Always One-Sided or How the Left's Mind Works
Join Victor Davis Hanson and cohost Jack Fowler as they talk about Biden's email aliases and foreign policy, destruction of southern monuments, the passing of Jim Buckley, and the left-leaning university archaeology going anti-Semitic.
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Hello, ladies.
Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.
I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and namesake.
That is Victor Davis-Hansen.
He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.
he has a website.
It's official.
It's called The Blade of Perseus, victorhanson.com is its address.
I'll tell you more about that later, why you should be subscribing to it.
There's always Joe Biden stuff to talk about.
Victor, I think his name is Joe Biden.
I know he goes by several names now, at least in emails.
We'll get your thoughts about that.
President Biden has attacked the concept of promoting America first in international
diplomatic relations.
Another head scratcher.
We have a, you want to get your thoughts about this.
What will be a formal, I think it's already been decreed that a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery has to come down by the end of this year unless some formal action is taken.
Our good friend,
I know you knew him, and I really was a good friend of his, James Lane Buckley, the former United States Senator, and just an icon of conservatism, passed away last week.
And
we are recording on Sunday the 20th, but the day this particular podcast comes out will be the day of his
funeral in Sharon, Connecticut.
I'd like to get a few thoughts about Jim
on this podcast.
We may have another topic or two to talk about, but we'll get started with Joe Biden email man right after these important messages.
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we're back with the victor davis hansen show you know victor it's something about uh democrats You mentioned, we touched on this a little bit in the last podcast
we recorded, but Hillary Clinton thought that emails were a thing to play with.
They were vehicles to circumvent the law, to interact with people on official business or criminal business.
and on government servers or constructive servers in bathrooms in Colorado, however the hell she rigged that up.
But emails are things to be abused
for the acquisition of more power.
And who wants to acquire more power or more money or more loot or more shakedowns than the Bidens?
So the news has come out last week that Joe Biden
used a number of
bogus names in emails, hoping that by doing that, they wouldn't become part of some formal record that had to be retained but these were things that clearly involved the the coral
family um operations uh in ukraine and other places i mean it's really he was vice president of the united states while he was doing this joe um victor just
remarkable uh chutzpah of uh of joe biden but a man who
chutzpah marks everything he does.
Your thoughts, Victor, about the they're not bogus emails, but the fake names of Joe Biden.
It was Richard Peters.
There are three of them, weren't there?
There are three.
Peters and Wallen or something.
Robin is there also for Robinette, middle name.
They're really poorly
cloaked.
It reminds me of...
Jack, we had three fake names of Joe Biden.
And why would the President of the United States have a fake name other than he wouldn't want
a paper trail of official communications that were dealing with his son, right?
So he thinks he's going to have a separate private email account.
But then I guess it must have ended up in the archives because Comer and the House Republicans are now
subpoenaing.
They want those email accounts.
That could be really explosive.
But it doesn't have
a very good history.
Remember Anthony Weiner was Carlos Danger?
Carlos Danger.
And I remember all the Latino people said, oh, you're associating Latinos with your perverted pseudonyms.
And that was when he was, wasn't he texting stuff with an underage girl or something?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I don't know what he was, his torso.
He was picking penis pictures.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then there was Mitt Romney and he was Pierre Delecto.
And, you know, Delectus is a Latin term for delight.
So, and then why do they always, why do these guys always pick a foreign name, Pierre or Carlos or
Danger, something weird, Carlos Danger or Delecto?
Mitt Romney, the uptight Mormon
Christian, gets, what, a vicarious name, Pierre Delecto?
It doesn't make sense.
You know, and I just thought of another one.
You remember the EPA director under Obama, Lisa Jackson?
Yeah.
And they fired her because she had that name.
I can remember, it was Richard Windsor.
And she started emailing as if he was like this high official.
And I even think they
did Richard Windsor nominate her for an award or so?
Anyway, he praised Lisa Jackson.
And so when you get fired from a left-wing administration, you get promoted.
We've talked earlier, Jack, about James Baker, the FBI flunky lawyer that tried to seed the dossier to all the media to
damage the 2016 presidential run of
Donald Trump.
And then he got rewarded for that.
Remember, they hired him at Twitter for $8 million.
And so the same thing with Lisa Jackson.
She's humiliated.
She had this fake persona that she was using as a vicarious aid to her own failed EPA directorship.
And guess what?
I think it was Apple or one of those Silicon Facebook, They hired her as their environmental head, whatever that means.
So that is a,
as we said earlier, a general dynamics-like Northrop-like grounds, dumping ground when you get out of the military, the highest echelons, but when you get out of the Obama or Biden administrations and you're kind of done some weird things, they take care of you in Silicon Valley.
I think I need one.
I need, instead of.
you?
Yeah, I'm going to go on to my comment section.
Okay.
And let me just say
Juan Hansome.
And Juan Hansome is going to go, wow, I heard Victor's podcast.
It was stunning.
Just really good.
Or then Juan Hansen is going to go
text somebody in the corporate world.
Do you have that information?
I think I'm going to start, I don't know,
praising individual products off the record so I'll get free stuff, but I won't, we'll have to use a pseudonym.
That's what they do.
And it's just ridiculous.
It's just patently
an expose that you're a crook.
And the president of the United States is not one, two, but three.
Right.
I think, you know what?
I want to use the left's vocabulary here.
The walls are closing in.
The walls are closing in.
And there's a quote-unquote bombshell coming because this guy is an inveterate crook.
And you can't hide all of these expenditures, these IRS irregularities, the laptop information, the oligarchs in Ukraine bragging they have him on tape, Tony Bobolinsky, Devon Archer,
IRS, there's too many of them.
And so they're going to sink this guy.
They really are.
It's getting harder and harder.
And then they got, as I said before, they have an existential problem because they have an existential problem and they have an existential solution.
The existential problem is
that if you let this get out of control, and that gets back to why they appointed Weiss,
if you get out of control, then you got Camilla Harris.
If this gets out of control and Joe has to resign, then you got Kamala Harris.
If you run Joe again, there's no way he's going to finish the first year.
You got Camilla Harris.
But on the the other hand, you don't have anybody but Gavin Newsom who's going to run on the record that says, I'm going to do for San Francisco, I'm going to do for the United States what I did for San Francisco or California.
But you do solve the Kamala Harris problem.
I think James Clyburn and others have said there's no way that Kamala is going to get off this ticket.
Well, there isn't
the way if there's no longer a ticket.
That is, that Joe's out of the picture.
And then it's a lucha libre, it's a free-for-all, free fight.
And all everybody has to say is well come out how that worked last time when tulsi gobert ate you alive on stage and you didn't get one delegate the same thing will happen again i'll say well we wanted a black woman as vice president and then i think galvan will have to pick maybe he can pick maxine waters or somebody who knows
i like the lucha lucha libre concept there victor that because they all could be have they all have pseudonyms you know i'm just teasing because i was on the bus and at four o'clock when i was in third or fourth grade, Lucha Libre started on Mexican TV.
And my favorite wrestler was
Pepper Gomez.
And he fought Ray Stevens in big time.
It was called big time wrestling.
And the bus driver would be really slow.
And he'd go, you know, we had those old handhold doors that would open, you know, and he was very elderly.
And he had trouble opening the door with that crank.
and those old pug-nose buses.
And I'd say, please, please, please, please, Mr.
Baltho.
I got to get home.
Lucha Libre starts at four o'clock.
Oh, yeah.
I loved it.
Do you know, wrestling in the East Coast was also called Lucha Libre and was by Vince McMahon, you know, Linda McMahon.
Yes,
Dave,
and it was Podunk, but they had Andre the Giant and Chief Jace Strong.
Oh, I loved it.
I do.
The sleeper hold.
I remember all of those things.
Guy and chic.
Yeah.
And it was Pepper Gomez was the hero.
We all loved him because this is very funny because it shows you that in a supposedly racist climate of the 1960s, the heroes were all Mexican tag team guys, but especially Pepper.
And then he would, and then the announcer would go, Pepper, it's time for you to speak to your community.
And then he would speak
in Spanish.
And then the evil guy was,
they always talked out of the corner of their mouths, remember?
Yeah.
And they would talk about pencil necks.
Pencil neck geeks.
Yeah.
Ray Stevens had long blonde hair.
He was pure white.
And he said, well, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to, I came to this dump called Fresno, and I'm going to, I'm going to get these chili bellies and these taco eaters, and I'm going to just kill them.
Pepper, you're dead.
And then Pepper Gomez was, that's why we loved him.
He was like the perfect gentleman.
I don't know what you mean like that, Mr.
Stevens, but we're going to, we're going to play by the rules and we're going to do it the fair way, but you are going to lose.
And then he would
get a standing ovation.
It was really, we'd always say, Mike.
I think one of your special
columns on.
You should consider one of your special ultra columns, Victor, on
your memories of childhood wrestling.
Ah, well, it got really scary because every once in a while I went to,
I think that was the 1% from first to sixth grade, and maybe the 20% after that of non-Mexican students.
But every once in a while, we'd be one to six, and some guy would go, Luche libre, luche libre.
And that was out on the ground.
And they had distinctions.
And one was, well, you were born in Fresno or Salma.
And they go, Lucha Libre, Salma.
And if you were born in Salma, then you attacked everybody, Fresno.
So everybody just ran around and said, Are you Fresno or Salma?
And you hit them.
And it was just like a huge brawl.
And then the teachers came out.
And we had a Mexican-American teacher, Mr.
Fabala, and he would give us lectures about about how we were.
He was a really straight guy, Mr.
Montoro, and they would come over.
They were great teachers.
And they said, no more licha libre.
What does it matter?
This is ridiculous whether you're born in Salma or you're, and then they had lucha libre, whether you were illegal or you were legal citizen.
You were born in the United States if you want.
And so I was always saying, I'm born in the United States, you guys.
And then I remember I was in Lucha Libre.
This really big guy named Normando came up to me and he said, no, his name is Fernando.
And he said, you were born in Mexico.
I said, no, I wasn't.
I was born in the United States.
Boys will be boys, boys in the playground.
What they went through to
hey, Victor, if you don't mind, if you don't mind, before we move on to
back to serious matters and Joe Biden's policy about America first or denigrating it.
I'm just curious, have you ever thought about pseudonyms
in writing?
I mean, I know a number of people that have done it.
I must say, I've not reflected on it.
I really don't understand why
some, like Anthony Daniels
does that with Theodore Dalrow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And
not attacking it.
I just don't get it.
Do you ever thought of that?
Maybe you haven't.
I think it's based on, I mean, Eric Blair, right, was George Orwell.
Sure, right.
So I guess they call them pen names.
And I guess the idea is that
in your immediate circle of readers or family, it's of no value, but that you can go places and check into a hotel or travel, you know what I mean?
Especially in the age where there was not television.
So if you were George Orwell and you went into a hotel, say in 1944,
45, 40, when you were starting to become very well known, and you checked in under
George Orwell rather than Eric Blair, and nobody would bother you.
I can't think of any other reason because.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I don't know why else.
No, I've never thought of having
a pseudonym.
The only thing I've ever done that was slightly misleading,
every once in a while, if I meet in a particularly obnoxious person and they say, I know you, but I don't quite place you.
and I've had it two times I was on a flight to San Jose from
to I was on a site to Los Angeles and this woman sat next to me she's very left-wing she was a community organizer and she said you look like that guy in San Jose Mercury who has a column they put his picture there I said I don't know what you're talking about well they said that was one of the newspapers that buys my column and she said I know you and I hate those columns And I don't even know if I should.
I said, I do too.
Who is he?
I've read that guy.
And she said, Well, he's Victor Hansen.
I said, You know what?
I get it.
I get mistaken for him all the time.
And then she was very pleasant the whole flight.
Oh, yeah.
And then I've had it too when I've been in the airport.
And some
people are very friendly.
And every once in a while, somebody looks at you and they've come up and said, Are you that guy that's when they say, Are you that guy?
Watch out.
Right.
Are you that guy on Fox who thinks he knows everything?
I said, no, I'm not.
You could say, honestly,
I'm a Hansen twin brother.
You know,
that might be an out.
I said that the other day.
I was getting inspected on the electrical problems that I'm having right now because we're replacing the main circuit breaker and all of the hookup to the pole out in the street.
And
it's a mess because we had the house all rewired, but that was the last job.
And the guy came out from the power power company and he looked at me really funny.
He said,
I know you.
And I didn't know him.
He said, I've been out here.
And he said, do you have a house on this ranch?
And I said, well, we used to own.
But he'd actually seen my twin brother.
And so
I didn't know whether he had a positive or negative experience.
And so he was saying that I was that person.
He said, but you,
I went out to this other house.
It didn't look like this house.
That must have been you.
But
I said, Oh, that's my twin brother.
So, and then he said he'd like my twin brother.
So then I said, Yes, that was my twin brother.
It's not me.
So, yeah, that's happened sometimes.
But I have a fraternal twin, so we don't look alike, except that we have Swedish football heads.
Oh, okay.
Hard to get a helmet on that.
Yeah.
Hey,
by the way, Victor, before we talk about
the Biden policy,
I noticed
regarding the collapsed Hunter Biden case, which we spoke about that on the last episode, but
part of the reason it broke down, did you read this?
Part of the reason it broke down was that
Hunter Biden's lawyers said
that Joe Biden would,
if it went to trial, they were going to call the President of the United States as a witness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kind of.
Not quite like
yeah, you can't quite though claim executive privilege, right?
Right.
You can't, I guess you could say he was his dad's lawyer.
He has a law degree.
He's a constitutional lawyer.
Yeah, maybe he's like Obama.
Maybe he could say
client attorney privilege, dad and son.
I don't know.
I don't think he can do that.
I don't know if the spousal rules about
testifying, you can't testify against, before you should testify against a spouse
apply to father and son.
Well, it would have put the Justice Department lawyers in a position to
ask, cross-examine the president about his role in any of this.
So, gosh, that could have gone haywire.
Well, anyway.
Well, Victor, let's keep talking about Job and his foreign policy.
And I just find this quite repulsive.
And maybe you do too.
And we'll get to that right after this important message.
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Victor, Joe Biden, the last week, has had
significant meetings with the presidents of leadership of South Korea and
Japan.
But in the midst of being asked some questions,
none seemingly about his nefarious relationship with his son, he spouted off about that America first is not a good thing.
I thought he was the president of the United States.
I thought America, you know, what's the correct story to the Constitution?
I'm sorry, Victor, your thoughts.
I go back to that weird meeting I had with Fang Fang.
Remember Fang Fang
and Eric Swalwell?
Yes, many people appreciate your imitations of Fang Fang, I guess.
Well, she came up to my office, as I recalled, and I had a staffer there with me.
And when she was going through her
kind of heavily fake Chinese accent, and, you know, trying to tell me we can go out to dinner and all this stuff.
And then
I said I wasn't interested.
I couldn't take her gift.
I didn't want anything.
And then she broke into her valley girl, CSU Hayward.
I think she told me she was at.
And she was, she said she was a community activist or something.
But my point is that she was asking me, cut the crap.
Don't talk, let's talk Turkey.
And I think I said that.
Every president cares about their country first, she said.
And I want to know, and our consulate wants to know, why this president is talking about Obama.
And I think it was,
I don't know what year it was, 2014, maybe, maybe earlier.
Every president puts his own nation's interests first.
But he went on an apology tour.
When we go over flights, your president stops us after one or two miles.
And we go three, four, five miles before the United States calls us.
We go into it.
Why is he doing this?
And I said, I don't know.
And I didn't, except that he was a Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin type of appeaser.
And then she said, ah, it's like a trap.
She put her hands like a bear trap that he's luring us in.
So we'll go so far, it'll be so flagrant, then they'll just smash us.
I said, I hope you believe that.
But the point is that everybody in every country assumes that the primary responsibility of every president is first and foremost the interest in the security and the prosperity of the United States, in the case of the president.
And that's what America's First was about.
Joe Biden Biden makes fun of it because he's trying to play off on
that
quasi-anti-Semitic, maybe overtly anti-Semitic movement.
Oh, between 1936 and December of 1941, America First, that Father Coughlin, remember Charles Lindbergh, and their idea was that we were being drawn into
a European repeat of World War I
by the British Empire and its imperialist agendas, and by the Jewish bankers in France and England, and the American Jewish press and Hollywood.
That was the narrative.
In fact, I'm going to have a, Jack, I'm going to have an angry reader up on the ultras coming up about a reader who attacked me and voiced those
same ideas.
We didn't have to fight World War I,
II.
It was all the Jews that made Britain do it and made you
crazy.
Yeah, so anyway,
America first has that name.
And so every time, I mean,
Trump doesn't use American for make America great again.
He can say a circumlocution: we want America to be first, meaning we worry about issues from the standpoint of America, not our allies or our enemies, our neutrals, even.
And
if you're a cosmopolitan or globalist, you just hate that.
And so Joe Biden is a globalist.
And by a globalist, I mean that in the most tawdry sense.
He made a fortune in his global relationships.
And he put America last.
The funny thing about Joe Biden is that we haven't had a president.
McKinley might have been the closest.
Although he didn't profit, either did Grant.
I don't think he profited directly from the teapot dome.
And I don't think that
the people around you listen to him.
That would have been Harding.
Yeah, not McKinnon, but he did.
Yes, sorry.
No, Harding, William Harding.
I'm sorry about that.
And Grant didn't either,
personally.
In fact, Grant ended up broke and had to write his memoirs with throat cancer to save his family from impoverishment.
But I think when you look at the Constitution and it spells out impeachments, high crimes and misdemeanors, treason and bribery, this is the first time that we may have had a president that took money from foreign countries while he was in high office as vice president.
I don't know about his senatorial career.
And this is second is if he gave any of those countries, Romania, China,
Ukraine, maybe Russia, who knows, any preferential treatment that was against the interest of his own country, then there you go.
He's guilty of treason.
And so
this is why it's so strange.
This is something that everybody should keep in mind that he's really skirting.
The way I look at it,
he's walking under
a big snow drift or a ledge, which is, it could crash down on him and obliterate him any second.
And the same thing about his health.
It's very fragile.
And this country's presidency right now and our reputation abroad and the continuance of his administration, is a thin threat.
He is one trip on Air Force one steps.
He's one fall after going the wrong direction on a stage.
He's one crazy, senile remark that could be racist.
He's one
turkey gobbling nibble away from complete implosion.
And the same thing is true of
these charges against him.
When you get Devin Archer, and he confirms basically what Tony Bobolinski said, which was confirmed by the emails, and you realize the emails and the laptop are authentic, and then you have two oligarchs claiming 17 conversations plus two, and then you put in the equation of the IRS whistleblowers,
he's on the razor's edge.
Well,
the problem with him, well, there are many problems with him, Victor, but whether justice comes to him or not for lining his pockets, the price America has paid, a much larger price, is just
it's
we should send him a bill.
Send him a bill.
All the money you made, your Corvette, your Newport Beach mansion, your Delaware Williamton mansion, your other house, and all of your stuff.
It was all made by selling out the the name of the United States, by selling influence in a very crooked way.
And then what's funny is this man that is our president toured the country for two years and said, I'm sick of rich people.
They got to pay their fair share.
When he knew that his son was facing IRS charges and that he had taken a lot of money, that's where they're going to probably get him that he didn't report.
And then to accuse other people of paying their fair share.
I think I paid 57% of my income in state and federal taxes.
Or, Victor, if you spend $601, we want to know about that.
Trump change.
Absolutely.
Well, Victor, you mentioned McKinley before, albeit mistakenly, but it's a good, good
jumping-off point because President McKinley, at the time of the Spanish-American War,
realized how any number of
Southerners and actually some former Southern officers served
in the American forces in the Spanish-American War and saw it as an opportunity to
do something demonstrative
for healing the nation, which
still needs to be healed, you know, a hundred plus years later from the Civil War.
Anyway,
he moved,
led an effort for a Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
So this is a healing, this is a memorial to heal a divided nation.
And now, after the George Floyd madness, which consumed everyone, including our government, and this is related to the efforts to change the names of various military bases,
part of that has been is a requirement to tear this
monument down.
And James Webb, the former,
he was a veteran of Vietnam, former Democrat senator from
Virginia, wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day saying, this is just nuts, and some action needs to be taken to forestall this because this is going to happen unless an action is taken to stop it.
Victor, what are you...
We've talked about related things, but on this specific, this specific monument at Arlington National Cemetery, Victor, your thoughts, please.
Well, you know, it's a very moving monument.
And
when I was teaching at the Naval Academy, I went and visited a couple of times, not it particularly, but all of the monuments.
And I remember that Latin inscription on it.
Victris causa dias placu wit sed victa cat caton.
It was very strange.
And it meant the
winning cause or the victorious cause
had been pleasing, or actually it's the perfect tense, was pleasing to the gods, but not
the lost cause to Cato, meaning, you know,
Cato the censor,
the man of principle.
So in other words,
We had a cause that didn't please the gods, and so we didn't win, but we had a cause that was principled
and to people like Cato, who committed suicide in defeat as he opposed Caesar.
I guess the implication was Lincoln was Caesar-like or something.
But the point is that
700,000 people were killed in the Civil War over slavery.
And as James Webb wrote in that Wall Street Journal op-ed
just recently,
there was a lot of complexity to it.
It wasn't just, and I mentioned that to a group of students at Stanford the other day.
Somebody asked me about tearing down statues, and I had said I could understand why you would tear down a mass murdering Stalin,
but not Hitler, but why would you tear down James Longstreet's statue?
And they got angry and said that was hypocritical.
And I just, not angry, but the student said that was inconsistent.
I said, unless you believe that James Longstreet, who didn't own slaves, who was ambiguous about the Southern cause, who fought only because he was on the soil of Virginia, and later became a Republican pro-unionist after the war and tried to be an ecomenical and heal the divisions, was comparable to a guy who was responsible for the final solution, or 20 million.
But there is no gradation.
There's no complexity.
It's just if he, this is all good and this is all bad.
But as James Webb said in his autobiography, I think I'd use that argument before: of the four border states, Jack, Missouri and Kentucky and Delaware and Maryland, for practical reasons, Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation did not outlaw slavery in those states.
They were afraid if they did, they would join the Confederacy.
So there were Union soldiers fighting that owned slaves.
And it's hotly disputed what percentage of the South, and there's 260,000 approximately died in combat, more civilian,
owned slaves.
I read stories anywhere from 2.5% to 5%.
And then there's another corollary argument,
what percentage of the Southern population benefited from being cotton?
And I think you could argue that to the degree there were internal improvements, they were almost all from plantations, roads to ports, and they did not benefit the poor white free class.
But that's another issue.
But people have suggested, I think Webb quotes John Hope Franklin, 25%.
So the point is you could have a battle where a Kentuckian or a Maryland was fighting a Virginian who was poor and had no slaves, and he was a slaveholder.
That wasn't common, but that was theoretically, and it did happen.
And so this monument to just tear it down and say
50, it's all bad when it's not all bad.
The point was that for 30 years after the Civil War, there was no healing.
And, you know, how could there be with 700,000 dead?
There's no healing in this country.
And we just went.
January 6th and the
rioting and killing in May, June, July, August of 2020, and the George Floyd, the bar, all that stuff, there's no healing.
So there were efforts to bring, one of the ways to do it was to,
when we were rearming in World War I and then continuing those bases, was to put them in a climate that was warm so you could have maneuvers year-round and win the appropriation support of these senior Democratic one-party
senators and especially House members, because in the South, remember, the Democratic Party was the party.
So the Democrats, once they were elected, they were elected for 40 years and under the seniority system, a guy like James O.
Eastland
or,
you know, Strom Thurman, you name it.
They were in there institutionally and they ran it.
And so to get their support, they would...
say,
we're going to appropriate money for base.
We'll put it in the South and we'll allow you to name it.
That's all.
It wasn't because they favored favored the south, they favored slavery.
They wanted a compromise.
And the same thing with the monuments.
In the 1880s and 90s, they were bringing the North,
bringing black soldiers into Arlington, and they were bringing Southern soldiers into Arlington.
And there was an idea that the Spanish War was on the horizon or late in the 1890s.
And you had, and
when we went into Cuba, they had General Wheeler, the cavalry commander.
He was
pretty good cavalry general, not the greatest like Jeb Stewart, or
not certainly like Nathan Bedrid Forest, as far as his skill.
But he had command of a battalion, I think, in Cuba.
And then in World War I, the same thing was true.
It took a long time to heal.
So to go back and look at these, and they're beautifully sculpted.
They're masterpieces of classical art.
And to say that
this is just all about slavery and hatred when the cause was no good.
And I mean, it wasn't.
The Confederate cause
was transmogrified into the holy soil of the South, but it was promulgated not for that reason.
It was for the perpetuation of slavery by a 3% slave-owning class who, in terms of actual capital, and adjusted dollars were, we haven't seen any American small group so well compensated, so wealthy until Silicon Valley.
It was really something else.
And a lot of people in the South didn't benefit it.
But that being aside, why would you want to go back and open up that wound?
I'm sure when people walk by and they see it, they just seem to think, okay, that's a relic of the past.
And it was kind of an effort.
We wouldn't do it today, but you can understand
what they were trying to do.
But again, in all these questions, Jack, you have to ask yourself.
So we're condemning the past
because we are perfect in the present, but what will the future say of our perfection?
Or will they say, wow, a million people
were aborted by your society?
8,000 babies were killed in the birth canal per year.
And you want us to have...
You want us to look at Margaret Sanger's name or Prant Plan Barrett?
We're not going to do that.
We're going to tear down every mention, every of this eugenicist.
We're not going to allow it.
Or,
wow,
you had
all of these mayors of these big cities, and they had thousands of homeless people on the street.
They had people dying in the street.
They had in Chicago on one night, 50, 60 people injured, shot, three, four, five, eight killed, and you did nothing about it.
We're going to blacken, wipe out, erase their names.
We're not going to have anything to do with them.
And if you keep doing that, you can see where you're going.
There is no, everything is fluid.
It's year zero fluidity, and that's where we are today.
And the people who are tearing down,
I mentioned to this audience that there's no bigger fan of Martin Luther King than myself.
But if you read David Garrell's biography and you read a lot of Ralph Abernathy's memoirs and you read what a Stanford professor found at the King Center, it's pretty clear that he plagiarized his Boston University PhD thesis.
It was all plagiarized.
And it's pretty clear that he not only was a serial philanderer and drank too much, but that he
abused women and he forced them into sex acts that they were not willing to do.
Some of them were a little kinky.
And so the point is, with all of this, is that the totality of Martin Luther King's life?
Or is that a segment,
an unsavory segment, but a segment nonetheless that does not
shadow or overrule the greater good of his career of trying to be peaceful and bringing racial relations to a norm that we still don't have.
But at least it was different than what Stoky Carmichael and Rap Brown and the black Muslims were saying at the time.
It was still based on the idea of nonviolence.
So when you look at that monument and you're going to tear it all down, are you saying that in your moral certainty, you're superior to everything in the past?
And that if you'd been in rural Georgia or Virginia and you had no slaves, and nobody in your small town had slaves, and you had farms, and you heard that William Tecumseh Sherman was coming through with an army of 65,000 of the meanest SOBs in the world from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, who themselves had never seen a slave, and they were going to burn and tear and destroy to punish punish your slave.
Would you fight or not?
Probably, yeah.
Does that make you on the wrong side of the ledger?
If you die, your grave can't be anywhere because the cause was bad.
I don't know.
I know a lot of German people in the United States who came to this country, Austrian and German, that had ancestors not very distant that fought for the German army.
Everything about Nazi Germany was evil.
But the German army, if you were living in rural Austria or Bavaria and you got drafted,
you had a choice.
You're either going to be shot in the head or executed with a military firing squad, or are you going to go fight for Hitler?
And that's not an easy thing to do.
Same thing with Stalin.
Same thing right now with those kids.
And there's some pretty gripping scenes from Ukraine.
And you see these 18-year-old Russians.
There was one, did you see it about three months ago where there's a Russian guy in a trench and a drone is following him?
And the drone has blown up one
comrade of his, and he's just kind of in a fetal position begging the drone not to kill him.
Oh, my God.
And the Ukrainian operator didn't kill him.
Now, is that guy responsible for Putin's invasion?
Because if you read the left, and a lot of people who I have colleagues where I work, they're all evil.
Right.
And all the Ukrainians are good.
Well, I tend to think that the Ukrainian cause is much superior to the Russian cause, but I'm not so stupid to think that Ukrainian government is not corrupt
and that they have a long
history with each other and that there's a lot of bad Ukrainians and there's a lot of good Russians, even though the causes are quite different and the Russian cause is not nearly as good.
But the point is, I can't stand that.
I don't think our listeners like it either when you get this moral absolutism.
I'm not trying to be wishy-washy and say, on the one hand, on the other hand, no, you can make a judgment, but you have to be clear about the consequences of that decision and that judgment.
It's complex.
It's tragedy.
It's not melodrama.
It's not a bunch of people going in.
You know, another thing you can tell,
you tear the statue down at night.
You tear it through threats.
This was done by a commission.
But who was on the commission?
Was it representative?
Was it demographically?
Was it gender?
Was it politically?
Was it ideologically diverse?
Or was it just a bunch of political...
I don't know.
But James Webb is not an extremist, and he's not a raging right-winger.
He's a Democrat.
Well, he talks about his own efforts, Victor, with Vietnam, where he fought to.
We have made efforts to come to terms and bury the hatchet with old people that were faced on the other side of
the battle line.
And why is that okay with Vietnam?
Not okay with fellow Americans.
I had a friend who was of Japanese descent, and that friend had a relative that was sent to a camp.
And I got in an argument once with that person, was saying, see, this is a racist country, and this is this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this.
And I said, it was deplorable.
But first of all, because this person was on the left, it was a friend, very nice person.
First of all, Earl Warren was the attorney general.
signed that order.
And then the governor was a Democrat and FDR was a a Democrat.
So that's number one.
Blame the Roosevelt administration.
And they did blame Earl Warren because they removed his name from the Warren Law School, which was a big mistake.
I didn't agree with any of his decisions, but he was a noble, fine person.
And during the hysteria of the time that he thought it was best, 50% of the people who went to the camps were not citizens.
And yet they were legal residents.
And yet they found not one person.
Could they find any evidence?
They did in Hawaii, but not in the United States.
Not one Japanese American or Japanese national with an American legal residence ever was engaged in espionage.
And they did find, of course, the 442nd, and they found a lot of Japanese Americans that volunteered and died in fighting in Italy.
So the point I'm making is when I was talking about all this and he was blaming the United States, I said, you know,
I had a family that was not hurting anybody.
They were just living very poor on a little 40 acres in Kingsburg, California, and they were a bunch of Swedes.
And they came from Sweden.
They just, they were good citizens.
They didn't get in trouble.
They lived in the center of town, the patriarch.
And they took two of them.
And they put one on a B-29
and they took him over to stop Japanese aggression.
And he saw 14 of 16 of his planes blown up.
And when they bailed out, I can understand why it was a fire raid.
They beheaded a lot of them because none of the crews that bailed out, they thought, ever survived.
And then he had another member of that family that was killed on Okinawa.
And why did he have to go over there and fight fanatic Japanese militarists that were trying to destroy the Pacific Islanders, that were trying to destroy China, that were trying to destroy the Burmese.
And now, are you responsible for that?
No, you're not responsible for that.
So everybody's got to be careful.
I think that when you have this moral absolutism and you're going to be sole arbiter of bad and good in the past, and you're going to take a work of art that maybe is flawed and the inscription is kind of nostalgically
wrong,
but nonetheless, I mean, I don't think what Cato represented in the anti-Caesarians is quite like Caesar, although they tried to do that during the Confederate, make that argument.
But I just don't think that
you do that.
It's kind of like Byzantine iconoclasm.
You know, it's just, you go back in this frenzy of destroying names and dates and erasers.
There's no end to it.
And I hope that people in the future, when you start, and it's the same thing with canceling people.
And a lot of the people that got canceled were on the left as far as Me Too and other things.
And then it's selective, isn't it?
I mentioned Martin Luther King, but nobody seems to be canceling Farrakhan.
I mean, he took a picture with Barack Obama with his arm around him smiling.
Nobody said that was wrong, although they hit it during the campaign.
And
I just, we mentioned it in our earlier broadcast, Gunna, this new song.
Are we going to ban him and say, you know what?
There's not going to be any songs, hip-hop, rap, that glorify the destruction of property in a city, nor talk about six sex violence acts perpetrated against women.
We're not going to allow it.
Or we're going to say, Mr.
Kendrick, you cannot come to the White House because in your lyrics you say
hate the Popo at a time of tense community relations with the peace.
Is that what we're going to do?
We can do that according to the left's logic that we cancel and shadow, ban and
Trotskyize everything.
But it's always one-sided is what I'm trying to get at.
Always one-sided.
Never even said much about us.
Yeah, I'm glad you said Trotskyized before you mentioned Stalin.
And,
you know, the more, I kind of feel the moral superiority is probably
what defines most people.
But underlying that
is not a moral superiority.
It's just pure will to power.
And that,
you know, the Soviets did this as marxists there is an intentional stratagem of the left to
to to deny forgiveness you cannot forgive if you if if you're forgiving um ideology
you will destroy your own ideology so the left doesn't forgive so you can't forgive this the confederate soldiers you can't you you you you can't try to mend the fences by a statue.
I just think it's deeply part of the left is to is to outlaw and ban forgiveness.
It's trying to enslave, I mean it's trying to erase whole elements of the American experience and render them
trivial as if they never took place or they shouldn't have taken place or they and
destroy evidence and destroy complexity and nuance and tragedy and turn it into some type of,
I don't know, superhero TV where everybody's good and the villains are all bad.
I wish that way it's not so easy.
It's not so easy.
Boom.
Well, one man was sainted, Victor, by the way.
I view that, was James Lane Buckley.
I'd like to talk a little bit about him.
And then if we have some time, talk about some anti-Semitism in the academies.
And we'll get to those, hopefully we'll get to both of them.
Final two topics right after this important message.
We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.
So Victor, today's episode is released on Thursday, the 24th and on this very day
James Buckley has his funeral and will be interred, buried in Sharon, Connecticut.
Jim was 100 years old, turned 100 in March and lived a few months more.
He was a United States Senator from New York who in 1970 won a historic three-way election battle.
He defeated the incumbent Republican Charles Scuddell,
who's the father of the current NFL
commissioner and the Democrat Congressman Dick Gottinger.
He served one term.
He lost the re-election to Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
He served in the Reagan administration as an Undersecretary of State.
And then he was a federal judge for 10 years and served with true high distinction.
And Jim Buckley just wanted to be a country lawyer, and he became an icon to conservatives.
Of course, he was the brother of William F.
Buckley, my old boss, National Review.
And Jim Jim came into public life when Bill asked him to serve as the campaign chairman for Bill's kind of infamous 1965 New York City mayoral run.
And people were so taken by Jim, who was a Buckley, you know, that smile, the glint in the eyes, that kind of accent, a little high society, unique Yankee French, whatever pastiche
ingredients went into it.
But there was something very,
very Christian and decent and holy almost about Jim Buckley.
Unlike, I think, anyone that has served
in American public life in the last 60 years.
I didn't, I occasionally, when I was in New York or something,
he would come to a lecture that I went.
I think I sat with William F.
Buckley.
It's been so long, 20 years ago.
I was a Wriston W-R-I-S-T-O-N lecturer in 2004, maybe
at the Manhattan Institute.
Yes, at the Manhattan Institute.
And I remember him there.
I'd forgotten that I remember I talked about being a judge.
And I didn't realize that he was a one-term senator, but he was then a federal appellate court judge for a long time.
He was 10 years and actually senior judge until he died.
So he always considered himself, I always called him his honor.
Didn't he write a book in his late 80s?
I think he wrote, yes, he did.
And he was a true, his true passion at the end was, well, his primary passion in
public life towards the end was federalism and the 10th Amendment.
And
the basic thing, the size of the, as the state grows, your freedoms shrink, and we have to fight it.
But unlike William, he never smoked a cigarette or drank, did he?
And Jim might have drank.
Jim might have
have
he might have had a glass of wine to here or there, but he did not smoke.
And a number of the Buckley family members, his siblings, there was a large, famous family, I think there were 10 of them.
Yeah, a number of them died from
lung cancer or
whatever, CB.
I can't think of the initials, but
he lived a pure life.
And he was such a good man.
And I just think it was worth
letting our listeners know that such a great man existed and should look look him up at some point, look up his books.
Encounter has published a couple of his books, Victor, as you know, you're very involved with Counter.
He was born in 1923.
He was.
He was the oldest living former senator or member of Congress.
He was very hail, wasn't he, until the very end?
Yeah.
Yes.
He was.
I've always wondered about that because when I hear that date
spectrum, my father was born in 2021
and he died in
1998 before he was,
but he was 76.
And my mother died in 89.
I guess she was 67.
And she was born in 22.
I was just wondering what it would be like had they lived all the way until now.
much richer, richer
childhood for my grand, for my own children to have known their grandparents like that that long.
Yeah.
Or for me to have their counsel.
So I think it always brings up, you know, you never, you can't plan anything, but it always brings up the idea that everything you do in your own life has consequences to others.
And
the fact that he was able to keep in pretty good shape and then be some there for his family and for his ideas is very important.
Yeah, to be meaningful to other people, not only when you're 40, as he was, but also when you're 97,
as he was meaningful at that age, is well meaningful.
I've been a lot of people like that.
Bernard Lewis was that way in his
90s.
Oh, my gosh.
I think you got him on National Review cruises.
I had him a couple of cruises, yeah.
You did not bother him in the afternoon.
God knows what he was doing.
He was, oh,
he was so impressive.
Look, Henry Kissinger there's 100.
He just was over in China.
Oh, I remember, was it 30 years ago he had a bypass or 40 years ago?
Oh, he did, though.
Oh, Kissinger did.
I don't remember that.
Yeah, it's really amazing about all these people who live.
The Tom Smith Foundation, that wonderful philanthropist Tom Smith.
I mean, gosh, I see that guy.
And he's.
He's like 85, right?
Oh, no.
Is he older than that?
Yeah, I mean, he looks like he's, I don't know, 55.
Oh, he's in great.
yeah, he's in gray shape.
Yeah, I'm eating up.
I don't know.
It's got to be, I know that people like that who they keep in shape, they don't smoke, they don't drink heavily, they eat moderately, but there has to be a genetic component to it, too.
I think so.
Gosh, we know people who drink immoderately, Victor.
I don't know how they
press on.
I know.
It's remarkable.
I know.
I know a lot of people who were luscious when they were in their 90s.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it is genes matter.
Well, anyway, Jim Buckley, rest in peace.
So, Victor,
yeah, one more
topic here.
It's not so offbeat.
Every once in a while, I remind myself, oh, there's this great website, Minding the Campus, that our old friend John Leo, God rest his soul, John had,
I'm pretty sure John founded it.
And
it's a great repository for thoughtful pieces about what's going on
on the campus, hence the name, mining the campus.
So there was a piece I came across by Philip Carl Salzman, who's a retired anthropology emeritus professor at McGill University.
Did you, do you, have you ever had anything to do with him?
Does that name ring a bell?
What's his name again?
Excuse me.
Philip Carl Salzman.
No, I haven't.
No.
I did know John, John Leo, and I really liked him.
Oh, I love John.
Yeah.
He was sort of a, I think he started out more on the liberal side, and he gravitated.
He was a, yeah, he was a liberal to left Catholic journalist writing for Commonweal and other such publications.
But
John was.
Yeah, I saw him on an occasion.
I thought he was pretty hail in his 80s.
I don't know if he got COVID or what.
No, he.
At Parkinson's, maybe?
Yeah, I saw him at a...
by coincidence at a wedding in Connecticut about five or six years ago.
And then
John got, he just went over Cliff Health-wise.
I think Parkinson's, I was glad, I was very fortunate.
I talked to him a couple of weeks before he passed away.
But so part of his legacy, though, is this Minding the Campus, which really is a great website.
Anyway, so this piece Philip Saltzman has written, it's titled Official Anti-Semitism Marks the Demise of Anthropology.
And here's just the first paragraph here, betraying the premises and ethics of anthropology.
the American Anthropological Association has thrown its weight behind the anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic boycott divestment sanctions movement.
That's BDS.
This is the final act in transforming a field of honest academic study into a program of
far-left ideology.
And part of this, Victor, means nobody, now that it's taken this official position, and this is right, this is about scholarship, this is about intellect, the pursuit of knowledge.
Well, if you're affiliated with an Israeli institution,
you're not to participate in any AAA, that's the association,
et cetera.
Israel is evil.
It's verboten.
I don't think it's necessarily a surprise, Victor, that the field of anthropology, or I don't want to lump all these
kind of non-hard science fields together, but it's disturbing still nonetheless that it's formally taken this position.
Are you surprised?
And what more might you say about these kind of
the growth of anti-Semitism in the academy?
Well, Israel is a special case because when you look at the terrain of the Middle East and you ask yourself
which country has a constitutional government and a loyal opposition and give and take
in the political sense with regularly scheduled or at least parliamentary scheduled elections with mostly a free press
and free expression.
It's Israel.
And when you look at its neighbors, Lebanon is a hellhole.
Syria is a wreck.
Iran is medieval.
Saudi Arabia is maybe liberalizing, but no comment.
Same with Kuwait.
Jordan is a monarchy, an autocracy.
So Egypt is run by a dictator.
So when people say that you're, and
the Palestinians are what now?
Do they, when you poll the Palestinians and some
suicide bomber goes into Israel and blows himself up and kills women and children, and is that okay?
Yeah, they do think it's okay.
So there's a difference structurally, politically, from Israel.
And so the idea that you would enter politics and you would deliberately not apply your strictures against Israel to any of these more, far more illiberal regimes is just absurd.
And you can really see it when you go to northern Israel, especially where there's a lot of Arab communities, many of whom who are living there were not living there in the 1947, 48 war dividing line.
And when people are polled who are Arab, who have not been born there, would you rather live in Israel or would you rather live under in the Palestinian Federation or you can live in Lebanon, you can live in Syria?
They don't want to move.
Now, why would that be?
How could it be possible, according to the American Anthropological Association?
And the answer is because Israel is a Western, humane democracy.
And one of the things that I just got back from Israel this
couple, six weeks ago, and when you look at Israelis, Jack, they're the most diverse people in the world.
There's European-looking Jews.
There's Jews from Somalia.
There's Jews from North Africa.
There's Jews from the Arab world.
There's Jews from Russia.
There's different languages.
It's a very diverse democracy.
And if you decide you want to be an atheist or agnostic in a Jewish state, you're welcome to be that.
And so the idea that you're going to single out this particular group and you're going to apply this standard, you don't apply to any of the more illiberal groups that employ regularly violence.
And by the left-wing canon of isms and ologies, they don't make muster it.
They don't cut it because they're homophobic.
And by Western definitions, they're transphobic, they're misogynist, they're racist.
When we had all this problem with the suicide bombing, I remember a Palestinian official newspaper ran a column
with an illustration
of Condoleezza Rice as ape-like simean, you know what I mean?
And that was the official Palestinian
voice of Palestine newspaper.
And I thought, my God, I wrote a column about it at at the time.
And I said,
how can this be?
How can they get away with this?
So
it's, I don't know what it is with the left.
It's always cosmic.
We've decided we're cosmically good.
So therefore, on the individual level, concretely, then we can be bad.
Is that it?
Because, you know, Lenin and Stalin really cared about the small people.
So if they had to crush a few eggs to make their omelette, they were good.
And that's what this is about.
Palestine, deductively,
is good, and Israel is a neocolonialist, imperialistic Western interloper.
Therefore, it's bad.
Therefore, we move to the next corollary.
If they're bad, we can do and say do anything to them, and we won't do anything to the people who are declared good.
That's how the Marxist mind works.
But,
you know, it's.
Another thing about it is, just to finish, there's something that I think the Americans are starting to see has gone vastly wrong with academia if you look at the public's perception of higher education it's gone systemic systematically from 60 to 50 to 40 it's down in the 30s now jack right partly it's the 1.7 trillion dollars in
student loans partly it's the six seven years
necessary to graduate.
Partly it's the worthless majors.
Partly it's the huge administrative bloat, partly it's the idea that these universities, Harvard $53 billion in endowment, Stanford $37 billion, Princeton $37 billion, and they're all on tax to why they jack up the rate of inflation above the rate of tuition above the rate of inflation.
Partly, as we discussed earlier, about they're asking TAs,
I think Yale is, to go on food stamps to supplement their $40,000 a year salary.
And so before a left-wing person says, I hate Walmart because it's oppressive, I can guarantee you that that greeter at Walmart that meets you at the door or checks your tag when you go out, when you compare his or her salary to the district manager behind the glass office, there's not as big a discrepancy as the full professor, endowed law professor, medical professor, or business professor at Harvard, and the part-time grad TA.
And yet they will each teach a class, but the compensation for that class will be far more asymmetric than any other area.
So we've given them an entire pass.
And I think when they start to read these stories about how the academic world operates,
whether it's denying free speech, or the fourth or search,
you know,
violating ideas like search and seizure or cross-examination or testify, Fifth Amendment protections when they investigate quote-unquote sexual harassment.
Everybody's sick of them.
They're very tired of them.
And when you look at their admission scandals, you look at, you know, I'm just looking at where I go.
This is one of the great universities in the world, Stanford University, and yet...
We have Bankman Fried operating on campus trying to tamper with a witness at the home of his parents after he destroyed almost the life savings or investments of $35 billion worth of investment money that was not his.
And he gave $100 million to Democratic candidates and his parents were involved in this operation.
They were both law school.
And this takes place when Stanford's issuing
edicts about you can't say American, you can't say patriotic, or you can't say migrant while the president is under investigation for doctoring a paper and has to be be signed by on top of Elizabeth Holmes
creating an $8 billion Ponzi scheme on a fake medical tester former Stanford student with some of the most illustrious names at Stanford on her board of trustees
and then we go into
the law school where the federal judge is shouted down by the Stanford law students who voice invective like, hope your daughters are raped, while the administrator, DEI administrator, hijacks his lecture, kicks him out the podium, takes over, and then trashes him for causing her students to get mad.
You put all that together, and it never ends.
I just gave a Yeah, don't forget trying to screw you and Scott.
Yeah,
Scott and Neil Ferguson.
Yeah, you just put all of that, and then you say, well, why is it such a good name?
And then you look at their webpage for class of 2026 and they're bragging that they only have 20% white when that's 67% of the population.
And then you look at the San Jose Mercury article a year ago where they're bragging that they turned down 60 to 70% of those who applied with perfect SAT scores, almost a boast about how anti-merocratic.
And then you say to them, well, if you're letting students in by your own admission don't meet your past standard and you're doing on the base of race, what are you going to do with the Supreme Court ruling?
Well, you know what they're going to do.
They're going to do what Harvard did.
They're going to ignore it because they think they're morally superior.
Right.
And they're going to get sued.
And then the next thing, they're going to have to deal with a faculty that is very left, very supportive of all these policies, and yet privately, each faculty member is making a concentrated decision.
We are not letting in students with the test scores and grades that were pretty much accurate barometers, not always, but along with their writing sample, accurate barometers of how well people could do Stanford-assumed work.
Therefore, we're not letting those students in.
Therefore, I have to react.
I have to inflate my grades and give everybody A's and B's, or I have to cut down the curriculum to accommodate those who have never been admitted before.
Or I have to retain the standards that were accustomed under the Stanford brand.
And I have to have the same requirements for class work, same grading, and I will be labeled a fill-in-the-blank, bigot, racist, something.
And that's what every liberal professor that created this Frankenstinian monster is facing.
And then the university itself has to figure out when they find out that the people they're graduating are not going to be working at a level that people in Silicon Valley assumed that they would be with that S brand on their rear end.
And so
these are things that are all in flux.
And the long and the short of it is, given the woke movement and what we saw at Stanford or what we saw at Middlebury or what we see
at San Francisco State, the violent, the screaming, the yelling, and the sheer ignorance, arrogance and ignorance of these students and faculty,
I just don't think it's sustainable to exempt all these private universities from having to pay taxes on their income under the false pretense that they're apolitical and they're inductive institutions of learning.
They're not.
They're deductive, shrill advocates.
That's what they are.
And they're not teaching things that lead to
the graduation of informed, enlightened, inductive thinkers and citizens.
They're not.
They're turning people out to think in a pre-subscribed progressive way.
And that comes at the expense of foreign languages and philosophy and science and math.
And you can really feel it on campus.
And so
I think we're at the, at some point, some president, and he's going to have a majority, some Republican president and a majority Republican Senate, and a remote,
that can happen if this continues.
And a Republican House are going to say, you know what?
Call me every name in the world you want, Mr.
Harvard President, Mr.
Yale provo.
I don't care.
But you are totally out of control.
You shout down people.
You don't follow the Constitution.
You don't enforce the First Amendment.
You run star chamber investigations of students.
You admit people and promote people and hire people on the basis of their skin color.
And you segregate your graduations by race.
You segregate your dorms by race.
You segregate your workshops by race.
You segregate.
your safe spaces by race, all against the Constitution.
And we've had it with you.
And that's coming.
It's really coming.
It should be.
I mean,
70 years, 80 years of
leftist control.
These institutions are the incubators of the enemies of
our republics.
And you know why?
You can see it.
I get asked all the time, what book would you read
about introduction to Greece?
And I can tell you that if you go back and read George Zimmer's Greek Commonwealth, or you read
The Greek Way by Edith Hamilton, or even go back to the Marxists, M.I.
Finley,
or you go back to any of these books, and you compare them to what's come out of the last five years, it's just atrocious that supposedly generations that didn't have access to computers, didn't have access to the collective advance of scholarship, weren't up on latest archaeological epigraphical discovery.
You should see how they write.
They write wonderfully.
They write empirically.
They're not ideological.
You read a book coming out of a university today in my field, and it's jargon-filled.
It's almost impomable,
impenetrable prose.
It's highly ideological.
It's factually incorrect.
It's just a symptom of a complete decline of scholarship.
And I think a little tiny field like classics, if it's happening there, it's happening in English and French and history and everywhere.
And it's just...
we're going to get to the point where people are going to say, you know what, in a computer age,
you can get by without a BA degree and you can be a sophisticated electrician, plumber, be highly skilled and highly compensated without going through this indoctrination camp.
And you can be a teacher.
And so you can be online school.
You can be, there's going to be schools like Hill.
You do not have to go to these schools and this complete waste of the American product and investment.
Anyway, it's just staggering.
Well, Victor, yeah,
the clock has run out other than a couple of things as we do at the end of the podcast and genuinely thank our listeners for
listening and
telling others about the Victor Davis-Hanson show and those who have the opportunity to
rank it, rate it on Apple slash iTunes, most leave a five-star,
zero to five stars is what you can do, mostly five stars.
The average rating is 4.9.
So folks are liking it.
We thank those who take the time to do that.
And some go even further and they leave comments.
We read them, read the comments on
Apple,
I also read the comments at Victor's website.
Many people are active there.
But here's one comment, Victor.
I thought we'd share, wrap up the show today.
Oh, I have to say, civilthoughts.com.
I've got to promote what I do.
CivilThoughts.com.
Go there.
Sign up for Civil Thoughts, the free weekly email newsletter I write for the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic Amphil.
We are fighting to strengthen civil society.
I give you a dozen plus recommended readings, links, and excerpts of great articles I've come across in the previous week.
So those who have done that, I get a lot of notes from folks saying they love civil thoughts.
So thanks for those who have signed up and for taking the time to write me.
CivilThoughts.com is where you can do the signing up.
So Victor, this is
from
it's titled VDH Fan, Bluff, B-L-U-F, military term, bottom line up front.
I don't miss a podcast and listen to them multiple times.
Always learn something new.
I'm reading Carnage and Culture, and your books are the majority of my library reading lists.
As the fourth son of a World War II Army Air Corp vet who was drafted by Roosevelt when he lowered the draft age from 21 to 18, I enjoy all stories about your father's World War II experience and your insight on the Indo-PACCOM AOR.
I think that's, well, I'm I-N-D-O-P-A-C-O-M-A-O-R.
In fact, I know you know what that means.
My dad, this is now back to the reading here, was a 10-year strategic air command combat crew member on a B-47 bomber as the navigator, rehearsing the Cold War fail-safe one-way mission, deployed to French Morocco during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I'm an Army retired major and Army civil servant with 44 years of service living in Oahu with my Korean wife of 42 years and 89-year-old mother-in-law, who lived through the Japanese colonial period and the Korean War.
Thanks again.
Take care and stay safe.
Sincerely, Paul.
C-D-R-R-R-C.
You know, Victor, it's great.
We have so many people who write those kind of notes, share their life story and the similarities.
with you and their their affection for you and what you mean to them.
So Paul,
Major Paul, thank you very much for taking time to write this and share this.
Thanks all who send us
leave comments and praise for Victor and he deserves it.
Maybe we're all
maybe we're all Oliver Anthony's old souls in a new world.
Maybe.
You know what?
We'll all get together and have a hoot nanny and blow the take the joint down.
Hey Victor, you were great today.
Always are.
Thanks so much, my friend.
Thanks everyone for listening.
We'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.
God bless.
Thank you again, everybody.