't even know it.

That means the Harvard professors in that bubble will write a letter saying, we support, 700 of us support

President Gay.

Pause.

Even though she's a plagiarist and has stole things over 20 times, 25 times, that's okay with us.

Or even though she allows people to push Jews or say that they hate Jews on campus, it's okay with us.

No, no, that

it's not going to be sustainable.

People are going to say, you know what?

Harvard, when I go out to hire people with a Harvard J.D.

or a Harvard PhD or a Harvard BA, I don't think it's competitive.

If the president herself got away with plagiarizing and had a record of about a graduate student's scholarly output,

I just don't think it's a competitive place anymore.

I think it is a commissariat where your ideology certifies you as competent.

They have destroyed meritocracy in all of its forms.

And I'm sure that people will get angry and say, well, Victor, there's great economists.

There's great, yeah, there is.

But there are talls in an island.

I mean, there are islands in a sea of mediocrity.

And

nobody would believe anymore the value of that degree or that.

They know that if you go to Harvard, and you say there is a two-sex biological world, you're going to be shouted down, or if you're a professor, you're going to be in big trouble.

And that's happened.

They know if you go to Harvard and you say, I think the era of affirmative action should be over and we should go back to judging people on the content of their character and not you're done.

If you go back and say,

I think

the world may be heating up, but I'm not sure, A, that it will be catastrophic, and B, that man-made activity since the Industrial Revolution is 100% responsible for it, rather than natural cycles of heating and cooling, and C, I don't know the mechanisms by which we can reduce the planet's temperature by one degree, given the behavior of China and India, where you know you have almost three billion people.

Yeah, or they're big polluters, isn't it?

Yes, and you can't say that.

And they know that.

And so

they can say all they want about free inquiry and free speech, but they know that is true.

If Harvard today said, Victor, would you like to go speak to the classics department?

And I went on that campus, I would have to have security guards.

I would.

And I think that's just, and

almost anybody in the conservative side would.

So

they're not honest.

And today in the Associated Press news accounts of her resignation, they said, conservatives find a new weapon.

Colon,

plagiarism.

I'm sorry, Associated Press.

You can't use a weapon if there's no bullets in it.

You can't just say, I've got a new AR-15 called plagiarism.

There's no bullets unless there is plagiarism.

And it's not new.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's not new.

It's old as

the hills.

As every itty-bitty part of the United States.

Yeah.

And they also like to

call everybody names.

So did you see the article about Bill Ekman?

He's a

long letter.

I read his long letter.

I thought, wow, I read this letter by a so-called greedy capitalist, multi-billion.

It's so much better written,

better analysis, better crafted than any professor that I've read.

He just said, this is why DI is racist.

This is why it's mediocre.

This is why this, this, this.

And he had no.

See, when she said that I was a beacon, or basically people around the world looked at me, that's such an egocentric thing to say.

I know.

They didn't.

Everybody knows that they hire after George Floyd, they wanted to be the cutting-edge university to have the first major elite multi-billion dollar endowment with a black woman.

So they looked around and they thought that you were the most articulate.

And she is, she's well-spoken.

And then they didn't look at her academic record.

They just looked at how she'd been passed from Phillips Academy to a year at Princeton to graduate at Stanford to be a Stanford professor without enough scholarship to get tenure at Stanford.

It's very hard to get tenure at Stanford.

And then passed on to Harvard.

And they said, you know what, we don't care what the circumstances was.

She's got these cattle brands that we all value, and therefore we're going to hire her.

And we're going to be so cool and neat.

Yeah.

And that's what they thought.

Now that you're talking, you're reminding me that of having all of that background, how did she learn to plagiarize so much?

Like, who was allowing that to go on with her?

And

she thought it was all A-okay, and now I'm a model for the world.

Right?

I don't know.

I don't know what was in her head.

I think

I believe the world works,

revolves around deterrence.

De terio, terre in Latin, to terrify somebody from doing something.

So if you have no deterrence,

you have no world.

You have no rule.

When I was a graduate student at Stanford,

we were all terrified.

So If you went into an exam in Greek composition

and Professor Lionel Pearson was there and he said, you're going to take dictation and he's going in this thick British accent,

say something, read an English poem and you're supposed to transliterate that into English and then translate that to Greek.

And you know that if you say you have a headache or your mom died that day,

I'm serious too.

Or you say,

you feel odd.

I'm Victor.

I'm a little bumpkin from Selma and I feel that all these prep schools, that's not going to work.

So if it doesn't work, you're going to study and study till two in the morning because he's going to insult you or embarrass you.

And that's basically what education was.

I don't mean to be

suggesting it was just a hazing experience, but when I remember graduate school and to get a PhD, it was constant, constant study to 18 hours a day and very competitive.

And the professors were not sympathetic to excuses.

And they did not make allowances for anything, anything, anything.

And

I can remember taking a French test, and I had never taken French, but I learned how to read it pretty well.

And the professor started speaking to me in French.

And he said, well,

maybe you passed, maybe you didn't in French.

And I said, I don't know what you're saying.

Can you write it out?

I can read it.

And he said, that's not the way to learn French, Victor, and I'll let you go, but I'm disappointed in you.

I said, does it say that you have to be fluent in spoken French?

It doesn't say anything, Victor, but it would be nice if you were.

And that was the attitude.

And so

when you get rid of all of that, and you say you're a black woman and you therefore are in a hostile world as a victim, and she said that.

She said she was frightened, remember?

She said, after George Floyd, she was frightened.

And I think the people who were frightened were people in those neighborhoods during the 120 days of Antifa BLM rioting and murder.

35 of them died.

1,500 police officers were

injured.

I think the people who are frightened are not you because the people that are victims of hate crimes tend to be Jews.

60% of victims with 2.5% of the population.

So do you think if you're you're walking around Cambridge at night and you have clothing that identifies you as Jewish, you're going to be safe and Claudine Gay will be not safe with all of her security guards and Harvard

protective shell?

I don't think.

If you're a working class Jewish guy in in Cambridge or Boston versus Claudine Gay with all of her money and affluence and security, I just don't believe that she was frightened.

I do believe there's a lot of working-class Jews that were frightened, or wealthy Jews.

But the point is that when you remove all of those deterrence and you're not afraid, you say, well, how did she,

why did she plagiarize?

Because she could.

I keep going back that line in Dirty Harry when they say, why does the killer do that?

And he says, because he can.

And she can.

She can plagiarize.

And

somebody said, well, she could.

Listen, she did.

She was right.

We were wrong.

She plagiarized her dissertation.

She got through Stanford and got a PhD.

She plagiarized her articles and got tenure.

She went to Harvard and she still kept plagiarizing.

And she got a full professorship tenure there.

Then she became president.

It worked.

And it would have kept on working if it hadn't been for two hours of her life.

Two hours, she went before a congressional committee under oath and nakedly lied to the country and the world when she said, if you say anti-Semitic things at Harvard, we will react according to the context, given that we honor the First Amendment.

And people said to her, You have not done that in the past.

You have disciplined, censured, expelled people who say things that are covered by the First Amendment, but what you don't like, but not anti-Semitism.

You apparently don't mind if people are anti-Semitic because you didn't do anything in a way that you do do things if they're anti-black, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-woman, anti-Latino, etc.

And that was just a naked lie and people got upset about it and then they said, who is this person?

Who is it?

They'd never heard of her before.

Who knows who the Harvard president is?

They said, look at her.

And then people got really angry and said, well, how did she get here?

Oh my God, how did she get here?

Well, where's her books?

Let me go on Amazon and see her name.

Oh, no books.

Well, let me go look at these articles.

Well, they're all in the same thing about how the horrible world was unfair to black people.

Okay, let me read one of them.

And people started reading them and they said, wait a minute.

I think that argument went to someone else.

And then people may be critical of her.

Maybe they didn't like her.

I don't know.

But they took maybe a paragraph and they put it on what, in quotation marks on Google?

And bam, bam, bam.

They started showing up.

And then they got, they were like a pack of wolves that had a nice little thigh bone to eat and they went nuts.

And it wasn't their fault.

It was your fault, Professor Gay.

And so

that's what happened.

She was never afraid.

And, you know, I keep quoting

the brilliant Tom Soule because I knew him very well.

I still know him well, but we don't have our bi-monthly lunches.

That's for as we did for 15 years, partly because I'm 70 and he's 90, I think, three now.

But the point is that we would have lunch every two weeks.

And sometimes we'd have guests, but we'd talk about things.

It wasn't always about race.

It wasn't even mostly about race.

But once in a while, we would talk about these issues.

And he would look at me and he'd say, I'm very, very worried.

I'd say, well, I am too.

He said, no, no, you have to understand

that some of the most brilliant people have been African-American scholars.

We're talking about academia.

But they came of an age where they were treated, if not the same, even more negatively, and therefore they overcame this and they became as good or better scholars.

And he was referring to Glenn Lowry or to Julius Wilson or to Shelby Steele

or to this whole group of scholars that didn't need any help.

They didn't need an exemption.

And more importantly, they were the object of derision by the white elite left because they were felt to be not grateful for all of the magnanimity that people on the coast gave them.

And I don't think they gave them anything but a burden.

So his point was that when you remove that deterrence and you give a blank check that we're going to give a separate standard, that that separate standard is going to be taken advantage of by people.

And he didn't just mean African American people, he meant everybody that would be involved in it.

And what he meant by that was, and we talked about sometimes virtue signaling, that there were going to be mediocre, mediocre

white people.

who came out of the woodwork and saw an opportunity, just like they did in the Soviet Union when ideology became rewarded and they all of a sudden became Trotskyites or Leninites or Stalinites.

And when they understood this ideology was reigning, then they were going to come out and try to duel with one another and say that they were more supportive of DI or affirmative action than the next person.

Or they would ridicule and

call people names or make false accusations.

And his whole point was,

if you destroy merocratic criteria,

then you've got real problems because you're going to encourage the type type of behavior that later Professor and President Gay engaged in.

And that's what his point was.

And for him, it wasn't a racial thing, it was human nature being what it is.

And he was worried about what, not that it was just going to affect black people, but it was going to affect everybody.

And they were going to be living in a la-la land where the truth was second fiddle.

And I think he was right.

Yeah, we seem to be there, that's for sure.

Well, Victor, let's go go ahead and take a break and then come back in California.

Can I just say one thing, too?

Yeah.

There was a real, he testified during, remember Lanny Grenier?

She was the

Bill Clinton administration nominator, I think, for civil rights head.

Yeah.

And then I think people testified and they attacked Tom Soule.

He said, you know, Tom Soule grew up

basically

with adoptive parents, lived in Harlem, dire poverty,

and in the age before affirmative action and before DEI and all of that.

And he had a brilliant career as an academic, places like Harvard, University of Chicago, UCLA, and then Stanford.

Okay.

And they went after him.

because he was not supportive of that appointment.

And he said, or she weighed in.

It was either that her appointment or another.

I remember this very clearly when she said very critical things.

And he said something that I do not need to be lectured from a half-black wealthy woman from Martha's Menor.

And that summed it all up, didn't it?

It is a phenomenon that when you look at intellectuals today, or people in the so-called black movement, not all, but it seems to be that people like Tom Soule or Shelby Steele or Roland Fryer come from

modest roots, say to say, and suffer directly the racism and the pathologies directed toward blacks.

And the people who then capitalize on that history of race, it's not them who actually experienced it,

but the people who had privilege from the very get-go.

Claudine Gay, a Haitian, wealthy, wealthy, upper-class Caribbean immigrant who went right into prep school at Phillips, then right to Princeton, then right to Stanford, then right to Harvard.

And

when you look at Barack Obama, he's another example of a half-black person

who she, not like Blaise, she was all black, but he was half-black, and he went to what, prep school?

Yes, he went to Occidental, yes, he went to Columbia, he went to, he'd never experienced any adversity in the way that Tom Soule did or Roland Fryer did.

And yet they're very critical of people who,

through the hard school of life,

basically

Clarence Thomas is another example.

They despise him, but Clarence Thomas's childhood was very different than Barack Obama's or Clouding Gay's.

And

so

I don't know what it is.

I think there is a culture of white progressive elitism, and it's mostly in the bi-coastal areas, that has really been pathological.

It's done so much damage.

And it's based on white guilt or white insecurity or white fear that there actually are racists.

They don't want to be around anybody but themselves.

And it's class racism and maybe

race racism.

But they create a big facade of caring and liberality to hide it or mask it or square the circle that they're not comfortable with people like themselves.

And I don't think it's just race.

I think they despise more than anybody the white working class.

People from rural areas of the South, the deplorables, the irredeemables, the clingers, the chumps, the dregs.

Even John

McCain said of Trump's people they were the crazies.

I think he said the hobbits too.

Well, well, Victor, we need to take a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about the Assembly Constitutional Amendment proposed in California, number seven.

Stay with us, and we'll be right back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Welcome back.

You can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com.

It's called The Blade of Perseus, and you can join the site for the VDH Ultra material.

So please come join us.

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So please come join us.

Victor, California, as

you've said many times, it is a litmus test for the rest of the nation.

And currently, since we've been speaking about the problems with DEI

and well, DEI, which was in California intended to combat Proposition 209, now they've got already passed in the Assembly this amendment to the Constitution of California that calls for the ability of the governor to make exceptions to Prop 209, which was the reaffirmation of Amendment 14 of the nation.

For those of you who don't know what 209 was, that you can't discriminate.

And now they want in ACA 7, Assembly Constitutional Amendment No.

7, that that the governor can make

exceptions to discrimination.

I was wondering.

Well,

first of all, I never thought they enforced 209.

They didn't.

Because

I have been a California academic since the day

I went to undergraduate, maybe.

In 1971, I went to graduate school in 1975, and I was a professor at California State University when 209 was in effect.

And I saw no difference because I know academics like the back of my hand and they feel they have a world unto themselves.

They're tenure, they're exempt.

And their attitude when it was there is,

okay, well, it's against the law to use race, so we'll just use race, but we won't admit we're going to use race.

And I mean that literally.

I won't mention his name.

He's deceased now.

But I had a dean call me every time

because I was the only classicist to start at California State.

And

there was a really brilliant classicist there who was part-time, Bruce Thornton.

And in the English department, I wanted to hire him if he was the best candidate.

He'd had an ample, he ended up writing 11 books at California State with eight classes to teach.

And each time we had to hire someone, that dean, who is now will not be spoken about,

you know

non dicare bon malam nise de mortuis ni nisi bonum don't speak a bad malam thing about the dead unless it's good

and so my point is i'm not going to mention him but he said to me victor victor victor here we go

and you're going to interview usually had a hundred applicants and he said i do not want any of the three that you're going to use my money to fly out here for interviews that is a white male.

The last search, you had one white male.

I don't want to see that again.

I want you to hire a minority or a woman.

Got that?

That's that's that happened.

So that was during 209, by the way.

I was on the hiring committee during 209 on several occasions, and I said, why do we have an affirmative action officer when it's illegal?

Because that's federal law.

It overwhelms it.

And the state,

do you,

does 209 matter that the people said no, we don't want to use race as a criterion?

No, it doesn't.

So that's the one thing.

The second is, we've already had a ballot, a proposition to overturn it.

And the people overwhelmingly, in a state where 27% of the resident population was not born here, where 45%

of the adult population,

I should say the total population, are Hispanic, or so they identify.

And believe me, when a person is on the census and they say, what are you?

About 10 to 15% of Hispanics say white.

So when they say 45% of the state self-identifies as Hispanic, it's more like 55%.

What am I getting at?

I'm getting at that a

minority, majority population refuted efforts to overturn 209.

They didn't want, it was given to the people just four years ago.

They said no.

And now the legislature, which is dominated by elite DEI activists, tries to sneak it in.

They're smart this time.

They don't say, well, we're not going to repeal 209 because the people, of course, on several occasions have reified it, but

we'll make some exemptions.

We have to have the ability and in really extreme cases to use it

for purposes that are central to the life of the state.

No, we know what you're doing.

And so they're going to try to push that.

And we'll see through the legislature, and maybe they'll get it on the ballot as well.

I don't know.

We know what they're doing.

We know what they're doing.

I think everybody should realize that

I want to be very careful.

I feel that the university is still a good place.

It's more positive than negative, especially in the STEM things.

But the university mindset in the humanities, at least, is

we are smarter than the rest of people.

We have more letters after our name

and we develop a life of the mind.

And you people are either money grubbers or you're muscular or what I don't know what it is, but we really don't have to listen to you.

Because we should be giving more, be given more material war just because we're better spoken and we're smarter.

But we don't.

That's unfair.

We'll put up with the unfairness, but you've got to give give us tenure.

We've got to get nine months of work.

And don't monitor us.

And we're just separate than you are.

And we can do what we want.

And that's what their attitude is, of entitlement.

And they always try to go around statutes that they don't like that are imposed from the state or the federal government.

They do.

I know they do.

I've been in.

And so the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action was what?

illegal and before they had even ruled the universities found ways are finding ways to get around it.

Of course.

Yeah.

Well, I've been in trainings, you know, those video trainings.

And one of them was on equal opportunity employment.

And they literally said in there, and I'm sure they've taken it out now, that the California people passed Proposition 209, and now we have DEI.

So that was their, how do you get around it?

I just finished my mandatory university sexual harassment training for anybody who has employees under them, two hours.

And

I'll just say one thing.

It's like I've done for 15 years.

It's a multiple choice finding.

But now they're putting more and more videos that you have to watch.

If you speed the video up, it starts back to punish you.

If you try to go to the next session too quickly, it won't work because they will, at the end of the thing, they'll say, you didn't do 120 minutes.

Sorry.

Just stick around and push buttons until you get your 120 minutes because they must know everybody does that.

And then it's like

I'm not saying there's not exceptions, but mostly

it is a black guy talking to a Latino guy or trans guy or gay guy about a white supervisor or a Karen-type pushy woman.

And it's something like she said something offensive,

maybe

sexually or something, and then you have

multiple choice, A, B, C.

Given what Professor Somman said, and it's usually something like they have a little tape or a little story, and the conversation is something like, Professor Smith said to me,

Wow, that's a short dress.

I guess you're trying to show your legs off, the cute though they are, something like that.

And then, question A,

People are people, get over it.

Very sponsane.

Tech B,

get a bunch of people together and

try to pat each other in the back and just ignore her.

C,

go to her privately and say, you know, let's just

person to person work this out.

Or

choice D,

go to your sexual harassment center and advisor and make a formal complaint that she has violated the code of the universe.

And if you have that idea, you can pass every single thing

and the whole thing.

And just expect that 20%

or 30% are going to be the DEI manager, the DEI sexual harassment assistant, and they're going to come on in pictures and they're going to talk to you.

It's like it's a promotional video about themselves.

And then you've got to get through.

If you don't get through,

your paycheck gets held up.

Exactly.

So I did it.

I did it.

I conformed to the letter of the law.

Yeah.

Well, those are always fun little trainings.

That's what I'm doing.

I had the worst headache because I was driving with my wife to Los Angeles and she was driving.

And I put it on my computer.

And I got the internet signal.

curves,

grapevine, doesn't matter.

I did that thing in the car.

And by the head, I don't know if it was the content or trying to read when you're going 80 miles an hour or what, but I was so dizzy when I finished that thing.

I should have got a purple heart.

You should have.

Well, Victor, that's the end of our episode.

Thank you so much for your today.

You were very much on how we should have things, and I really appreciate that today.

So, thank you for that.

Okay, thanks everybody for listening.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.