Military Academies, Our Censors and the US Debt

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, the namesake.

That's Victor Davis-Hanson.

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

He has a website official, The Blade of Perseus.

And you will find that at victorhanson.com.

And towards the end of the show, I will be telling you why you should be subscribing.

Victor, lots of interesting things to get your take on.

And one of them is the Air Force Academy.

And we've talked in the past about well, not only the academies, but

the Pentagon itself, how DEI is run rampant.

But there's a really interesting article on the blog of AMAC, which has sponsored our podcast many times,

the Association of Mature American Citizens.

And it's about the troubling DEI consequences at the Air Force Academy.

And we'll talk about that, Victor.

We have a couple of

announcements for President, well, Jill Stein, maybe Joe Manchin, get your thoughts on that, and one or two other things.

And we'll get to all that right after

these important messages.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works.

Criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to home titlelock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple lock protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please, don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home titlelock.com slash Victor.

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

So, Victor, here's the headline: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Reign Supreme at the Air Force Academy.

And this was published on the AMAC blog.

It was written by Scott Sturman and Joe Arbuckle, who's a retired major general.

And

let me just read a bit here, Victor.

What does it say here about, I'm sorry, for the past 10 years, United States Air Force Academy has been immersed in DEI programming.

What are the results?

From 2017 to 2018, six permanent professors, including a department chairman, resigned from the Academy.

The timing, circumstances, and reasons are unknown, but in

a statement published last week, All of the professors pointed to sweeping cultural changes at the Academy.

In the open letter, they detail the actions of the Dean of Academics, who was disdainful of the honor code and averse to academic excellence.

The dean developed academic courses of low expectations to adapt to the scholastic aptitude of intercollegiate athletes.

An atmosphere of intimidation silenced full professors.

As the dean transferred power and influence to civilian faculty members, the degradation of the academic experience is so complete that the professors wonder if recovery is possible.

Victor, I have a feeling that this may

be the same thing happening, the Naval Academy at West Point, man, the Coast Guard Academy.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this kind of news?

Well, you know, the Air Force

traditionally was the one branch that didn't really have the recruitment problems because the idea was that it was

there were more technological applications in the post-service world for a person who enlisted.

It had that reputation.

When you go to the air, I've spoken there four or five times.

It really stresses technology more than, say, West Point or the Naval Academy.

And now, Jack, they're short 2,000 recruits, which doesn't seem like a lot, except the Air Force is not as big as the Army or the Navy.

So it's serious.

And I've been hearing when I have gone there, but I haven't gone there for about six years, but even then, there was a little bit of that woke stuff creeping in.

But now, you know, they have a, I think they have a diversity inclusion minor.

And they have, when this whole thing came out about Reading List,

Kendi, and I remember looking at their reading list, I think they had that guy in Star Trek.

Remember him, George Taki Sulu?

Oh, he's a raging lefty.

Yeah, a gay guy.

And he had a whole manifestation about how awful the United States was in one of his books.

I don't know if that was the one that was designed, but you were getting a lot of criticism about the Air Force Academy's woke agenda.

And this is very important because

one of

the way we maintain deterrence is traditionally when American pilots go up in the skies, whether it's in the Balkans or whether it was during the Reagan

era against the Libyans.

or whether it's in the skies over the eastern Mediterranean, nobody screws around with them because they're superior and they're usually their planes are superior.

The pilots are considered the best in the world.

And when you start tampering with that, and you have sort of like Stanford University word lists where you can't use the word mom or dad because some Air Force academies,

children are children of one parent, or they suggest you say y'all rather than you.

You're really taking

As I said earlier, it's a sin of commission and omission.

You're not only destroying morale and sending a message to cadets there that your promotion and your career will not entirely be

adjudicated by merit, but it will have something to do with your race.

In other words, when you're in a class and you look around and you think, if I am non-white, I am going to get an edge, and if I am white, I'm going to not have that edge, and it has nothing to do with class.

So they do not ask my Middle Eastern cadet or my black cadet or my Latino cadet whether they were the children of dentists or doctors or oil money.

They don't care.

It's just superficial appearance.

So that's going to destroy morale, and it already has.

And that's why they're short recruitment and people don't want to teach there in the same degree they did in the past.

And

again,

there's no brave superintendents, commandant.

Nobody wants to go in there and say this is antithetical to battlefield efficacy.

And

it will eventually mean that really good people are not going to go into the Air Force.

And the people who were in there were going to get cynical because they feel they're not going to be promoted on how they fly a plane or shoot a missile or something.

And I don't know how we're going to maintain our preeminence unless you assume, and I don't assume it, but that these people think the United States is so far ahead of everybody else, that we're so powerful that we can afford to have a commissariat, a commissar system that monitors our ideology, sex, race, ethnic background.

And I don't think we are.

So I don't think we have any margin of error.

And China certainly doesn't do this.

Russia doesn't do this.

There's a reason why they don't do it.

And they did it before under Mao in China, and they did it under Stalin and Khrushchev, and probably Brezhnev as well, where they had commissars that used ideological criteria to adjudicate performance.

And they found they couldn't compete with us or the West.

It didn't do that.

Now the West is doing it and they don't.

It's

bizarre.

I'm wondering, you know, this is unfair.

I'm just springing this on you, but I'm wondering if

we shouldn't speculate, but the Army War College and the Naval Naval War College, first of all, they are

arms of the military, yes?

Or is there some semi-private kind of public-private thing there?

But whatever their status is,

do you think they may also be emerging hotbeds of DEI?

Is it infecting there too?

Do you have any idea about that?

You mean where again?

Naval War College?

Yes, yes.

Post-Naval graduate.

Yeah, absolutely.

All of them.

All of them.

Because

they're interconnected.

The Army War College.

I've spoken at the Army War College.

I've spoken at the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey.

I've spoken at the Naval War College.

Yes, absolutely.

And

because

once you set a standard that's not merucratic, people make the necessary adjustments.

So the word gets out, you're going to be...

promoted not how many times you landed on a carrier, for example, in the Navy and you didn't hit the third cable, you were just perfect, but

on your race or gender or ethnic background.

And then that's going to mean that a lot of people won't take that as seriously as they will the other criteria.

And that will be permeating throughout the entire services.

And you know that because we had Mr.

Gilliad, was his name Gilead?

Gilead, the head of Chief of Naval Operations, Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defense.

shortly after George Floyd, I think it was June 2021, we had those congressional hearings and they were talking about white rage, white privilege, white supremacy, Professor Kendi,

be a racist to be an anti-racist.

And they were just fools.

They just got up there and made a fool of themselves.

And they just parroted all these lines and they just simply lied to it.

And then when we get out of Afghanistan,

I still shudder.

I know I beat that horse to death, but a pride pride flag on the embassy as you're humiliated.

And then we have a press conference, and this Air Force lackey says, I want to assure you that we had special Mediterranean food for our Afghan friends that were airlifted back to the United States.

I think that is the least consideration.

How about the thousands of people you left there?

We should talk about that, not whether they had the right type of humas or something dip for their Mediterranean

meal.

That shows you

how it corrupts everything.

And it's so weird because if you study the cultural revolution under Mao or what happened to the Soviet army, the Red Army in the first year of the invasion by Germany, you can see where that leads to.

It just means that your whole system breaks down and it breeds just, you know.

Go watch

Enemy at the Gates and see what a comas are.

I know it's a fictional, it's it's based on a real story, supposedly, but you can see how, even in a fictional context, all the criteria that go into making

decisions that are not based on battlefield, but on propaganda, or public relations, or advancement.

Yes.

The Soviet Union said we're going to promote people that show the lot that are the loudest and the longest demagogues about the Soviet system and Marxism or, you know, Trotsky, Trotsky, not Trotsky probably, but Marxist

Leninist dogma.

And we just say the same thing with DEI.

And

I went on a rant in that last podcast, but when you, you know, the universities, the English department or classics department, I can see the damage there, but I don't think it's going to directly affect our F-35 program or the pilots.

in a rapid

this this does

and the people who are corrupting these academies come from the humanities or the social sciences.

And it's a very lucrative thing for a DEI contractor to get these bids and they go in and they say, read this and this and this, and you're racist, this, this, this.

You over there are victims.

You over there are victimizers.

Hey, you back there are an oppressed.

You next to me are an oppressor.

And that's just designed to divide people.

I don't know where anybody got this idea that diversity was good.

It's always unity.

Diversity is a challenge.

Diversity of opinion might be good, but to divide up a society by your superficial appearance and call that's divisiveness, not diversity.

And unity is what you want.

Well, Victor.

Talk to our listeners for a second.

If you're too busy with holiday plans to cook and you want to make sure you're eating well, well, you can do that with factor.

Skip the extra trip to the grocery store and the chopping, prepping, and cleaning up too, while still getting the flavor and nutritional quality you need.

Factor's fresh, never-frozen meals are ready in just two minutes.

So all you have to do is heat and enjoy.

And for our listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show, Factor is giving you 50% off.

Head to factormeals.com slash Victor50 and use that code Victor50, Victor50, and use it to get 50% off.

Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal delivery service, can help you fuel up fast for breakfast, lunch, and dinner with chef-prepared, dietitian-approved, ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door.

You'll save time, eat well, and stay on track with your healthy lifestyle while tackling all your holiday to-dos.

So, again, head to factormeals.com/slash Victor50 and use the code victor50 v-i-c-t-o-r50 to get 50% off.

That's code victor50 at factormeals.com slash

victor50 to get 50% off.

And we thank factor for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, let's get a little

American

politics

political.

A couple of news stories this past week.

One is

after all he's done, after all Joe Biden has done to destroy the American energy industry and to kiss the tukas of the

AOC and the green agenda,

the green lady, Jill Stein, is announcing she's going to be running for president.

Kind of seems like a middle finger to

Joe Biden.

If the Republicans blow this, this is an election delivered up on a golden platter.

It's a big fat turkey.

I mean, think about it.

You've got a president that is suffering a quadfecta

of A, corruption.

It's mounting, mounting.

To use the left's term, the walls are closing in.

Then you've got dementia that he doesn't know where he is or who he is half the time.

And then you have his polls that show him below 40% increasingly.

And then you have his record on the border, on crime, on energy, on foreign.

It's a disaster.

And if they can't defeat this guy

with that alone, it's unfathomable.

But now you add these other things that you just talked about.

So

Joe Biden is going to have Robert Kennedy, whatever you say about, well, he'll take as many from Trump.

No, he's a left-winger.

And then you're going to have Jill Stein, who did some damage to Hillary in 2016.

And then the black vote is starting to defect slightly from Biden.

Maybe it would be

he'll only get, I don't know, 85%, which would be very important given Obama got 96.

And Cornell West will add to that.

That's number three.

And then you have Joe Manchin lurking out there that he might be third way, kind of a Joe Lieberman type.

Right.

candidate, and he would take away, I think, a lot of suburbanites.

And you add it all together, and you've got four third-party possible candidates that would really hurt Joe Biden in addition to these other four things I said that are doing.

And if you can't offer a viable candidate and unite the Republican Party and spend it and raise as much money as the Democrats and ensure ballot integrity, then we deserve to lose.

Here are some of the, I know people have heard the swing state polls, but as we're talking today, and we we are recording on Saturday the 11th, I'm looking at real clear politics right now, Victor.

And the numbers are

in Wisconsin, Trump up two, Biden's up one in Michigan, Trump's up three in Pennsylvania, up nine in Georgia, up four in both Nevada and Arizona.

And those are Bloomberg

polls, and they seem to be

in Emerson's swing state polls has Trump 49-41 in Georgia.

Pennsylvania, he's up by four.

Nevada, he's up.

Again, Arizona.

So Wisconsin and Michigan are tight states, but still, those are, you know,

five out of six,

five out of seven, six out of seven, whatever.

Pro-Trump.

And Trump is one of them.

He's up by nine in Georgia.

And Trump's

going to be on trial in Georgia.

And that's interesting because remember

it was in Georgia that we lost not two close Senate races to Democrats, but two close Senate races to socialist Democrats, the hardest left probably in the entire U.S.

Senate.

And so that shows you that tragedy that basically Georgians want a conservative, viable alternative.

And when they're given one, and that is Joe Biden is not an alternative

to a conservative, they'll go for it.

But

it means that Georgia really isn't purple like everybody says it is.

And it can,

if Republicans offer a difference from this disastrous presidency, they'll win that state.

And that's good news.

Yeah.

Well, we don't have to go over, you know, rehash, relitigate

those special elections, but

you know, Donald Trump did.

I think there's some culpability there for those two socialist senators, and um,

and then the ensuing election was with um,

oh my gosh, I can't remember his name.

Herschel Walker was, oh my, my, my, what a candidate.

Um,

anyway, Victor, uh, we're going to, um, we're going to get your

views on the Stanford-Silicon Valley left-wing intersectionality and which you've written about on twitter slash x and we're going to get to that right after these important messages

we're back with the victor davis hansen show so victor we've mentioned this um

recently i have anyway on the show and uh you've been you've been very active on twitter over the last

couple of months.

Yeah, I've never done it in my life until the last

five weeks.

It was an inert Twitter account that my,

when I was at, I am at the Hoover Institution, people in their social media were using it to advertise things like this.

I think it had, I don't know, 240,000.

My daughter decided that she wanted to help, and so she suggested she would

encourage me to start doing it and not to just to put a one or two lines, but maybe have many columns.

So, I've been doing that for about five weeks.

We are up to, I think we're up to about 460,000 now.

And so, there is an audience for it.

Yeah, that's very, very

great stuff.

And again,

it's on top of what you already write for American Greatness, syndicated column, your ultra pieces for

your website.

And now you're doing some significant writing for

X.

And

Victor, you're a machine.

I don't get how you've

writing.

You have to be careful because I hope it's

each time you write something additionally, and if I do three ultras and then two columns and I do three little mini tweets, you can see it's eight things a week.

You're getting up to, you know,

six, seven thousand words.

So you don't want to, and you have to research the stuff.

You just don't want to blather.

So you can lose the quantity of quality.

So, I'm not going to keep that pace up.

One of the things I'm going to stop doing is speaking out of state in January, and that'll help a lot.

Well, we'll get to this particular treat, but I do have to say, I got some emails from folks who, you know, they people hear partial, and they thought you were retiring totally.

I think I will be

speaking out of state.

I, you know,

since September, I got kind of over.

I had long COVID and I'm starting to feel better.

And then, bam, I went eight days to Michigan, and then I went three and a half days to Texas, and then I went to Las Vegas, and then I went out back to Washington, D.C.

And then I'm on my, I'm down, I've gone three times to Los Angeles, and now I'm on my way to Milwaukee tomorrow, early morning.

And then I've got to come back and go back to Palm Beach.

So it's just

you get tired of the road warrior Ing and you've had

you know I travel a lot too, but and we trade notes sometimes on but you are the king of of uh travel chaos

it's hard to fly out of Fresno, California and get a connection.

And when I go to San Jose or San Francisco, then I have a three-hour drive to my farm.

Or if I'm not staying at my apartment in Palo Alto.

So, and it's hard to get connections these days.

We even I talked about air travel and

blank-blank disaster a lot of times.

I'm getting so tick of

near, near, you know, touch down on the ground, then take off again.

Those near-misses or fly around.

I'm getting tired of

the

16 wheelchairs

go onto the plane, and then when you go to a connection, suddenly everybody's been cured of their ailments and three people need assistance getting off.

And, you know, the guy comes in with,

you know, it looks like a cargo box for his carry-on ways on a cell phone,

you know, blocking the entrance.

And you're, it's just little things that make you neurotic or something.

I'm not, that's not my anxious.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't like it anymore.

It's not like it was.

You rich listeners out there, get a private plane.

Maybe

Victor to your neighborhood that way.

Anyway, Victor, back on this, this post, Stanford, Silicon Valley, left-wing politics, intersectionality.

It begins.

The House Judiciary Committee just revealed how the Department of Homeland Security worked with Stanford University to form a disinformation group.

Victor, you write some takeaways on this.

Why did you write this?

Well,

we've known that the Biden administration

and even before the Biden administration, deep moles in the Trump administration, the bureaucracy, especially the FBI, were working with Twitter, for example, to

censor the news.

And even they had,

I think they paid Twitter $3 million.

They have 11 former employees there, including their general counsel, Mr.

Baker, who retired and got, I think, I don't know, five or six times his salary or more to work for Twitter.

But

there was something called the Stanford Internet

Laboratory.

They have all different names for it.

And anyway, the point I'm making is that they were

actively engaged with the Department of Homeland Security to, quote-unquote, form a disinformation group, which means that any information that they came across on the news that they found was not helpful to the progressive agenda would be suppressed.

And they partnered with the Election Integrity Partnership.

Just remember, when it's anything to do with the left,

whether the extreme left, like the People's Republic of, you know, blank, blank, it's not a republic.

And when you say election integrity partnership, it means it's the opposite.

It is the election

biased partnership.

And when it partners with the Stanford Internet Observatory, it's not observing anything.

It's the Stanford's Internet Action Group.

And so one of the people that was involved in that project actually came to the Hoover Institution and gave a lecture and I think was in some ways affiliated.

I was shocked by that because I followed that person's career and it's not.

Who was that, Victor?

I don't want to mention it because I have sort of a

private code that I don't criticize the institution

with detail that hires me, but I was very upset about that because

that we

it wasn't an, I will say in our defense, it wasn't a permanent academic.

It was a visiting billet.

But it gave that person

the, I don't know, the cachet that he was representing us.

And he wasn't.

He was part of this Stanford Internet Observatory,

as I remember.

And they pervert, I mean, it's a perversion of academia to use these people.

from Stanford University, and then they partner with Silicon Valley,

and they partner with Homeland Security.

And the whole purpose of it is to suggest that a laptop that is obviously Hunter's possession is somehow not, and any information contrary to that in the public realm will be censored or suppressed.

And we've talked about Google searches that are warped to have the order of the results favor a particular point of view.

The point of that tweet, and I wrote up in May of this year, if anybody wanted, Roger Kimball edits a wonderful magazine called New Criteria.

And I wrote an article about the nexus or the trifecta of

Stanford, Bay Area politicians, Silicon Valley.

So where the $9 trillion in market capitalization of Google, Facebook, Meta,

Apple,

Twitter, all of those groups put together, then you compound it with the academic academic sheen of respectability that Stanford impugs.

And Stanford trustees come from there.

Stanford employees, high employees go to their boards.

It's symbiosis.

And then you add all of that to, as I said, the barrier politicians.

And you have to ask yourself, Jack, why is it that this little place, this a total disaster, San Francisco, by any barometer,

any barometer, it is a one-party city.

It's got homes.

It's got crime.

It is filthy.

It's a beautiful city.

They got a wonderful inheritance and they destroyed it.

But it has produced Diane Feinstein, who we know had a Chinese spy as her chauffeur, whose husband had sizable investments in China, who was very, I thought, for somebody that I had some modicum of respect for, I thought she was awful during the Kavanaugh hearings.

And then we got Nancy Pelosi in that same basically zip code, no need to elaborate, Nancy.

And then we got Gavin Newsom.

And then

we got

Jerry Brown, who was mayor of Oakland, that area, and before he was governor.

And of course, we got Barbara Boxer, who was famous for election denialism.

She was the only senator in 2004 to try to stop the Electoral College.

We forget about that because now that's considered insurrection.

She was leading the House members, even though she was in the Senate.

So you have all of those people, and that group together is very toxic.

I don't know why the nation looks toward its national leadership, but if you look right now, Jack, the second most powerful person in the United States, Camela Harris, is from the Bay Area.

And the formerly third most powerful person was Nancy Pelosi from the Bay Area.

And the governor that everybody's talking about for president

as a candidate is from the Bay Area, Gavin Newsom.

And his predecessor who ran for president, I think three times, Jerry Brown, was from the, was active as an office holder from the Bay Area.

And probably the most prominent woman in the last 50 years in the U.S.

Senate was from the Bay Area, Diane Feinstein.

Don't forget Willie Brown.

And Willie Brown was a national figure.

And that was because

they felt that

the twin universities of Berkeley, Stanford, give them sort of an Ivy League patina.

And then they had all this money behind them from Silicon Valley.

And the result of it is, as I wrote, Stanford, you know,

people who go to Stanford never let anybody, they always let everybody know they went to Stanford because we don't have the Ivy League out here.

We don't have Princeton, Yale, Harvard in a row.

We have one

private university with a huge endowment, almost $40 billion, Stanford.

And

it's an arrival from supposedly the top flight of the nine UC campuses, Berkeley.

And traditionally, those two anchored the West Coast higher education excellence.

At least that's what they tried to sell people.

And, you know, in my family from this little farm, my mother went as a BA and a JD.

Her sister went with a BA and an MA.

This is long ago.

My nephew went there.

My first cousin, who was more like our sister, grew up with us.

She went there.

I went there.

And there was something to be said for it.

I just remember the classics PhD program was very rigorous, and there was no woke or DEI, anything other than intellectual rigor.

And I think that was true of the other people.

But now,

I mean, we had during the

October 7th aftermath, we had this lecturer, Loggins.

He was the architect of Colin Kaepernick's transformation into a so-so athlete, into a stark raving madman, a racist.

And he's teaching a class at Stanford on the basis of that mentorship.

And what does he do?

It takes him a nanosecond,

Jack, to hear that a bunch of Jews, I guess that's what he would say, but

1,400 Jews are butchered in the most savage

manner imaginable.

And he's separating Jews in his class.

He says, you go over there, you're Jewish, leave your property over there, and now you know how it feels.

So that was a big embarrassment.

And then,

you know, I mentioned earlier that when Ben Shapiro spoke, they had kind of insect repellent cans, you know, Ben Be Gone, kind of playing on the theme of gassing Jews, and nobody did anything about it.

You know, they were sort of, oh, we don't want to do that.

We find that disturbing.

Can you imagine if the target of that had been Latinos or gays or blacks or women, they would have gone crazy.

And then we had, you remember the

Stanford Law School, Judge Duncan fiasco, where finally the trans crowd people were saying, I hope your daughter's raped and the DEIs are hijacked.

And then we come, of course, to the most infamous Stanford scandal, and that is

Sam Bankman Freed, who I think, except for George Sorrells, gave the most money to candidates, but like George Sorrells, who's banned today, Jack, from going to France because he's a convicted felon and he manipulated at one time the financial markets to almost break the Bank of England.

So following in that Bernie Madoff George Sorrells tradition, Bankman Freed

you know, destroyed the fortunes of a lot of people while he siphoned money to Democratic candidates in 2020 and earlier.

And then his professor, Professor Freed and Professor Bankman, leftist professor, she

funneled dark money, I think up to $40 million from Silicon Valley people who didn't want to be known, which I think we're always told by Jane Meyer and other liberals is horrible, dark money.

And all that.

That's what the leftist experts are at now.

And he was an equity tax lawyer.

And now we find out that that both of them were very busy,

intricate tied in with their son's nefarious career.

And we have that great email when the father, remember, Professor Bankman says, Sam, is something wrong?

I thought I was promised a million dollars for consulting.

Not a basically a measly $200,000 a year.

And then all of a sudden they ended up with $16 million in real estate property.

And then he was on the Stanford campus in house arrest, house arrest, after destroying the whole reputation of the cryptocurrency market and destroying the fine, almost destroying the financial markets.

And he's out in his lawn about a quarter mile from where my apartment is.

And then suddenly we learned that he was using that

leniency by the court to tamper with witnesses on his computer, apparently.

And then we had the Theranos-Ponzi scheme that Stanford was involved in, in in the sense that Elizabeth Holmes was a Stanford graduate.

You say, don't blame her, Victor.

She didn't graduate, really.

She dropped out.

Yes, but she got the idea for this Ponzi scheme while at Stanford.

And yes, she was on the Stanford campus ubiquitously raising money and trying to develop contacts.

And yes, I will not name their names.

out of,

I don't know what, but there were four members of my institution that were on her board, three members, and another person that was sometimes associated with us at Hoover.

And that was a classic Ponzi scheme.

It was completely, that was one thing that John Ioannidis, who was vilified unfairly by Stanford University for his skepticism about the efficacy of the lockdowns, had exposed Jack.

And he basically wrote a series of articles and said, the idea you can take one drop

and put it on an iPhone, and you're going to be able to get a complete readout of a person's blood

profile with that very microscopic sample of blood is absolutely ridiculous.

And he warned people.

Nobody listened to him.

And then we had the elimination of the harmful language.

You remember that, Jack?

Can't say, what, American?

Can't say immigrant.

And we had that.

I could go on and on and on, but

100 years of all that, more than 100 years, 150 years of building a great institution and watching one generation in the last 15 years, and I'm not even talking about the forced leverage resignation of our president at Stanford and his constant denials, and maybe they fired him for other reasons other than his culpability or exposure on scientific research.

I don't know.

I'm not qualified.

to adjudicate that.

But my point is, one generation in the last 10 years did almost everything they could to destroy the reputation of that university.

And there was one common denominator.

They were all people of the left.

And they felt that any means necessary to advance an election or to further the progressive cause or to highlight particular issues like the trans issue or to find a veneer of liberality to mask your greed, you name it, they employed.

In the process, they destroy the reputation of a great university.

I'm not even getting into the reparations type of admissions because they are now boasting on their website that only 20% of the students that they admitted this past year were white, even though the general population, I think, is

70% white, and even among young people, it's at least 55 or 60%.

So they're deliberately using racial quotas, and they abolish the SAT scores as a requirement.

And then the San Jose Mercury and other venues ran stories bragging that Stanford had refused, given the particular year, 60 to 70% of those who had taken the SAT, either optionally or as earlier required, and got perfect scores.

You've got to be a genius to get a perfect score on the SAT.

You really do.

I took it as a college student, and I took the GRE form.

It's very hard to get a perfect score.

And yet, why would you want anybody to know that you were rejecting 60 to 70 percent of the people who got perfect score?

You were recruiting them.

And yet, that is what this generation

did.

And I won't even get in.

I will get in.

I will get into what they did to Scott Atlas and Jay

Bacharia

and John Yannids.

And they just went out to vilify their reputations for what?

For suggesting that the lockdown, if we persisted, might entail greater cost both to our health and our economy than the virus itself, and that the vaccinations, while of some utility, but given the changing mutations and

unpredictability of the COVID virus,

would not be ironclad proof, 94, 96%, as Dr.

Fauci had promised.

And then they also suggested that if you were going to lock down a whole generation of school kids, then you were going to suffer family abuse,

miss cancer screening, the whole thing.

And they were completely

confirmed in all of their prognostications.

And we know now from studies abroad and here that what they warned about happened both economically, psychologically, medically to the United States.

And guess what, Jack?

Not one person from the Stanford Medical School who signed petitions damning Scott Atlas and even the people who attempted to yank his license have ever received, have ever given an apology to Scott or said, mea coppo, mea copo, I was wrong, including some of the top administrators who piled on.

And I will just end by saying I don't think universities should weigh in on every political event.

They're not an op-ed

section.

They're not pundits.

But they always pander.

So if there's there's any trans or race issue or green issue, they always try to pander and they weigh in.

And so when you hear news that 1,400 people are butchered and it's a national debate over anti-Semitism on campus, and you wait four days before you'll say a word about that at Stanford, it's pretty disgusting.

Yes.

tearing down posters at Stanford of captives.

These aren't pro anything.

They're just saying, please, in a humanitarian sense, let's not take captive.

And they tore those down.

So

as a graduate, I feel like I, I don't know what I feel, but I feel that that university has betrayed generation after generation after generation.

You know, when I come to work one day, and I've been gone traveling, and I go up in the tower at my address, and it's Junipio Serra Circle Boulevard, blah, blah, blah.

And I come in, I don't know where the name is.

And so I asked one of my assistants, where is it?

Oh, where were you?

They changed the name.

Why did they change the name?

Well, he whipped people in

the 18th century.

Oh, he did.

So founding the missions and introducing agriculture and trying to spread the gospel was, what, a crime?

Well, Indigenous people.

And

that's what the university was telling people.

Just change.

Well, I said, well, why don't they get rid rid of Junipio Serra Boulevard, the big one?

The big one.

Oh, we couldn't do that, the university says, because everybody likes that address and it's known.

Why don't we change the name of Stanford?

Because Leland Stanford, whom I think was a great guy, but according to the DEI standards, he was a racist for hiring

Oriental, it's a word he used, not me, labor, and then castigating them and saying we got to deport them after their usefulness is ended.

And he took land that apparently was, well, I don't know what it was, Chumash land or something.

Why doesn't Stanford call itself Chumash University?

But

I'm being facetious, but everybody knows what I mean, that they are selective in their outrage.

They always go for the misdemeanor

for the virtual signal, but they never go if they're going to be consistent in their

recklessness.

They never really change names.

Yale doesn't change its name.

They just go after particular little buildings and this and that.

And they tell everybody how wonderful they are when they're abjectly incompetent and amoral.

And that's what's happened to Stanford.

And I hope I'm not somebody taking glee in this.

I really hope that the next stand, they're looking for a president.

I hope they get a Larry Arn type of president or John Silber or someone of that or Max Nicias at USC, who did a wonderful job before he was railroaded out.

They get somebody of that caliber to come in and shake things up and restore the independence of that university and don't make it a dumping ground for left-wing administration, revolving door incompetence, or partner to spy on people or to make phony Ponzi schemes that originate out of the university and have people from the university on their board or

host somebody like Sam Bankman-Fried

on campus, on campus, on campus.

He's there.

Probably guilty of the greatest financial fraud in the United States history in terms of

dollars.

And he's on campus at his parents' home walking around on, I guess, house arrest.

I don't know what it was.

Going to money.

Hey, Victor.

I know farmers who were put in jail for not reporting, for improperly reporting a tax deduction on depreciation

by the IRS.

They came to

their home.

And this guy is out on bail on the Stanford campus while his parents are

faculty members.

And they were, and everybody's going to say, well, no, though, no, no, no, no, no, no, Victor.

They were on leave of absence.

They were on leave of absence when this happened.

But when this was going on, they were faculty members.

And they were integrally involved, not from me, but from their own testimonies and emails in the running of the company.

They were consultants.

At least the father was.

Yeah.

So, blah, blah, blah.

Hey, a guy's going to jail because he did a tweet making fun of Hillary Clinton.

So

the outrages are plentiful out there.

Hey, Victor, I'd like to take a minute to welcome back our sponsor, Cardian Company.

Cardian Company is a family-operated, nationally recognized, fixed-income investment firm with more than 50 years of experience.

If you want control of your financial destination and decisions, but also

want an

experienced and knowledgeable person's guidance based on your risk tolerance and financial objectives.

Well, then go visit cartiko.com, that's c-ar-r-ty-y-c-o.com.

Generally, for initial investments of $5,000 and up, find the investment that's right for you by visiting cartico.com, that's c-a-r-ty-y-c-o.com.

We thank Cardi and Company for sponsoring the Victor Davis Hanson show.

And I want to apologize to Cardi and Company for the little blip there because my dog's here and he's starting to snore.

And I was trying to keep him awake

so he wasn't snoring through the ad.

So, anyway, Cardi and Company has been, they've sponsored this podcast before, and we're deeply appreciative.

Victor, I did want to mention you, since you mentioned the new criterion, I got the new issue

a couple of weeks ago.

Well, maybe it was last week, even, but that, and we talked about the piece you have in there, a lyrical populist revolt, but there's also, we don't have to talk about this, I just want to mention it, a terrific piece by Anthony Daniels called Blanquette de Bard.

And it's, he's reviewing two books.

One is titled White People in Shakespeare, Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite.

And the other book is The Great White Bard, How to Love Shakespeare while talking about race.

And one is particularly insufferable, the first book I mentioned.

And he just does a, he is a terrific writer, and he does a great job of carving these people up.

So, that's in the new issue

of the new criterion.

Remember what literature has become, everyone.

There is no criticism that talks about the beauty of Shakespeare's line or his prose or basically his sonnets or any of his plays, comedies, or tragedies.

It's not that no professor tries to explain to students why so many of our

elements of wisdom are a nuggets, a line here, a paragraph there that resonate throughout the centuries, why that is, or how he was able to capture the contradictions in the human condition.

Instead, what literature is now is started with deconstruction postmodernism, now critical race theory.

What it is is you

read a piece of literature.

You read Romeo and Juliet, and you do not read it to be enlightened about love or human emotions or hypocrisies or contradictions or look at his style or try to emulate his prose or poet.

No, no, no.

You have to find out who is the victim and who is the victimizer, and that will be predicated on race.

And Othello, he's a victim, and Shakespeare is a white oppressor, and etc., etc., cetera, et cetera.

And it just makes everything so boring and dreary and tired, weepy.

And that's what, and when you,

John Heath, who I've said before was a brilliant colleague that helped me co-write, co-wrote, I shouldn't say help me, he co-wrote Who Killed Homer,

my God, we pointed that out 25 years ago, what they had done to the Iliad and the Odyssey and Sophocles, Euripides, Everstop.

It just takes all the fun and joy out of reading.

And that's what they've done.

And that's why Anthony Daniels really did a great job exposing that.

Well, they've taken the joy out of much of comedy now.

So, yeah, how do you

know why?

How do you laugh when you're walking on eggs?

Well, yeah, what would

it wasn't, you know, what would Don Rickles do today?

I don't think you could beat Don.

He was funny.

I don't think you could be, you could even say a word.

No, not not a peep.

Hey, Victor, we've got one last quick thing to get your thoughts on, and that's Moody's rating of the U.S.

economy.

And we'll get to that and wrap up this show right after this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Here's the headline, headline, Victor.

Moody's slashes U.S.

financial outlook from stable to negative.

All but capital word negative.

Amid concerns, America's fiscal debts will remain very large.

This is from a

Daily Mail story.

I won't read any more of it, but Victor,

we all know the size of the debt

is massive.

We are robbing,

printing money, robbing from our grandchildren, those yet unborn.

I don't think you're surprised by this rating, are you?

Or is it long overdue even?

I was surprised, only in the sense that it had not come earlier.

And what do I mean by that?

Once

we came out of the 2008 recession, near collapse, whatever, and the Federal Reserve under the Obama administration, but continued to the Trump and Biden until recently

was able to lower

interest rates, really zero or negative interest.

By that, I mean the rate of inflation was higher than the rate of interest.

Then

people in these political decision-making said to themselves, wow,

you can borrow money, and what you

will be less and less every year.

And

with negative interest rates, you don't have to pay interest on it.

So let's just borrow it, borrow, borrow.

It's going to go.

And this was called new, I mean, modern monetary theory.

Remember that?

That debt is not bad.

So George Bush, I think, increased, I have to be careful because I've said double the debt and people got angry.

I think increased it by 80% over eight years.

Barack Obama, I think, did double it.

Donald Trump enlarged it by $6 or $7 trillion.

Joe Biden is going to outpace that, even though he says he cut the deficit because of the huge COVID expansion, and then he didn't quite expand at the same rate.

So he calls that a cut.

But the problem is now we're at $33 trillion, right?

And we're not paying zero interest on it in real dollars.

We are paying for 4% to 5%, 6%.

And when you look at the size of the debt at $33 trillion, and you've got to pay 4% or 5% on that, you're talking about $3 trillion.

And the budget is only, I mean, even that it's bloated, if it ever got back down to a normal size, it'd be $5 trillion.

But let's say it's $6.5 trillion.

So you can see that you're paying 15 to 20%, whatever the actual budget will be, in interest.

And that's larger than the defense budget.

And that's just the beginning, because this thing is getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

And at some point, historically, when you look at Rome or Byzantium or the classical Greek city-states, they have a remedy jack for this.

And it's throughout classical literature.

They can either inflate the currency, And what they usually do in the ancient world, they take a piece of bronze and they coat it with silver, and that silver gets thinner and thinner and thinner as they print more money or coin more money.

And then finally, it becomes, after about a month of use, it just turns red because it's all copper.

Or they can confiscate wealth.

And in

almost every single

classical author, whether it's Sallust or Cicero or Tacitus or Libby, it's cancel the debts, redistribution of property.

And that means people can't afford anything and we've got to redo it.

They can't pay.

And what that means is if they've taken a student loan out and they owe the government money or they have a federally backed mortgage, FHA mortgage, or

they have

a loan that the federal government somehow has also backed, they can't pay it back, small business loan.

So the government then

does what?

It defaults.

And what does that mean?

They mean they go to Jack Fowler, who has a federal bond, savings bond, and they say to you, hey, Jack, I don't have the money because we've decided we're not going to print money because it's completely worthless.

And if we print anymore, we can't pay it back because it'll be like Germany under Weimar.

So I need to cover the debt from all of these defaulting student loans, all these defaulting scholarship loans, all these default federal-backed mortgages that people can't afford.

So I just can't pay you.

I'm sorry.

You're not going to get your federal interest on your bond, or maybe you won't even get your T-bill at all.

That's the second thing.

You renounce it, or you can confiscate it.

And believe me, there's people on the left that have mentioned that.

They'll say to Victor, hey, how much is in your 401k?

Let's just say I have $100,000.

Hey, we're going to take that.

Well, you know what?

We'll give you one year of Social Security credit for that.

So you either have to confiscate money or you have to default on what the federal government owes or you have to

inflate the currency so it's worthless to pay it back in worthless dollars.

Or you're going to have to cut about $2 trillion

a year.

And

people are going to say, well, Victor, why don't you just raise taxes?

Well, the problem with raising taxes is it's up to 39%,

the tax rate, on a lot of income.

And then you have to add, you know, seven plus on payroll taxes and Medicare taxes and gasoline taxes.

State like California are paying 13.3%.

So you're getting up to a lot of people that are paying 55 or 60% of their income.

And these are the people who pay their taxes, unlike the Bidens.

And I think people will argue that California has the biggest black market in the United States where,

you know, Jack, I know people who don't,

they never pay sales tax.

They buy tools, they buy food, they go to swap meets on the weekends, they go on rural corners and buy clothes.

They never pay sales tax.

And so it's very hard to raise the revenue when the people who do pay taxes are taxed to death.

And the people who don't pay taxes, because they're getting it, they're operating a cash economy, think it's going to be mean, unfair, homophobic, racist, sexist, whatever the ism or ally is to enforce the law.

And then

you can't raise money, then you decide what you want to do, but it has to be cut.

And then all of a sudden, people say, oh, you can't, oh my God, I'm starving to death.

So you can't cut the way that we're on bread and circuses.

So, and then the military,

I don't think we're in such good shape in the military.

We're out of artillery shells.

We're out of javelin missiles.

We're out of a lot of key supplies.

We're giving a lot of wherewithal to Ukraine.

We're going to have to give it to Israel.

We're going to have to give it to Taiwan.

So

either you've got to make more wealth, you have to encourage more productivity.

You have to get the labor participation rate from 62% back up to what it was in the 40s or 50s, 75%, 70%.

And you're going to have to use all of your fossil fuel resources, burn clean coal, natural gas, oil, so you're not, you know, you're either exporting and giving revenue or you're not importing or you're making the price of energy cheaper here than it is in China or Europe, so you're more competitive.

But you have to do something like that.

And I don't see any answers from anybody.

I don't.

And I, you know, I was shocked because I was really worried about this.

And I wrote an article.

So I went back and looked at administrations.

Do you know which administration over eight years had the smallest rate of deficits?

Was it Bill Clinton's?

Absolutely.

It was 2%.

And he was the only one to have three balanced budgets.

I wrote that, and I got a lot of conservatives.

Said, well, I can't believe you wrote that, you traitor, basically.

It was Newt Ginmech that did that.

Yeah, it was.

He threatened to shut down the government.

He did, and he made a deal with Clinton.

But

why don't Democrat Republican presidents do that?

Why didn't Trump make a deal?

Why didn't George W.

Bush make a deal

and just balance the budget?

We had the Simpson-Allen Simpson and Bowles.

Remember that, Erskine Bowles?

Obama commissioned them.

They had a plan.

If we had followed it, I think in five years from now, we would have been debt-free almost, balance the budget annually and paying off the debt.

We were actually paying off the debt in 98, 99, 2000.

So, or maybe 99, 2000, but it's terrible.

And

you can see it's eroding the standard of living because inflation is eating up any increases in wages and labor participation is static.

People are not expanding their businesses.

The federal government is getting larger and larger.

The regulations are squeezing people.

The energy restrictions, the whole green experiment has failed.

So I'm getting depressed about it a lot.

Well, they'll come up with a solution, and history offers them the guidance, and it usually ends up with social tension, civil war, revolution, when they start tampering with money or stealing money or renouncing debt.

Right.

Yeah, because there's no United States for us to help in a case of the US.

Yeah, there's one thing new, though.

I want to finish this round with one thing that's new.

Before everybody recognized what they were doing was desperate and wrong to print money, to pay off debts, to confiscate private wealth,

to renounce debt, what you owe,

okay, or to give credit from the government for money that they stole from you.

Now they don't think that is bad.

They call it

monetary theory.

It's good to borrow money, but but more importantly, to spread the wealth or what Barack Obama calls an inclusive capitalism.

In its raw, most savage form, it's manifested with smash and grab, looting,

shoplifting that has no consequences as if this is redistribution of wealth.

But in its most egregious form, it's entire,

you mentioned the COVID ripoff, billions, hundreds of billions of dollars that

we'll never see again.

And the idea, the subtext of all that, well, people, you know, they needed the money, it's gone, and maybe it was a good way to let other people get in on the economy.

So there's no shame or penalty for people who abuse the financial system.

And

that's a sacred test.

I mean, Sam Bankman Freed, when he was charged with that, he should have been put under

with no parole.

And

the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

When you gave that guy parole and he got on his computer and was trying to interact with witnesses to leverage their testimony against him, it just showed you how bankrupt that idea was.

Well, Victor,

we've come to the conclusion.

I'll quickly mention that

you have a website, The Blade of Perseus, at Victorhanson.com is the address.

Please visit it, folks, and please subscribe.

$5 gets you in the door, $50 for the full year.

Why would you subscribe to read the many ultra articles that Victor writes for the website?

You'll also find links to his books.

And the forthcoming book, by the way, is The End of Everything, and that will be out in May.

So why don't you pre-order it?

And then as for me, Jack Fowler, I write Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Anfield.

It comes out every Friday.

It's 14 recommended readings of great articles and essays I've come across the previous week.

Sign up, don't worry.

No cost, no risk, not selling your name.

Victor, I'll read a quick comment.

Of course, folks can leave comments on your own website, and they do, many do.

And at Apple/slash iTunes, where you can rate the show zero to five stars.

And here's a comment from

Bruce in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

He writes, VDH,

in decades past, if 33 U.S.

citizens had been killed as in October 7th in a foreign country by terrorists, how would Republican POTUS have responded?

Well, that's not a comment about the show.

Actually, I hope we had time.

I was going to ask that, but we'll ask that.

You know, Victor, we should talk about that next time because

You know, where we have Americans killed, Americans hostages.

And, you know, as much as we want to lament about Joe Biden, and we should, there seems to be a lack of, maybe even a lack of interest among the populace that fellow citizens are being

kept by our enemies.

But that's it.

Thank you.

Yeah, I've never heard a word about it.

I don't hear anybody say to Representative Talib, are you worried that 30.

30 Americans were butchered by Hamas or that

12 of your fellow Americans are held hostage?

No, she's not worried.

Nobody talks about it.

Again, just

one last rant today.

We were willing under Joe Biden to give $1.2

billion

per hostage to Iran, $6 billion.

And we're not willing to even talk about what Hamas has taken.

You know what I'm saying?

We don't even talk about it.

And so

I don't know why we don't, but it seems that we want to do two things.

We want to not blame Hamas and we want to enrich Iran.

And that's the common denominator.

Wow.

Twisted world.

Twisted Biden.

Anyway, hey, and Kerry and Obama.

Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you shared today.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Thanks to the Victor Davis Hanson Fan Club on Facebook.

Good people there.

Follow us.

Check out

Victor on X slash Twitter.

His handle is at V D Hanson.

Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks so much.

Folks, we'll be back soon soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.