Horrors and Atrocities and our Universities

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I am Jack Fowler.

Lucky man, lucky man.

I get to talk to the great VDH twice a week, my behalf a little, on your behalf, I hope.

Anyway, VDH, that's Victor Davis-Hanson.

He's the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And he's the star of the Victor Davis Hansen Show, which is what this is.

Victor and I are talking right now on the 29th of December.

This particular episode will be up on the 2nd of December, excuse me, of January, 2024.

So happy new year, ladies and gentlemen.

As we

are talking today, though, on Friday, the news is broken about Maine's Secretary of State trying to pull a Colorado and keep Donald Trump off the ballot, the presidential 2024 ballot

in Maine.

And we have plenty more stories to get Victor's or articles

to get Victor's take on

regarding Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard.

And maybe if we have time, Victor,

we'll get to Neil Ferguson's piece on

the terror of the intellectuals.

And we'll do all that

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Folks, you should begin the year, the new year, by subscribing to Victor's website.

That's the blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

I will tell you more about

how to do that, why you should do that later in the podcast.

Victor, though, let's begin with getting your thoughts on this

Maine Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows,

not even an elected official herself.

Some states do elect the Secretary of State, not Maine.

She's appointed by the legislature.

She unilaterally decided that Donald Trump violated the U.S.

Constitution through January 6th.

Insurrectionists, therefore, she has, she declares that he cannot be on the ballot come november by the way victor uh maine is one of the i think other than maine nebraska maybe two states that divide their

electoral college votes uh based on congressional district and maine has two seats and one of them is always in play anyway victor your thoughts about this

two things make a trend right now we have it well i mean it was really weird because um she kind of said that they're going to overturn it.

So the point is, she goes, well, even if they overturn it, they're all likely.

But she just, she wasn't elected, and she has just decided that,

and she's a leftist, we know that from her

remarks, social media, et cetera, past.

So she just, A, unilaterally on her own declared Trump guilty of insurrection, again, for a crime he's never been charged with, much less convicted of, but in her opinion.

So then it begs the question: by what standard or benchmark are you using?

So if you say that the election was a fraud, that's insurrection.

So Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump was illegitimately elected.

So did Jimmy Carter in 2016.

Stacey Abrams would be behind bars.

She not only said she was the real governor, she said she was a victim of a racist campaign to deny her the vote that she actually received, which was she lost by 50,000 votes.

Should she, I don't remember anybody taking her off the ballot when she ran again.

So they know what they're doing.

And, you know, it's kind of like a tick or a scratch.

They know they shouldn't do it constitutionally, and it's not good for the Republic.

They even know that it's not good for their own political futures because it's only helping Trump, but they can't stop it.

It's like a cigarette you can't put away or a chocolate bar.

You say you're not going to finish it, but you do anyway.

She knows that, but they can't stop.

And she thinks they're going to build momentum and put pressure on the court.

Or they feel, as I said earlier when Sammy mentioned it, they feel it's going to hurt the down ballot Republican governor, you know, local offices, senators,

representatives.

But they, all that said, they know that what they're doing is wrong, and they know that if the Republicans did it, it would unwind the Republic.

But they know that.

And so I get back to that metaphor of an adolescent adult.

They just assume that they can do stuff and throw tantrums and act outrageously because the parent's not going to do that.

The parent's not going to say, oh, you pay me money, or I'm not going to take you.

If you, you know, the parent will say, calm down, this is not helpful.

You must do this.

But if the parent acts like a child, then the whole family implodes.

And so.

Victor, Maine's a quirky state

politically.

It did under LePage a few years ago,

not all that long ago.

I think his first name was Paul.

Paul LePage was the governor, twice elected, conservative.

And I'm pretty sure Republicans control the Maine legislature for at least one term.

But

That's kind of impossible in Rhode Island or Connecticut or Vermont.

But as for the let's affect things down ballot, I don't know that Shenabellos

realizes recent history in her own state.

We'll see.

I do agree with you, though.

I believe these kind of efforts only

enhance

the possibility of Trump being elected president as opposed to her.

Yeah, it is.

And then

it's even weirder than that.

They're coupled with these

warnings that he would be a dictator or override democracy, which is what they're doing.

Besides the fact of projection, it is almost like they want to do so many extra-legal things that they hope Donald Trump will respond if he were to be elected in kind, and then what?

They would get out in the street with a million strong.

I don't know what they're trying to to do.

I know they don't want Trump as president.

I know that they know

that this is helping Trump to be president.

I know that they know that

if the Republicans did what they did, we wouldn't have a country.

And I know they know all of this, and I know that they want to continue.

And that can only tell me they want some kind of crisis.

You know, they really do.

Yeah.

And

I think the Republicans, conservatives are in the driver's seat.

All they have to do is just press on and make the appeal to swing voters and say, are these the people you want to have in control of your destiny?

You look at the border.

It does not exist.

You look at what they're doing to us, Syria, the Houthis, Iran.

You look at what this whole budget, $1.7 trillion, he keeps printing money and handing it out illegally to people.

You look at what he did to the FBI and the CIA.

You look at what crime is like.

You want all that,

and that's what you keep voting for.

Yeah.

And I think I wasn't sure that he could win.

You know, I've said that on this podcast.

And I think he can now.

I do.

I do.

Because I think people are mobilized.

I think

prior to all this, there were...

not just never Trumpers, but there were certain, I don't know, Rhino, whatever they are, they had voted for Trump once,

maybe twice, but they said they wouldn't do again.

And they were kind of angry, but they were going to just find a way, maybe, maybe not, kind of sort of vote.

But when voting day came, I'm not going to vote for, I think they'll vote now.

I think it really mobilizes people.

And it's happening at this exact same time that

Joe Biden is fading.

People are not enthused about him.

And everybody says, well, the economy is going great.

And they just

miss the central truth, that it's prices for what counts, food and fuel.

I know it goes, there are gyrations in housing and mortgages.

They're up about 20 to 30 percent since when he took office, which would be an annual inflation rate of about 9 percent on average.

But come on, Victor, come on.

I don't really care what, you know, what the price of a flour is or something.

I care about what steaks are and potatoes and vegetables and gasoline and usal fuel and carpentry and Romax and plumbing supplies and the mortgage that I'm paying 7% on.

That's what I care about.

And it's awful under Biden.

Well,

I think you got to give Biden a little credit.

Don't you feel better as an American this week that Joe Biden is tackling the

crisis at the border, what used to be a border?

All these cabinet secretaries are going down to Mexico to try and deal with the Mexican government to figure this out.

There's only one, there's only, he doesn't care.

He thought,

this is what he did.

I can't even say he, this is what the Obamas did.

They thought the diversity, equity, inclusion, rainbow coalition,

victimized, oppressed is a multiracial coalition.

It's intersectional.

And therefore, when we let all these people come in, we are enhancing our 30%.

It's going to get to 35, 40, and everybody's going to be happy.

And what's happening, partly because the brilliance of the Texas, Florida, and other governors by sending people to places like Martha's Vineyard, Chicago, to New York, is that it's having the opposite effect.

And

they can't afford that opposite effect.

They have so alienated the white working class that they need these 95%,

93% black vote

unanimity, and then they need Latino votes at about 70%.

And they're not getting that now.

They're down to about 55, if that, Latino, and they're down to about 85, 86% black vote.

And they can't win

with those ratios.

And more importantly, they have galvanized the so-called white working class to get out.

and vote.

And so

now, as a response to that, they're going down to the border and begging Mexico.

And Obador is a bully.

And

all he reacted to is when Trump went down there and told him, you do the following, or we're going to tax remittances at 10% or something, and we're going to get out of NAFTA.

And then he clicked his heels and said, yes, sir,

Biden won't do that.

And he knows that.

He knows that Biden wants some superficial,

non-important, empty gesture.

I think he cleaned out a couple of migrant camps camps near the border.

Just some photo op just to get by the next year.

Because essentially, Biden is getting what he wants.

That's what they want.

They want,

we've got eight, over 8 million, they want 10 or 12 million people to come in here.

And, you know,

as I said before, I live in ground zero.

So I'm a couple miles from a discount food market.

I drive from the country in town.

And I was thinking about our pod today.

And yesterday I went in, and

I was in a line, and I saw eight people.

Not one, Jack, not one, did not have an EBT card, not one.

Every single one then pulled out a big wad of cash to pay for things like alcohol and non-qualifying EBT electric banking transferred cards.

And none of them spoke English because the person was speaking Spanish to them.

And so that's the type of that phenomenon is what Biden wants and that's what the liberal mind wants.

It says to itself, I am insulated as long as you don't send them to Martha's Vineyard or Atherton or La Jolla, I'm insulated from this.

But in the abstract, I like the idea that people who were poor in Oaxaca or Chiapas or somewhere

Michel Khan can come up here and get food because I have so much money that the taxes really don't bother me.

And then, more importantly,

they're in solidarity with my liberal agenda because they owe me.

And that's why the left-wing bicosta elite so hates black conservatives.

Not just that they're opposed ideologically to them, but they feel they're traitors.

They don't patronize me.

I was their patron.

They were my client, and they broke that bond.

Look at all I did for them.

They're full of ingratitude.

So that's why they do it.

And it's,

you know, it's just incremental.

It's just incremental.

So when you have that many people

who are coming to your country and they're not on the same page

because they haven't been acculturated and they're coming en masse and no one is saying to the person who steps across the border, have you had a smallpox?

Have you had a polio?

Have you had whooping cough?

Have you had a COVID vaccination?

Do you have any of that?

Who are you?

Do you have a criminal record?

Where are you going to go?

Do you speak English?

Do you have means of support?

Do you have any?

They don't ask any of that.

They just send them and then they tell us, hey, to get a real ID, you're not going to be able to fly.

And they keep postponing, of course, because people are not complying.

But finally, I guess it's next year.

You have to have show, you know, that you're a resident of your state, that you have a passport or it's...

birth certificate plus your driver's license and then they just put these people on flights without any of that And so a lot of people, you know, people are getting very angry at that.

And

it's enormous cost.

And what does that mean?

What does it mean when I say enormous costs?

It just changes people's lives.

So if I drive five miles down the road, I just go very slow now because if I go on any non-major third, there's going to be a dog on the road.

Because people will be six or seven families living behind an old farmhouse and they will have

Winnebagos or trailers or makeshift sheds.

They'll have chickens, dogs, a lot of them.

They'll go out in the middle of the road.

I quit riding my bicycle five years ago.

I used to ride 25 miles because it was too dangerous.

Dog, I got bit twice and the people just ran in their house and closed the door and wouldn't come out.

And that's just, it's just, it's nothing to do with race.

It's nothing to do with anything other than bringing in millions of people who don't know anything about the United States, which is okay, we've done that before, but we did it legally and we did it with some type of audit and some rudimentary background and health checks.

And we're not doing that.

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Victor, you know, we've talked,

you and I, and I know you and Sammy have talked plenty in recent podcasts about Harvard and Claudine Gay,

but I think it's worth talking,

discussing this

more because of the,

it's so such the centerpiece for the culture war we're fighting in.

And I noticed you wrote

a longish

tweet, now X, whatever you want to call it,

about her and 10 reasons why she

will step down.

And

if you discuss that with Sammy, we'll talk about something else.

Did you discuss that with that?

We did in passing, just

in passing.

Because we have that and we have her history at Stanford, which you know something a little about, and her

Obama involvement, and frankly, her standing as

a

scholar, quote-unquote, scholar in America today.

So there are a couple of angles here we can talk about her.

But if you'd like to give us a little pre-see on your

Twitter post, that would be great.

Well, I went through on Twitter, I kind of did it more comprehensively.

I said,

and I stand by it

because I don't think it's tenable.

On Twitter, I just said that she's not going to be able to continue being president.

I think they're just going to wait for an opportune time so they don't look like they're caving to pressure.

And

people said, well,

I had a couple of people write me and said, well, they haven't got rid of her yet.

They will.

And they will for a variety of reasons.

they can't play the race card because liz mcgill was fired with far more accomplishments she was a white woman

we know that we we've had renewed interest on her own claudine gay's past and when you look at it what do you find out you find out one thing that her whole life has been nothing but exemptions.

And she got tenure at Stanford with less than competitive scholarship.

She did at Harvard as well.

She didn't tell the truth in front of the committee.

She said that

it depends on context.

And if she believes that, the only context is if you're Jewish and you're a target of people calling for your destruction or genocide, there's no consequences.

If you're black or Latino or gay or trans and somebody says,

from the river to the sea type of metaphor,

then you're done.

You're done.

And then everybody knows that.

She wouldn't be honest about it.

And even if she were honest,

she doesn't understand that if you're a Jewish student and the president of Harvard University won't condemn somebody, it wants to kill you.

It's like Representative Stefanik said.

What do you mean by context?

So they have to shoot a person.

And then, of course, there's the plagiarism.

And there's now, each day, there's a little bit more.

And it was, we were told, duplicative language, a new euphemism that the board used, I guess, from their law firm.

But now it's more than a word or two.

It's whole sentences, even a paragraph or two, and no citations.

And it's intellectual theft.

And as I said in a tweet in the article, you can either be a preeminent university in the world, or you can have a plagiarist as your president.

You can't have both.

And they do have both now.

And they're going to have to do something about it.

Miss Pritzer is, I guess, she the chairman of the board.

She was Obama's cabinet officer.

She's talking to him all the time.

He's weighed in.

Of course, that's ironic because Obama, as we learn

from David Garrow,

I don't know what the word would be, fabulous.

His whole memoir was made up.

It wasn't accurate at all.

We knew that from his girlfriend who testified or gave an account that was not anywhere near what Obama said.

And he never tried to refute that.

And then there were other allegations that there are sentences or echoes of other people's work in it.

So

when he calls up and says, you know, calls the board and says, don't fire her, what does that mean?

That's like having Joe Biden.

Is Joe Biden going to call up and say, or make a statement?

I think we should, this is a witch hunt.

No, he's a plagiarist.

He plagiarized Neil Kinnock's entire speech.

And that's just what he did on a campaign.

He got disciplined in law school for plagiarizing.

And Obama's a fabulist.

So there's not a lot of leftists.

Maybe Doris Kearns Goodman can come out.

Or maybe,

I don't know.

Maybe Fareed Zakaria or Maureen Dowd.

Oh, this is horrible what they're doing to her.

I don't think so.

There's too many people on the left that were plagiarists that can't say a word.

So I don't see where the constituency is.

And then

the question is, how many, what's her,

what's the price to keep her there in a very mercantile, mercenary sense?

Is it $500 million in lost donations?

A billion?

Because it's going to add up.

If you were Jewish American and you saw what she said and you see what's going on at Harvard,

then why would you give any, why would you subsidize that?

And then when you add in there that like Yale, about 80%, 70% to 80% of people get A's.

And so these are not nice places, everybody.

They're not.

They're not.

They're not nice places where you want to send your children or go to yourself i i work at one they're not nice people well let's let's talk

well

yeah about about i want to talk a little more if you don't want to i don't want to talk victor i want to hear you talk

hear a little more about um

your memories of her at at stanford when she when she got tenure at at stanford but And also, Victor, that she, Kevin Hassett, who's, you know, our friend, Kevin,

he's a visiting fellow, some sort of fellow at Hoover.

And he ran the, he was the head economist

for Donald Trump.

And Kevin's just a great guy.

And he wrote something for a National Review the other day that he take the plagiarism aside,

what was she plagiarizing about?

What kind of esoteric...

maybe the wrong word, the narrowness of the topic that

how can she or anyone like her be considered an intellectual?

Just the meaninglessness

of what her scholarship was about.

I mean, it's just so insignificant.

Well, there was not one thing that she ever published that was not about how black people are systematically victimized in the present age.

And then when you look at her resume, you think, and then remember after George Floyd, she made a national

stir by writing a letter and saying that she felt personally unsafe.

I can tell you she's a lot safer in her neighborhood than a lot of their people are in other neighborhoods.

But the thing was, she's from a very upper, upper middle class, or maybe even aristocratic class, I think, from Haiti.

And she went to, didn't she go to Phillips Academy?

And then she went a year at Princeton, then she went to Stanford, then she went to Harvard.

She's had nothing but but deference and exemption.

And she's written about nothing.

So the contrast is embarrassing.

On the one hand, here's somebody from her teenage years was given subsidies and

getting into places where people with much stronger credentials were refused.

And she was given these exemptions.

And then what does she do when she's in a position to write and reflect and add to the scholarly discourse?

She just says that she's a victim.

So

what would she write if she was a victim?

And, you know, it's this passive aggressiveness that's just ubiquitous that all these people make claims against this country and how bad it is and how bad it is.

If it's so bad and it's institutional, don't go.

Just say, you know what?

I'm not going to go to Phillips.

I'm going to go to Morehouse College.

I'm not going to go to Stanford.

I'm going to go to a black school.

I just can't stand this racist.

But they know it's not racist.

And they want to participate because they understand that it has this illustrious tradition and it's a gateway to career success.

And that's why they go.

And

they don't experience any racism any more than any other person,

you know.

I mean, you could look at,

you know, it was very funny in the old days, you couldn't look at your transcript.

And I, when I got out

of PhD,

there were no jobs for white males.

So I was farming for five years.

And one of my professors, I won't mention anything, called me up and said, you know,

I know there's no jobs, but I don't think you're going to get a job anyway.

I said, why was that?

He said, because this professor, who's very prominent, wrote something on your transcript.

And he said, do you have a friend that?

So I did.

I just said to a friend,

maybe I'm going gonna apply for your job and he said okay I'll request your transcript and he showed it to me that's what people used to do in those days and they this professor said at one point

something to the effect I don't have a photographic memory so I can't remember what he said completed all the exams as if they were a road race

did the secondary languages

did superb work in Greek and Latin.

However,

felt out of place, reflecting his rural roots, made no effort to master French, spoken French, or spoken,

had no interest in symphony or opera.

And that had nothing to do with it.

What?

Seriously?

Yeah, it was like

I was like a rube.

Oh, that was a good one.

And this was a letter, though, that the guy who was in a capacity as a chairman wrote him, thinking he was, I guess, an academic.

That was an addition.

So I said, well, what's on the transcript?

You don't mean the transcript.

He said, oh, it's there on the transcript.

It's not in such detail.

He did very well, but it reflects his rural,

okay, rural background.

But did I feel like a victim?

No.

Why didn't I?

Because I was

20 years old, and I got into the Stanford PhD.

program based on your GRE, your knowledge of Greek and Latin.

And then they paid for it for four years.

I had to be a TA, but they paid for it.

It didn't cost me a penny.

I never had a student loan.

And then I met out of the 15 professors, I met nine that were really good.

And yeah, there was some bad people there that were petty and mean and arrogant.

But my point is, when you look at everything,

you want to see some positive stuff there.

Can't she say,

I mean, I said,

you know, I was just saying, well, this guy is a fop.

He's an East Coast snob that wrote this.

He thinks he's an opera critic.

You know, I used to have a

service where I would mow graduate professors' lawns.

I had a little pickup.

So I would, maybe I had nine clients.

So that they had very, in those days, everybody wanted a Japanese American gardener.

They were the best, but they didn't do the.

take out the trash stuff, right?

They would go to their yards and say, we're going to plant this and this and this and this.

And then they would leave.

And I would come like two hours later and pick up all the

cuttings or the trash.

Or if they wanted to take out a patio, I would take a sledgehammer and take it out.

Or if they lived behind a gully and there was people were throwing trash down in the gully, I would get a rope and go down.

I did all that stuff.

I thought it was pretty good.

I was from a farm and I could fix things,

you know, so I fixed things around their house.

But my point is,

I did all that.

And this one of my clients was this guy who wrote that.

And

the guy didn't know how to do anything.

I mean,

nothing, nothing, nothing.

He couldn't turn on the faucet.

He couldn't do anything.

Did he know, did he ever know that you found out about no, I never told it.

This is the first time I've ever told anybody.

It just came to my mind because of Claudia and Gay, Gay's activity, that she was done a disservice.

Yeah.

But I also had a thesis advisor that year who was in the three most, he was a president of the American Philological Association.

He was the head of the American School of Classical Studies, and he was probably the senior person in classics at Stanford.

And we had a very tumultuous relationship, partly because I was very outspoken.

And

what I'm trying to get is most of the people were European, and they were very good philologists, or if they were Americans, they were all from the West Coast.

And most of the students went to prep school, not all of them, but most.

And I was a guy from rural Salma.

I'd gone to crazy UC Santa Cruz, but I knew Latin and Greek really well.

So they respected that, but they thought I was very unpolished.

And I wasn't a,

I don't want to use the word intellectual because I read a lot, but it was more like

you don't know which are the good restaurants in San Francisco, or you don't go to opera on campus, or you not, you don't play a musical instrument,

or you don't go, you don't break into French and the classic sloun, that kind of stuff.

And

i was outspoken too and they didn't like it and i took the wages of that but i never said oh they did me a disservice yeah and when i was looking at all this i haven't really talked about that to our audience i don't want to talk about because some of the people are still alive right it's not not fair to just give my version of it but when i looked at her resume

And then I thought, what was your experience in academia?

Well, I can tell you what my experience in academia was.

It was farming for 10 hours and going up to Cal State Fresno in 1981, 82, 83, 84, 85,

84, and being told, we're not going to, I'm sorry, we do not hire white males in the Department of Foreign Languages.

And we have no Greek and Latin, so we don't want to hire you.

And finally, I got hired as part-time.

Or it was, I was the head of the hiring committee and the dean called me up and said, Victor, don't dare do it.

Do not, I do not want to see the name of a white male.

You understand that?

And if you repeat what I said, I'm going to deny it.

And so that was what it was always like that for every search.

Right.

Every search.

And so I'm not talking about 2015.

I'm talking about 1986, 91, 94,

97.

And then

I taught as a visiting professor at Stanford

in 91 and 92.

And I had, I was told a particular student who was not very good,

not that it had nothing to do with his race, but that guy had some problems that,

you know, don't, don't,

don't grade this way, don't grade this way.

And I had a seminar that I think 14 people signed up before I got there.

When I got there, there were three.

I said, what happened to the student?

They said, well, this one faculty doesn't like you.

And she told everybody not to take your class.

I said, okay, fine.

That's the way it goes.

Free country.

I can remember all those stories.

And as a scholar and everything, I've, you know, it's, it's, that's, that's what it was.

But my attitude every time was that it's a free country.

They want to do that.

You just have to be better than everybody else.

Just work, work, work.

We were talking about Hesiod the other day.

I was really influential on work upon work upon work.

But don't keep taking stuff and then

get angry that they act that way.

And so

what I'm getting at is she's created a whole mythology that says that academia has been racist.

It has been racist, but reverse racism.

Reverse racism.

I was on a committee, I won't mention the politician, to give a honorary degree, a CSU honorary degree to this politician.

This politician had not finished the necessary units.

It wasn't a not, it wasn't, excuse me, it was not an honorary degree.

It was to finally give him a bachelor's degree so when he ran for state office, he could say he was a college graduate.

And

I was on the committee to examine that.

And I can tell you that he was 15, 12 units short.

So these people concocted a way of giving him independent study credit for stuff he'd done like press conferences.

And I said that.

What?

Wait, press conferences?

Well,

independent study.

I shouldn't say that.

All right.

Independent study.

Retroactive independent study.

Yeah, no, I get it.

I get it.

So I told the president that.

I said, this is racist.

It was racist.

You wouldn't do this for any other person, but this person is an ethnic identification,

you know, and we're doing something.

So it was that way all the way.

It wasn't that I was fighting it.

I just, it was just ubiquitous.

Right.

You know, it was.

I would be on a committee for a French professor, and there would be a white guy

and a white woman and then there'd be some guy who was from Argentina who put an accent on his name but was probably Italian basically and we would give preference for it because that person was a quote-unquote Latino.

We did that all the time.

Yeah.

And then my job, because I was chair about nine of this, was

somebody just like myself who for five years couldn't get a job.

And then for another two, it was part-time.

And that was the guy calls you up.

He was just like me.

A guy would call up, hey, I'm Tom Smith.

You remember me?

I had that PhD from the University of Michigan.

And I didn't even get a first-round interview.

You guys didn't interview you.

You say, Tom, we have 115 applicants.

I can't believe they want to all come to Cal State for us.

No, they don't.

But that's the,

and you're better qualified than all my colleagues, but I can't hire you because we have to do this.

And he said, well, can I sue?

I said, you can call the dean and tell him I told you that.

And sometimes they did.

And the dean would call me up and said, what the blank are you doing?

But that's, I'm just getting on this deep detour, Jack, to remind everybody that is the real world.

It was not this mythological Professor Kendi

Tanahisi Coates at the every single day in the world of letters and arts and university, it's just white privilege and white race.

It's not.

It's not for admissions.

And the other thing I remember is I got about 50 people into

the Ivy League over, I don't know, 22 years, not just in PhD classics, but law school and business school and master's degrees and PhDs.

And you know what?

Almost everyone, it was how do we get the white guy in?

I got people who were Hispanic and black in everywhere.

And then I had the white guy.

And I'd say, okay, we got a white guy problem.

What are we going to do about it?

And they'd say, well, I'm not talking about white guys that grew up in Westchester or Carmel.

I'm talking white guys from Bakersfield, Delano, Modesto,

Kingsburg, just white working class.

And economic class beneath what Claudine gave.

I'm talking about the deplorables, the irredeemables, the chumps, the crazies,

the clingers, the dregs, all the words that Biden and Obama used.

That's who I'm talking about.

And it was very hard to get them in, even no matter what their requirements were.

I'd always ask them, are you Native American?

Do you have any Hispanic lineage?

And it was racist.

But I would get, and then I won't mention names because this person, I really liked this one person.

He was great.

He was a great student.

He had natural aptitude.

I gave him maybe 10 independent studies over four years.

He got a master's.

He got into graduate school at Princeton.

And he deserved it.

But they called up and they said, there's a problem.

He's an illegal alien.

We have to verify his

citizenship.

So I said to person X,

are you an illegal alien?

He said, yes.

I said, okay.

And I said, you're not 21.

He said, no, he said, like, 30.

And so I called the guy back and I said, well, he is an illegal alien.

But he wasn't calling me to disqualify him.

He was calling me so I could confirm that he could tell everybody that he had admitted an illegal alien.

And this was wonderful.

Are you serious, Victor?

This guy's really an illegal alien.

I said, yes, and he'd be a very good graduate school, but he is an illegal alien.

Oh, it doesn't matter.

That is so great.

And that was the story with everything.

And it's that way at Stanford today.

And it's that way everywhere.

And so I don't mind it.

I just don't like people lying about it, like Claudine Gay, and saying that she's...

She's heterodox or she's swimming against the current or something.

She's not.

She's an apparatchik.

And the fact is she is not Roland Fryer, one of the most brilliant economists of his generation who happens to be black.

She's not.

And he was disciplined by her.

She's not Ronald Sullivan, a brilliant black lawyer

who's defended everybody, who's liberal, that she went after because he defended, remember,

Weinstein.

So

it's

trying to get is that it doesn't have much to do with race because those guys were conservative blacks.

And if you're conservative black, like Shelby Steele or Tom Soule or Jason Hill or any of those people, you're going to have a rough just as much as any other people.

Well, and who gave it to them rough at Harvard?

Yes.

So what I'm saying is, she was a bully.

She picked up

and used her position.

And she doesn't reflect well.

She doesn't reflect well on Harvard, because Harvard is now telling the world

we have the biggest endowment of any university in the world.

We have the most money.

We have the most prestige.

And we have somebody that we're not going to fire who will not say a word if you call for the entire destruction of the Jewish people, even though we would expel anybody else who said similar things about any other ethnic or religious group.

And by the way, we have a president who 60% of her meager output is in doubt that she has

appropriated intellectual property from someone else.

And

that's what you have.

The greatest, the quote-unquote greatest

school of higher education in the nation is being run by a plagiarizing mediocrity.

And I mean,

some of the donors, was it Ackerman?

Is that his name?

Ackman, I think.

Ackman, yeah.

He said, rumors tell me, it's rumor, so don't take it from me.

But he said that she has threatened to sue

as if she was a victim of racism, but that wouldn't be possible because all he would do is,

wow, what were your grades to get in Phillip?

What were your grades and SAT scores to get in Stanford?

What was your intellectual output when you were at Stanford to get tenure in the political science department, vis-a-vis other people?

What was your intellectual output at Harvard to become a full professor?

What was your administrative experience to be president?

And what is your scholarly output compared to other presidents of that caliber institution?

That's all you have to do.

And I don't think it's a persuasive argument that she's been a victim of anything except a beneficiary of pressure.

It's not that, yeah.

So, what I'm trying to, this long excursus is: I think we have this

idea that there, yes, there was systematic racism in the 1920s, and 1930s and 1940s and 1950s.

During the civil rights movement from 1960s and early 70s, there was race neutrality.

But by the mid-70s or early 70s and the 80s and the 90s, for the next 50 years, there's been reverse racism.

They call it reverse discrimination.

Call it what you want.

We knew that.

The same thing is true in movies, Jackie.

You and I talk about movies, and there was racist

Everybody knows Birth of the Nation.

There's condescending thing of black characters that are not portrayed in roles that are necessary, anything other than one-dimensional.

Step in a button.

Yes, exactly.

Maids, etc.

But you get into the 1960s and 70s and 80s, and you see things like HUD,

excuse me, Ombre talking about discrimination against Native Americans.

You look at those Sidney Poitier movies, you start to see a very different view.

And you get into the

recent movies.

I mean, as I said earlier, you look at Doll Down Direct,

you know, it's white men can't jump, and there's a word white almost in every 15th or 20th movie on Direct TV.

It's all in a deprecatory fashion.

And

so

this is what America does.

It's a radical democracy.

It's kind of what Herodotus noted when he said that it's easier to convince 30,000 Athenians to do something than it is a few thousand oligarchs in Sparta.

And we're on to kind of a mass hysteria, just like we've seen it.

We saw it after 2008 with the meltdown.

We saw it with the COVID going out, you know, the Karen phenomenon.

We saw it with the George Floyd riots.

We saw it with the Me Too.

And we're on this race kick.

And it's anti-intellectual, it's anti-empirical, it's anti-enlightenment, and nobody has the guts to talk about it.

But it does a lot of damage.

But we still have a little more to talk about it related

to Obama.

And Victor,

let's explore that a little bit right after these important messages.

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Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show again.

we're recording on the 29th of December, but this particular episode should be out on the 2nd of January.

Happy New Year, dear listeners.

So, Victor,

my friend, Ben Weingarten, you may know Ben.

He's all over the place.

He writes

for the Federalist American Greatness.

Real clear.

He's just a, and Ben's a terrific guy.

He has a piece in the New York Post the other day about

here's why Obama stepped in to save Harvard Pres Claudine Gay.

And I'm just going to read a very little passage here.

He said,

like Lafe or Gay broadly, Obama's intervention should be seen as a major salvo.

in the broader war over diversity, equity, and inclusion in America's most influential institutions.

Obama is making a play

to protect the DEI regime itself, a regime already royal by the backlash against wokeism and the Supreme Court's strike against affirmative actions in schools critical to maintaining political power.

So this is anyway, Victor, any thoughts about

that?

First of all, I want to warn everybody that I know the Supreme Court is the law of the land in terms of judicial rulings, but you have no idea the Machiavellian mind of of the academic administrator and the faculty.

They have prepared for this and they will do anything to continue race-based admissions hiring.

It won't matter.

They're lawless people.

So I know the Supreme Court says it's illegal to consider, but we had something called Prop 209 in California.

And I remember being on committees where I said, this is against California state law, because all we are doing is discussing these candidates in terms of their skin color and not their output or their teaching effectiveness or their academic record.

And it had no nothing.

It mattered nothing, nothing.

We had an affirmative action officer in every search.

And I said, it's against the law.

It says you can't do that.

Well, we're going to do it anyway.

And that's the attitude.

So

you tell me if the Supreme Court's going to have any effect.

I hope it does, but I think

they've already found ways to ignore it.

And

they'll war against it.

They really will.

And so

just to sidelight there, Jack, but

I think

we're not going to change this system

until people stand up, everybody stands up and says,

we're not going to do this anymore.

I'm not going to a separate graduation based on race.

I'm just not going to do it.

And we're not going to have dorms that are segregated by race.

We went too far in the civil rights movement and the Fair Housing Act to go back and say it's going to be separate but equal, just so long as all the dorms are, they're separate but equal, but

you can't have some Italian dorm, you can't have an Irish dorm, you can't have a Bulgarian dorm, you can't have a Greek dorm, you can only have a Latino, Asian, or black dorm.

That's the rule, isn't it?

And

who wants to go to a university like that?

And so

I don't know.

It's not going to change.

It's just like I did, do you think, Jack?

Just asking a rhetorical question: do you think that after that testimony and what has surfaced about President Gay, that the radical Palestinian pro-Hamas movements are feeling a little edgy, that they are not going to mass in Harvard Square or go to the library to disrupt people now because they're so afraid that she's going to clamp down them?

I don't.

I don't either.

I think these people

could be, should be

between a rock and a heart, but these people being the gaze of the world.

Victor, that, um, not that we didn't know about the atrocities of

the New York Times piece, I mean, oh my God.

It's stomach churning.

Everybody should read that.

This is coming from the most left-wing major newspaper in the United States.

And for them to do a thorough investigation

asterisk but they said they could confirm most of what the idea if not all of what they said these were women who were being raped and in the process of being raped were being tortured and killed these were

having her having rests yeah go ahead it makes you want to vomit yeah and these people on campus

what are they what are they um

what are they protesting for shutting down the bridge here's what they're protesting protesting for.

Because they didn't do, they didn't suddenly say,

oh, my God, Hamas did all this.

We can't condone that.

But at least Israel hasn't reacted.

No,

they were cheering when they did do this and they heard it.

That's what Mr.

Rickford, Professor Rickford at Cornell was doing when he said he was exhilarated on news of just what we talked about.

And so what are they protesting for?

They're protesting for Hamas and what Hamas does.

And there's there's a lot of good descriptions coming out.

People should just search IDF and reporting because finally there's a lot of reporters.

There's Hamas people who come out and they shoot behind people in wheelchairs.

They get into crowds of women and children and then shoot between the crowds at the IDF, etc.

They found suicide vests for small people, little kids.

You name it.

Any pre-modern savage act that they're capable of doing.

And remember, there are peace negotiations going on now that have one caveat.

There will be elections and let the people of Gaza decide.

If they want to elect, I have no doubt they'll probably elect Hamas again.

But let's get an international election supervised, just like they do in Israel.

They have elections and then let the West Bank.

And guess who's against it?

All of the Palestinian leaders.

Hamas won't consent to it.

No, no, we're not going to have an election.

No, no, no, no, no.

We're going to use shields.

We're going to build our headquarters under hospitals and mosques and schools.

And we're going to rape women even after we take them captive.

And we're going to torture people and we're going to mutilate them and we're going to decapitate them.

And we're going to use children as suicide

attackers.

And we're going to use old people and young girls and hide behind them.

And we're going to take all the multi-billion dollars we've gotten from every foreign source, and we're going to build our own tunnel and protect us, us.

And that's who they're protesting for.

And when you look at the vehemence of these protests, it raises some interesting questions.

What happens if Hezbollah jumps into this and starts attacking not just a random rocket, but starts attacking seriously the United States?

people in Syria and Iraq?

Or what happens if Iran and we get in?

Well, who are these people going to be protesting for?

I have a feeling they'd be protesting for Hamas against us because actually after all, there's 30 American hostages, some who have been killed.

And excuse me, 10 American hostages.

They killed 30 Americans.

They didn't say anything.

These people are basically saying, we're for Hamas, and we don't really care you killed fellow Americans.

But of course, some of them are not Americans who are protesting.

And so

I don't think they have have any particular fondness for Americans to be victims of these radical people.

30% of young people said they thought bin Laden was right.

So that's the problem.

And all of this is predicated on an assumption, Jack,

that Joe Biden and the people around him and that

left-wing mentality won't do anything.

And that permeates foreign and domestic.

It means if you're an American soldier from Iowa and you're 20 years old and you're stuck in some god-forsaken place up near Mosul

and some kind of base trying to train Iraqi security forces

and they're shelling you, they're not going to do anything.

You're not going to be able to retaliate in a substantial way that will protect you through deterrence.

They're not.

And that means if you're an American and you're taken hostage by Hamas, they're not going to try to pay $1.2 billion to get you back like they did with Iran.

They're not going to do it.

And that means if you're on a visa from Gaza or from the West Bank and you go out to the Golden Gate Bridge and you shut down traffic and you stop critical

medical vehicles that have organ transplant, they're not going to do anything to you.

Nothing.

Nothing.

And

this is an administration that's quite capable of doing things.

I mean, think about these people that are in jail for 10 or 12 years for illegal parading and things like that on January.

So they're capable of it.

They're just not going to do anything when it's a question of U.S.

interests or security.

They're not going to do anything.

And that's who's Oxus Gord.

You know, Victor, if we can get back, I just want to mention to since we mentioned the New York Times

that the article is from December 28th, anyone who wants to go look for it.

It's titled Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7th.

And again, it does have some stomach-churning

accounts.

And

I didn't get to the end of it because I was just

sick of reading it.

I couldn't finish it.

But I don't think it ends with any kind of home-based political analysis of,

you know,

where's the Me Too left

that

that should be, and we've talked about

where are the feminists in the face of even before October 7th, you know, where's where the feminists with the oppression of women in the Middle East, et cetera.

And, you know, leftist women are a big part of the leftist coalition.

And leftist women are, white women are a lot of the bodies out in the streets protesting.

And I'm sure they were out, you know, protesting when Kavanaugh was accused

of that crazy lady.

I think this article and the accounts of what had happened truly exposes

the feminist left.

But your point would might be they don't, they're not,

they're not going to react to it.

They're not going to, you know, they're not going to have it come to Jesus.

They never, they don't.

They don't care about that because this whole movement is anti-Semitic and hates Jews and by association does not like white people and they've conflated Jews with whites and they suffer the double wage of being Jewish and supposedly the evil white settler colonial.

But you know, what's funny is these demonstrators mirror image exactly the divide in Gaza right now.

So when you look at these demonstrations, is there anything, Jack, they won't do?

Will they deface the Lincoln Monument?

Yes, they will.

Will they crash a nativity scene?

Yes, they will.

Will they surround students and threaten to hurt them in the library?

Yes, they will.

Will they spit on a police officer and get arrested?

Will they disrupt traffic and cause mayhem?

Yes.

Will they beat a protester to hit him and have him fall and die?

Yes.

And will the other side do that?

No.

Do the Israelis, when they they go in, do they systematically rape Gazan women, Hamas women?

There's women in Hamas.

When they take them prisoner, do they put them in an Israeli jail and they say, okay, guys, decapitate and rape?

They don't do that.

And

the same thing when you have these protestiers is who's hitting the police?

Do all the pro-Israelis, do they go after the police?

I don't think they do.

I haven't seen any do.

And who wears masks, Jack?

How come every one of these demonstrations, half the people have some kind of face covering?

Why don't they be proud?

And now these students are very angry at these Ivy leagues that they've been doxed.

They call it dox.

It's public information.

They sign these petitions.

So some guy rents a truck with their picture on.

This is unfair.

So there's a whole element of passive aggressiveness that is here in America and here in Gaza.

So Hamas goes over in a time of holiday, a time of peace, and deliberately focuses on unarmed infants, children, women, elderly, and then tries to outdo each other in the most pre-civilizational savagery possible, and then takes hostages and scampers off, and then tells the world that they're heroic and they've inflicted this on the Jewish state, and they're going to do it again and again and again, and let the Israelis, and then the Israelis come, and all of a sudden, You can't do this.

This is horrible.

This is disproportionate.

Well, why wouldn't you just say, bring them on?

We want to fight fight them.

And that's what I don't understand.

Why don't these students say, I'm here from Gaza and I hate this country and I don't like Joe Biden and I'm going to scream and yell.

And I'm going to, what are you going to do about it?

I'm going to go out in the Manhattan Bridge and shut it down.

I'm not going to hide behind a mask.

Here's my face.

But they don't.

It's this most aggressive,

venomous protest.

And then, as soon as there's even a tiny little pushback, and there's not much with this,

then they go all of a sudden into a fetal position and play victim.

And that's what Hamas is doing, playing victim.

You know, why don't they just go out and fight?

At least the Yom Kippur War, it was a surprise attack 50 years earlier, almost to the day.

The Egyptians and the Syrians, they used surprise, kind of sneaky, okay.

But the Egyptians went out there, and there were some atrocities on the Arab side, and there was a few on the IDF as I remember, not very many, not nearly as much.

But the point is they had a conventional fight and they went at it, right?

They didn't do this.

They didn't do what Hamas is doing.

They didn't hide behind civilians.

They didn't shoot their own people if they

objected to their theft of food.

They didn't steal humanitarian aid to build military tunnels onto the city.

And, you know, and this whole mindset is so crazy.

You read these stories, you think, am I crazy?

I was reading one the other day when they said IDF may be flooding tunnels and it could cause damage to the aquifer.

Another study says, IDF blowing up tunnels,

causing subterranean tremors.

Well, why would they be doing that?

It wouldn't be because they burrowed deeply under their own city and undermined it so they can wage offensive weapons and mutilate and rape, is it?

So I don't.

I hope there's an intrepid reporter or team of reporters out there that tries to find

these great philanthropists

who gave money to these NGOs, who gave money to Hamas, who used it to build.

these means of destruction and we've given

yeah we gave them a billion dollars in the past a billion you go back and read you should go back and I was doing that this week going back and reading news Googling Hamas elections Hamas

government 2006 seven eight nine it's just amazing how much money went to them from both administrations the Bush administration and the Obama administration

And it's just incredible how what an opportunity they had.

There was not one one Israeli in Gaza.

They had their election.

They picked their government.

They were just lavished with all these billions of dollars of foreign money.

They expelled all these Israelis.

They had developed greenhouses.

They got rid of them all.

All they had to do was just govern.

And, you know, they use these terms in the Middle East.

It's such lies.

I don't know where they get them here or they get them over there, but they say settler, settler, settler, settler, settler.

What is a settler?

What does that mean?

That means the

Jews have not been there for 3,000 years.

Is that what it means?

Are Arabs settlers who came in in the 7th century to what had been a

Roman, a Byzantine, a Roman, a Hellenistic, a Greek area?

Is that what they did?

Are they settling?

Is that what bin Laden's ancestor did when they went into Spain?

Were they settlers?

Is when the Lakota Sioux or the Dakotas go in and they wipe out another tribe and they take over their land, are they settlers?

Does anybody think the tripartite alliance that the Aztecs ruled over that

incorporated 4 million people around

Tenochtitlan?

Do you think they settled other people?

Do you think they suppressed other people?

Do they have any idea that settlers is settlers is settlers?

It's not a Western phenomenon.

Same with colonialism.

The Ottomans were the biggest colonialist of anybody.

So I don't get this settlers stuff.

Oh, they're white settlers.

They're settlers.

They're settlers.

Well, half of the Arabs are settling in places that were not...

What do you think North Africa was?

It was an indigenous Berber population.

And then the Phoenicians came and settled it.

And after...

The Phoenicians were driven out, the Romans came in and settled it.

And then they were driven out by the Vandals who settled it.

and then they were driven out by the Byzantines who settled it, and then they were driven out by the Arabs who settle it.

And the whole time the indigenous population of the Berbers is down to what now?

In Arab Morocco, Arab Algeria, Arab Tunisia, Arab Libya and Arab Egypt.

They're all been settled.

And the Berber population is in most of those countries less than 10%.

I think it's only 1 or 2% left in Libya.

So So, are they settlers?

You seem to have settled it for us there.

Refugees.

Refugees.

I couldn't believe they said there's a refugee camp.

There is no refugee camp.

If there's a refugee camp in Gaza, then there's a refugee camp in Cyprus where the 200,000 Greeks are sitting.

Their homes are called a refugee.

There must be a refugee camp in Germany because 13 million people were kicked out in a stove and walked across Eastern Europe from Prussia after being there a thousand years and had it taken over by the Poles mostly because the Soviets stole

Poland and called it Western Ukraine.

Are they settlers?

I don't know.

Are refugees?

I don't know.

So there's a lot of refugees in the world, but apparently they only exist in one place.

And there's a lot of colonialists that exist, but they're only a particular type of colonialists.

And there's a lot of imperialists, but there's only a certain type of imperialist that we criticize.

So

that's what is so ridiculous.

Enslave traders, you know, you have to have a special pedigree to truly be a slave trader.

Hey, Victor, excuse me.

We've got a little time left, and I want to ask you a question when we come back from this important message about something on your website.

And we'll get that question asked and hopefully answered right after this final important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Yes, that website of Victor's, The Blade of Perseus, you should be checking it out.

Fair and dear listener, go to VictorHanson.com and when you're there, you will see the links to Victor's various appearances.

You'll find the archives for these podcasts, the links to his books, including his forthcoming book, and

to his American greatness,

essays one a week, and his syndicated columns, and the ultra articles.

You'll click on it.

I want to read that.

That looks really interesting.

And you won't be able to open it unless you're a subscriber.

Five bucks a month.

$50 discounted for the year.

Treat yourself.

Victor writes two or three ultra pieces every week.

Victor, I'm on the website the other day, and I saw something in the upper

right-hand corner of the homepage.

It's brand new, and it's a painting of you.

And it's about a guy named John Robert Peck.

And

would you mind closing out the show and telling us?

I had a very strange experience.

Yeah,

he teaches classical painting at stanford and uh i got a message i think it was from neil ferguson or someone that he was painting people and when he i liked to pose and i've never done that before but i met him and he was a very what i liked about um

Mr.

Peck was he was a traditionalist.

He was talking about classical tropes.

So, you know, he was not a representational artist or he was not even, well, he likes the impressionist, but he captures what the eye sees.

And so he came to my office

for, I think, four times and did a charcoal, and then he did a painting.

But more importantly, was I looked at his portfolio, and then he had me for dinner at his home in the, I won't say where, but it was not too far away.

And I looked at a lot of the stuff he did, and it was really good.

And so I thought, well, maybe people would like to learn more about what he does and

his portfolio.

So I thought one way of doing it was:

I'm not a very good model because I'm a torn up, torn cat upstairs.

But

I've had a you distinguished looking from one of my

accidents.

I've had my torn lower lip was torn off and retached, basically.

But anyway, my point is:

he did that.

And I think people would might, if anybody's interested in hiring him as an artist or wants to take a class from him, I think he teaches special students.

He goes to,

I think he goes to Florence or somewhere near there in Italy every year.

So he's very distinguished.

He works in the Santa Cruz, Los Gatos, Palo Alto radius.

And he's very talented, very nice person, very well-educated.

And a great artist.

Yeah, I checked out his website in a video, and I'm like, wow, this guy, he comes across as very

much.

Yes,

he's not political.

He's not ideological.

He's just, if he has an ideology that a person would detect, it is a commitment to classical idealism and realism in art.

I think he's of a small school who's trying to say, you know what, we inherited this wonderful tradition of making statuary and sculpture and

oil and watercolor that represents

what the eye sees and not what we think will be

something for the time.

It made me think about that church.

You know that story about Churchill,

the formal portrait of Churchill?

Yes.

But that has been destroyed by Churchill, I believe, because it was not done in the way that John Robert Peck paints me.

Yeah, there's a famous one at Jerry Brown up in the, you know, he got a representational artist that looks kind of bizarre.

But anyway, I thought it would be good to do that.

I'm trying to do, as I get to be 70, I'm trying to do stuff I've never done before.

And I can tell you, I have never sat still for

to pose for a painting.

And I found it very enjoyable because he allowed me to talk to him.

And so I talked to these three or four hours about art and painting and Picasso and everybody.

And he had made a good, one just last note.

He made a good point that it's something that I used to teach classical art in my humanities classes, but

there's always a standard and then you deviate from the standard, which is classical art and the ability to paint and draw and then you go into modern art like a salvard or Dali or a Picasso, right?

But the deviation from the deviation gets you something else.

You get classical art, modern art, post-modern art, after modern art.

And the problem with the deviation of the deviation is they're not taught the skills.

So a guy like Picasso could draw.

The Impressionist watercolors could draw.

But the people who did not learn the classical tropes to rebel against can't draw.

So most of these paintings you see that you don't know what they are.

If you ask the person, could you make a portrait of something that a person could identify as someone?

No, they can't.

It's like classics.

I was taught by classical scholars in the classical sense, Greek and Latin philology, manuscripts, grammar, syntax,

the corpus of text you had to read, et cetera.

And then as I got in my middle age, there was a reaction.

I was not part of that reaction.

A lot of my colleagues were.

They said, oh, it's all Westocentric, and we're going to try to study feminism in the ancient world, or the real hero of the Odyssey is Penelope, not Odysseus, or, you know, Eumaeus the slave is non-spoken.

He's

politics of resistance, all that.

But the point is, they all were classically trained.

So you had a commonality.

They knew Greek and Latin.

And I could tell when I interviewed candidates over that period that even when they were left-wing and trying to be bold in their research on the rhetoric of manhood, the poetics of masculinity, all these theses that they had that was common in the night,

they knew Latin and Greek.

But they, when they took over, they did not teach people what they had been taught is what I'm saying.

So the next deviation from the deviation,

I can tell you when you read their work, they don't know Latin or Greek.

They do not know much about the ancient world.

They just write crap.

And the same thing is true about a lot of the contemporary representational artists.

They've never been taught the classical skills in drawing and proportion and anatomy, etc.

And then you have that three cycles and then it breaks down and then somebody comes along and says, well,

we had this classical tradition and then we experimented with all sorts of nice things to do and it was interesting.

And then the next generation was just

chaos.

So now we're going to go back and start over.

And it's circular.

So I hope that happens.

I think all of us are tired of the postmodern world.

We've tried, you know, we all grew up with saluting the flag and singing God bless America.

And then we went in and we had the people with, you know, that rebelled against all that.

And yet they were trained by that World War II generation.

And then they took over.

They were marching on the Pentagon, they're in the Pentagon.

They were marching on the university, they're in the president's office.

But they did not continue that chain of knowledge.

And this current generation doesn't know anything.

30% think bin Laden's good.

If you ask them what the Battle of Fredericksburg was or what the Battle of the Bulge, well, they have zero idea.

So it's time to go back and start over.

Yeah.

I can tell you what the Battle of Fredericksburg was someday.

I think I might have mentioned it.

I lived on

Marie's Heights.

You told me that.

It's very funny because,

my God, that Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and maybe Gettysburg.

Pennsylvania Courthouse.

Gettysburg could have been one.

And I don't know what would have happened if James.

James Long Street.

If he turned the plank, right?

Yeah, and gone right down into an unprotected rear of Washington.

Yeah.

And I think they would have had a settlement.

So it was very lucky that Lee did not listen to some other advice.

Did I see you on talking about this with Laura?

Were you on?

Or not Laura, somebody else?

I did.

The ignorance of the Civil War.

No, I said that last night.

I was on Kaylee McAhie.

I was on Jesse Waters.

Yeah.

Oh, she was substituting.

Yeah, I like her a lot.

I don't know her, but she's been substituting.

And it seems like when I'm doing stuff this week, she's the host.

I'm doing one in about two hours.

Hey, I don't know who the host is.

It might be her.

But she asked me, they were talking about Nikki Haley in the Civil War

and how everybody pounced on her.

And I made a point that

she was an artful.

That was her sin because there's internal improvements, there's tariffs, there's new territories coming into states, into the Union, there's nullify.

These were all issues, but they all in some way were tangential or had something to do with slavery.

She didn't say that.

But she did say it was about government and the freedom of the citizen.

By extension, I think think she just thought,

well,

if you're talking about freedom for everybody, obviously you're talking about the end of slavery.

But she didn't articulate.

So they jumped on her.

And then I said this was ironic because these people know nothing about the Civil War.

And I've spoken, you know, I've spoken at four or five hundred universities the last, I don't know, 45 years.

And I always would ask students, is there a class in the

in your catalog on the Civil War?

And if there is, it's always Harriet Dubman or Women behind the lines or sexuality among the troops.

Never classical study of the Civil War.

So they don't know any of that.

And that guy was a plant that asked the question that she didn't answer the way she should have.

And then I just finished by saying, if you really want to get angry at people that are racially insensitive, get mad at Joe Biden because this guy prays to the skies, James O.

Eastland and Herman Talmage.

And don't believe, don't listen to Victor.

Listen to Spartacus and

Steve Bowen.

Yeah,

Camela Harris.

Camela Harris, they both said he was a racist when they ran against him.

And then when he was president, he's called two subordinates boy.

He called two journalists or blogger and a host junkie and you ain't black.

You ain't black, right?

And we'll never forget, oh, how can you beat this?

Barack Obama is the first mainstream black candidate, African-American candidate that's clean, and he's articulate too.

I remember Barbara Jordan, who wasn't a more articulate candidate than her.

And he,

then he went to that crowd of black professionals and said, they're going to put you all back in chains, Mitt Romney is.

Remember that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Y'all, yeah, he all stood up to it.

So he's had a whole history of racism.

And every time, and you know, I mentioned that, I don't know if I should have, but I said, if you want, and you can also go reference the text that were on the laptop.

You remember that scene where he's talking to his niece or is it his sister about, I think it's his cousin, about procuring women for him?

And he says, no Asian, I don't like them, don't want Asians.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then she says, don't worry, I don't do Asians or something.

So if you want to get a family that's dysfunctional, but has racial proclivities, that guy should be held to account.

Not Nikki Haley, who, according to their own,

remember the logic of DEI and woke is if you're a person quote unquote of color, you're not capable of being a victimizer.

You're permanently and forever a victim.

So she's half Indian.

So how can a person like that be, of course, I think Kaylee mentioned that she had, you know,

allowed statues to be taken down of Confederates and stuff.

Anyway, I admire Kaylee because when I remember her as a press secretary, she was kind of diminutive, you know, small, petite.

And she'd go out there and there would be this whole crowd, mostly of men, right?

And they hated Trump.

And they'd scream and yell at her and try to.

And unlike Karen, she didn't lie.

She just would just take a deep breath and then she said, no, actually, here is.

And she had all those facts.

And she was really good.

I thought she was an excellent press secretary.

If Trump is the nominee and he wins, he could do no worse than having her come back.

She'd be great.

Yeah, well,

let's see.

I wouldn't want her to do that, though, because that would be one of the worst jobs in the world.

Oh, we would see the

dichotomy

immediately.

I suggest if Trump is nominated and Trump wins, that the next press secretary wears hoplite armor.

Who was his first press secretary?

I can't remember his name.

Oh, come on.

Oh,

Sarah Huckleby Sanders.

No, before her.

Oh,

Sean Spicer.

Spicer, yeah.

I mean, like the first moment,

he was like torched right out of the box.

Yeah, he's a very nice guy.

He was at Newsmax for a while.

I think he's at News Nation.

I did a couple of his shows.

I like him, but I don't know what happened.

I think he wasn't ready for the venom and hatred.

I think his attitude was, wow, this is not a press secretary's job.

This is target practice.

I'm not going to it.

And then you looked at Sarah Huckleby Sanders' face.

It was like, oh my God, these people are really crazy and mean, aren't they?

And they hate us.

Yes, they do.

And

I think it wore her out.

Well, they know when to

turn it on, and they know with Biden when to turn it off.

I don't know.

I don't know if Trump is still on good terms with Kaylee, but if he is, he should get her back because

I liked her.

Something about her I like about her attitude and her energy.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, she's very, very pleasant, it seems.

All right, we have to wrap this.

She's very knowledgeable and prepared.

Prepared is what I'm thinking.

Nobody out-prepared her.

Unlike Corinne-Jean-Pierre, who doesn't seem to know anything.

Likes to bat her eyes and

show the

makeup on the top lid.

All right, Victor, quickly, two comments I have to read as we close out this show.

One is from Pamela 7644, who writes about, we had this conversation a couple of podcasts ago.

She writes,

Christopher Hitchens' stories

were great.

The tequila and your son calling any number he can find made my mouth drop open at the results.

The ruptured appendix, surgery, and all meds all coming together, amazing.

You have led an extraordinary life as a plain old farmer.

Wonderful.

That's from the moment.

All I'll say about that is I owe my life to my son happened to be home when I called.

Let's sell.

He happened to see a number.

He called it.

It happened to be Christopher Hitchens who called Donald Rumsfeld, who happened to call a official who was in Iraq, who happened to know of a doctor who was there, who happened to have a whole suitcase full of antibiotics and expertise about how to treat somebody who'd had a ruptured appendix.

And I happened to have an Egyptian guy who just happened to be there training Libyans that night in his pajamas.

And he'd never taken out a ruptured appendix and we had not very good facilities, but he did it.

Yeah, you're again, Victor, I said before, you're indestructible.

And I thought that seems the fates and God wants you to keep on keeping on.

Now, I have one other comment to read.

And Victor, this cannot lead to any recounting or updating.

This is from USS Tommy, who writes, thanks for the, it's titled, Thanks for the Optimism.

And he writes, sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel starts to get very dim.

Thank you for brightening it up.

By the way, how are you handling your pickup truck issue?

I apologize to everybody, Jack.

I did because I was exuberant.

I got this letter and it said, Mr.

Hansen, your repurchase request has been approved.

You will be hearing, we need your driver's license, your pink slip, your registration, and your bill of sale.

If you own it, please get these documents ready.

You'll be hearing with somebody immediately.

Nothing for three weeks.

Nothing.

And then the dealer,

because apparently I have to have it fixed before they'll buy it back.

And it's not fixed.

There's one really wonderful guy there who's been very nice to me, but the rest is, it's like, yeah, the parts in LA next week.

Yeah, parts in L.A.

I don't know.

I guess the parts in LA.

You think the part's still in L.A.?

That's been going on since October 16th.

And I took three and a half weeks to get there because I called every day.

Can I get in today?

Yes.

Can I get in today?

Yes.

So I get these great letters from people who have echo diesels, and they are two types, Jack.

Right.

They're a wonderful truck.

I have 300,000.

They're quiet.

They get 30 miles the gallon.

And they like them.

And then the other is,

Victor, remember, it's 260 horsepower.

It's a six-cylinder engine.

It does have up to, I don't know,

400 torque, and they say it can tow 11,000.

Don't believe it.

It's a six-cylinder engine.

It's very small cubic engine.

It's a diesel.

And oh, by the way, you think you're getting 30 miles the gallon with your four-wheel drive in the freeway, but you're not.

Victor, Victor, Victor, you're not computing the entire cost.

Diesel fuel can run from 10 to 50 cents higher per gallon.

Count that in.

Victor, the oil changes have to be more frequent.

Compute them over the life of the car.

Victor, they're more

oil changes.

Toll it all up as I have, and you will see that it's nominal economy.

You better go back and just get a V8 Hemi.

I've got that letter a couple of times.

You know what's weird about it is, though, I'm really enjoying this because the number of people who know so much about

Rams,

I can get a PhD in Ramonology now.

No, I mean, they're schooling me on every aspect.

Yeah,

I got to say something.

There's something about the American guy who likes trucks.

They know everything about them.

They do their own maintenance.

I was used to, I've really fallen.

Before I wasted my life writing, writing, writing, I used to change oil and fix things.

And I knew a lot about trucks.

In my senality, I forgot most of what I learned.

But I love these letters.

But anyway, the last thing I'll say because we got to go is I'm on hold, but I have an offer from not the dealer, but Stellantis that owns Dodge Ram to buy it back.

And I just hope they give me credit for now, what will be six months of no use.

And then if I get enough money and I have enough money, I'm going to go right out and buy a V8 Hemi

Ram.

You see how well I did at keeping you from talking about this.

I know.

I can't stop about it.

I'm getting,

I don't, I say to myself, I always say not this week.

I'm not going to talk about this.

Well,

folks are interested.

Thanks, USS Tommy, for your

kind words and Pam7644 and everyone else who leaves comments on Victor's website, The Blade of Perseus, or on iTunes and Apple.

So I think that's about it, Victor.

We'll be back soon.

Thanks all for listening.

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

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