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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.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

This podcast is one of two episodes we're doing while Victor is taking a little vacation.

So, but we don't want to leave our many listeners: 50,000, 60,000, 70,000.

How many downloads we're getting, Victor?

This show is just growing significantly.

Thanks to all who listen, but we don't want to leave you victorless for the week.

So

here we are.

Can you imagine a week without Victor?

Victorless is called defeated.

People,

there would be a terrible withdrawal.

Anyway, Victor,

we'll talk about at least two things, maybe three.

And the first thing I think would be interesting to talk about is not about today's headlines, these podcasts, but about a recent event, and that is the Titanic site, where this, and the Titan submersible, that was

great news.

And it blew up under water pressure back in your father's day.

But I think this leads to some thoughts that we'd like to get from Victor on burial sites or

the wreckage of ships, and how do we respect the dead and places where people died, etc.

And Victor

was on the

Battlefield Monument Commission.

I think he has a special perspective to lend on that.

And we'll get Victor's thoughts on that and more right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor,

while this five, six-day drama was playing out across America, of course, any number of comment haters started commentating

on

they shouldn't even be going down whether or not the Titan submersible was in

engineering shape to perform

these kind of things over long term.

The fact that people are going to the Titanic as a tourist site violates certain

sacred

codes, which are unwritten.

I could see a difference between

a battleship.

Carrier lost it during war, and this is where warriors now rest.

Though technically, I don't think there's even remains in many of these sites.

So, Victor,

we have this kind of

kvetching about what's permissible or not

with underwater graves.

Do you have thoughts?

And again, I want to repeat, you were a member of the United States Battlefield Monuments Commission.

I think you have

a special place in your heart, and maybe you've thought about these things a little more than most about how the dead are to be treated and respected.

Yeah, there's a wonderful book written on the American American Battlefield Monuments Commission by Tom Conner.

He's a professor of emeritus of military history, wonderful guy at Hillsdale College, very learned, scholarly.

And he wrote the definitive book, and it's really a fascinating story.

I was on the commission until bumped off when Obama came in, as all of us were, even though we weren't political.

But the care and the regimentation as far as the type of marble, the type of vault, the type of grass.

It's just stunning.

And then the generational loyalty of people in Belgium and France, to take two examples, in Italy, father, son, grandson, that work for us and to maintain these battlefields.

About half of the soldiers who were killed overseas since World War I have been buried in these types of cemeteries.

You don't really associate

shipwrecks with cemeteries, but they all are, because by definition,

usually people go down with a ship, at least some of them do.

And I know when they,

you talk about battleships, but when the U.S.

Arizona blew up tragically, if you go to Pearl Harbor, you can see, you know, that monument, you can see where

through the water where the wreck is.

And they were not able to get everybody out, as I recall.

And this came up, I think, in a discussion once at the Battlefield Commission meeting.

And I think there's at least 800 or 900

American servicemen that were not recovered that rest there.

And I surely would not think that anybody would be allowed and they're not allowed to go down there and prowl around that site.

So I agree with you.

I think there's something macab about that.

As far as the Titan and Mr.

Stockton Rush, the Princeton graduate,

you know, New Age, I guess he was breaking the barriers of deep sea underwater discovery.

There were some things I never understood about it.

I mean,

so you're going to use a carbon fiber shell, which is going to be what, safer?

But

how many dollars would you save over a time-tried technology of reinforced steel and various layers that have a proven efficacy at that level?

Why would you try to do something with people's lives that are not, you know, they're not, they didn't sign up to die.

They may have been mistaken by wanting to go to the Titanic graveyard, but you wouldn't really allow passengers to take that risk, it seems to me, if you were responsible.

And it's not a savings.

You can think of all sorts of savings.

And I remember before this incident took place at the Titanic, when the Titan blew up, before that, he was sort of bragging.

You remember, Jack, he had a joystick he bought on Amazon or something?

Right.

19 and the idea was something like that.

Yeah, it was, we were going to cut here and cut here, and we're not going to get quote unquote old white guys with military experience,

submariners.

And it was almost as if this guy was out of control.

I mean,

he was taking a risk with other people's lives that were unacceptable.

And

I don't know.

I think there's something about our culture that we

deprecate nature or

the physical natural realities.

And the fact is,

we're not designed to go down 10,000, 12,000 feet below the surface.

And this is a, it's not just a Titanic in the movies.

It's a graveyard of people who died tragically and they're down there.

Their remains are.

And the idea that you, and they're not archaeological specimens, you know, that you're excavating at Corinth in Greece and you run across a shin bone that's, you know, 2,500 years old.

This is fairly recent in the ninth, in the 20th century.

So

I don't understand the McCarp fascination with going down there.

I don't understand the risk that he took.

I do understand and deplore

the

implementation of a woke ideology, if that's what we were to call it, that substituted expertise and merit for considerations other than talent, which by definition, and his

post-mortem

quote that he that surfaced that his primary, not primary, but at least a chief overriding concern was a person's sex and gender and age rather than their proven knowledge of underwater realities.

You know, Victor, the smartest people in the world when it comes to submersibles are

older white guys who live in Connecticut, right?

Yeah, and the people who have been, who go down there months and months at a time, and they understand

that people who build them, the people who operate them, the people who know the protocol.

And the protocol is what?

It's been manured over 80 years, basically since before World War I, 1910, 1915.

There were certain rules and

protocols that people followed, and they were timeless.

I mean, they change a little bit with technology, but not the essentials.

And it seems to me that one of the protocols is if you're going to go down that deep, then you want a time-tried technology.

And he had problems with an earlier, I think he'd only had three prior

voyages.

And one of them had a problem with navigation.

It was lost for several hours in communicato, et cetera.

So

beware of people.

I don't know.

I just think that whether you go to Princeton or whether you announce yourself as a cutting-edge scientist or you're going to make breakthroughs in gender and race when you hire.

This is all nothing.

It's just nothing.

What the reality is, you're taking people down in a

shell where it doesn't belong, and it's very dangerous, and it also has spiritual and moral complications.

Yeah.

I need to, I'm not disagreeing with you, but just for general information,

when the Titanic was found

in the the mid-80s, located, and

the people who live for the sea and sailing, et cetera.

One of them was my former boss, William F.

Buckley Jr., the founder of National Review and great sailor.

And

he did go.

He was one of the first people

to go to the site.

A French company had some, you know, world-class submersible went down.

I would recommend if anyone's interested in what it's like to go down in a submersible to those depths and what one can see through a foot-thick plexiglass window,

you should go to the Hillsdale College website.

And it has the archives of everything Bill Buckley ever wrote.

And in 1987, he wrote a significant essay for the New York Times magazine on

going down to the Titanic.

So

I can see myself, Victor, people

checking, looking, finding the remains and marking the remains, but doing more than that is

a little troubling.

So

thanks for your thoughts on that, Victor.

We're going to talk next or get your views on the

phenomenon of Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

We've talked about him a little bit on some previous podcasts, but on this particular podcast, maybe give him a little more of your attention.

And we will get to your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.

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

I would like to encourage our listeners to visit

Victor's website, the Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com, And that's Hans Son, S-O-N.

Sometimes, Victor, I know I give it that little E sound.

I apologize.

It's my Bronx accent.

But all of Victor's writings can be found there.

His Pieces for American Greatness, his syndicated columns, links to his other appearances,

the archives for these podcasts, and his ultra articles.

Those are exclusive pieces that Victor writes two or three times a week for the Blade of Perseus.

To be able to read them, you need to be a subscriber.

Five bucks gets you in the door.

Stick your toe in the water.

$50 for the full year.

I would calculate that there's the equivalent of two books of Victor's writings that

you will enjoy and truly enjoy if you subscribe to the Blade of Perseus.

So do please do consider that.

So, Victor, I just got today my

weekly copy of the, I call it the Epoch Times, but everyone else calls it the Epoch Times.

And on the front page is a piece, RFK Jr.'s broad appeal

is an election anomaly.

Let me just read the beginning here, Victor.

Some Democrats say that Robert F.

Kennedy Jr.

is a fringe candidate who spends conspirac who spreads conspiracy theories.

Others believe that a surge of early support for the 2024 presidential campaign signals discontent with President Joe Biden's

job performance and bodes poorly for the incumbent's reelection.

In the early stages of his campaign, Kennedy generated support from independents as well as conservative and moderate Republicans, leading to speculation that he could run as a Republican or an Independent.

Kennedy squashed that idea, telling the Epoch Times definitively, I am a Democrat, which makes him an anomaly in today's divisive political climate, climate, because most pundits agree that he is the candidate who appeals to the widest spectrum of voters.

But Victor, a couple of weeks ago,

there was

a little more prominence

to Kennedy.

He appeared on a

very long conversation with Jordan Peterson that was

broadcast,

similar with Joe Rogan.

There's so significant eyeballs and ears catching what he had to say.

He is the enemy of my enemy, who is my friend, that enemy being Anthony Fauci.

He says things that do have strong appeal to

people across the spectrum.

On the other hand, Victor, he's also got a record of being a

It's a technical term, a creep.

Megan McCain wrote a

wrote a column for the Daily Mail in the face of these, all this attention Kennedy was getting.

Again, it's about three, four weeks ago, saying, hey, hey, let's remember what this guy did.

Remember what this, his second wife, et cetera, et cetera.

So anyway, Victor, there's something about him, though.

He resonates with

conservatives.

He resonates with liberals.

He's censored.

He's in part of that club, right?

Who's been censored?

And that crosses

a lot of thresholds.

So Robert F.

Kennedy Jr., announced candidate for president.

Victor, what are your broader thoughts about this man?

Well, he's getting resonance because of the COVID crisis, let's face it.

He had a theory that vaccinations, either the packing or the ingredients or the preservatives, resulted in autism, whether autism itself was primarily caused by vaccination.

It was a little bit murky, but most in the science, and I'm not going to weigh in on the validity of that assertion of his, but most in the scientific community doubted that.

And then they went the next step, and he became a pariah from liberal circles, of which he was beloved as a son of the slain Robert F.

Kennedy,

who had that miraculous 1968 brief, but briefly successful

challenge to Hubert Humphrey.

And

he got a lot of attention with COVID because he made the argument that the vaccinations were not only not going to be protective of you from being infected or you protect others from you infecting them, contrary to what Anthony Fauci had said,

but that the spike protein, we were essentially not,

we were not making a vaccine in the traditional sense of a weakened or partially destroyed virus that wouldn't have any ability to infect us, but would have an ability to excite the immune system.

But we were flooding our system with much more millions of these spiked proteins, just a fragment of the virus, and that this caused hyperimmune responses in the lungs, the brain, and it was dangerous.

And he said that the knowledge was suppressed.

And he was an absolute.

If we had this conversation two years ago, he was persona non grata

in academic punditry, punditry especially among the left and then a lot of what he said

whether it proved to be true his anxiety his concern was legitimate because now we're learning trickling out that the vaccines did have consequences that we weren't told about they were rushed into production they were not going to give you 96 percent You know, I'm speaking of somebody who got two Modernas and got COVID three times and long COVID.

So

I can tell you, it's a sensitive topic with me.

But that kind of revived him, Jack.

And before, and then

the Democratic Party went hard, hard left.

It had been from Obama.

And

that stance on a vaccination was a libertarian stance, and he developed that vein.

And so then he began to

question certain tenets of this new progressive Jacobin intolerance, such as suppression of free speech or trying to label as disinformation or misinformation, legitimate debate.

And that drew the attention of conservatives.

That on the issues of vaccine and on free speech, they found a kindred soul.

So he went on Fox News.

He went on, particularly Tucker Carlson, gave him a lot of free time.

And Presto,

he was transmogrified into Jack Kennedy of 1960.

And everybody said he's the old Kennedy Democrat.

And to your point, if you look

at his

stance on things like the border, crime,

border, he's a little bit,

he's transcended or evolved.

But on most of the issues, he's not that different than

Elizabeth Warren, Biden, the rest of the left.

But on two key issues that attract conservatives, on free speech, freedom of will, vaccinations, quarantine, he's with them.

And I think that makes him an attractive candidate, especially the more left-wing and more

non-composed Mintes are cognitive.

They challenge Joe Biden.

So Second Amendment also, I think.

Yes, Second Amendment.

He's a libertarian.

And

that said, I think what's going to happen is as he becomes more prominent, the media nexus machine is going to go after him.

And we know what they do to people.

They destroy them.

And they're going to go after his first annulment, where he had, I think he had two children with one wife and had an affair with another woman, and then he had four more.

And then

he,

I guess the word is dumped her in a very

supposedly cruel fashion.

He married a third time, and then she hung herself.

And there were a lot of braggadaccio about extramarita, all that stuff that you referenced with Megan McCain.

And that's going to come out, and they're going to use that against him because they cannot stand him.

That's something the left will not tolerate any questions about Dr.

Fauci or the lockdowns or quote.

It's just, you can't.

It's a non-starter with them.

And they will turn on him because

he threatens what the narrative is, and we know what the narrative is.

The narrative is now, you saw it with Maureen Dowd, Jack

trashing Joe Biden, rightfully so, for disowning his illegitimate grandson.

I guess

that's the proper word.

And then we see other things.

I think there was an article about Old Yeller today that Joe Biden, I think it was kind of aimed at helping him, but it came off like he was yelling, get off my grass, type of crotchety, mean sort of person.

My only response to that was he was always mean.

He was always cruel.

He always screamed at people.

But what I'm getting at is the media now has started a new narrative.

And the new narrative is Joe Biden, if he's nominated, he could very well get Donald Trump elected or Mon DeSantis, and that's intolerable.

And he's embarrassing us, and we've got to get rid of him.

But we can't get rid of him with Kamala Harris there.

So what we want to do is we want to ease him out so that we write stories, not enough to say that he's dangerous.

I mean, Fareed Zakaria just had one of the most intellectually dishonest things I've ever seen in my life.

What did he say?

He had an interview with Joe Biden, and he sorts, you have one of the most successful presidencies in history, and you are so successful.

How do you do it?

This is a guy who plagiarized.

Remember in 2012 when he was kicked off his perch

for intellectual dishonesty and didn't really man up to it until he was caught.

And so

there is another plagiarizer.

Yes.

So they yes, yes, two plagiarizers.

So

they don't want to get rid of him now because they do not want Kamala Harris to be president now, but they are setting the stage for these leaks and this innuendo, all the things that are absolutely true.

But if you or I said it, or any of our people listening, they would scream and yell and say that you're a smear or a libel or all that.

So they're going to try to ease him into a position that he does not run.

Then that opens up new parameters, i.e., a Gavin Newsom or somebody like him can run, and then they can legitimately say, Well,

Camela, you can run too, knowing that she doesn't have a chance and she won't just step into the presidency because he can't finish his term.

So they're trying to thread the needle, preparing all of us for the idea that this wonderful statesman with this wonderful record, it's time that after saving the Republic

from Trump, he's going to gradually fade off and write off in the sunset.

And then we're going to have a new Kennedy type, not the Kennedy, but a young type of Newsom or somebody like him.

That's the narrative.

And then Robert Kennedy, to get back and finish up, he's a threat to all that.

He's a wild card because they know what happened with LBJ in 68, and they know that people can come out of nowhere.

Ross Perot, 20% of the vote destroyed the Bush re-election effort.

And it's a wild card once you open things up.

So they do not want this guy anywhere near the Democratic primary.

And

so we'll see.

Well, I think he's playing the role of disruptor now and probably will continue.

What is also maybe interesting, Victor, is

that,

you know, you can't discount the media attacks, but if you're being attacked on MSNBC,

how many people are actually seeing it?

Yeah, it filters.

into a

broader narrative, no question.

But

some of these other, you know, we're talking to Tucker Carlson on,

well,

whatever Tucker has coming up,

when Tucker talks to someone, what is he getting now?

Like 40 million views on his or more?

Joe Rogan,

this is a,

there are Jordan Peterson's.

Yeah, I don't think the list is end runs around.

I think a really good point because

the left feels that they have the New York Times, they have the Washington Post, they have NPR, they have PBS, they have ABC, they have CBS, they have NBC, they have MSNBC, they have CNN, and they control the narrative.

They do in a large part, but there's a revolution going on that transcends Facebook.

There's a new Twitter out there, but somebody like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson or Megan Kelly, you put that aggregate audience on Tucker, and it's huge.

And they're not utilizing that, and they're not going to be utilized to go on there.

And so Robert Kennedy is really in a unique position.

He's thinking, hmm,

I can balance all of the negative orthodox left-wing attacks on me by going to conservative or libertarian media, and they have the same reach as the left does.

So in a weird way, it kind of funnels into my advantage.

The more they attack me from the left, the more people on the right won't look at my record, but they'll just say, well, I don't really know who he is.

I didn't follow him.

I don't know about all the shenanigans he was involved in, left-wing stuff.

All I know is they hate him.

And that's good enough for me, as you said, Jack, enemy and my enemy is my friend.

So

he's really adroit.

He's channeling all of that institutional bias and unwarranted prejudice against him from the left wing, who supposedly loves liberal Senate Kennedys in particular, to make him palatable to conservatives.

And as long as he sticks on those issues, as long as he sticks on vaccinations and free speech, and social media is dangerous, and left-wing corporations are trying to monopolize sectors of the economy, maybe even Second Amendment, First Amendment, he's okay.

But once he gets off that reservation, I think people will be shocked about his personal and his

public

persona

agendas.

I have nothing against him.

I wish him well, but I wouldn't vote for him.

That's my point.

Well, there's another Democrat who

caused a little flutter in the hearts of conservatives and now has disappointed them and the children of Pennsylvania, and that's the governor.

of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, who's sold out on education reform.

And we will get your thoughts on that, Victor, for this final question as we come back from this final important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

Victor,

kind of off the radar for a lot of people, it was a

hope that there was going to be some election reform, excuse me, not election, education reform in Pennsylvania.

Now, the state politically, Josh Shapiro, a young Democrat, second term,

but he ran on promoting education reform.

He's got a Secretary of Education who's in favor of it.

There were a couple of Democrats in the state Senate, which is controlled by the Republicans.

who are promoting it, but there's a one vote.

I think it's essentially like a 51-49 breakdown in the Pennsylvania House, which is controlled by the Democrats.

And education reform, they call the Lifeline Scholarships,

passed, were part of the budget.

And

Shapiro went on national television saying, well, I'm going to support them.

So there was this budget fight between the House and the Senate, and he said, no, he was going to support it.

And then the budget deadline was July, excuse me, June 30th.

It passed.

And then as

I think it was the day before, July 3rd, he announced,

you know what?

I have the line item veto.

And if this budget passes, and it will pass, I'm going to line item veto the $100 million

dedicated to education reform for the

elementary school kids in Pennsylvania.

So it's just like a

minus, obviously, Charlie Brown and the football situation.

Everybody has to remember what the elite left really cares about in education, particularly as it affects minorities.

They swim in the same water as elite minorities, you know, the Jory Reids of the world or the Don Lamans or the Opas.

And in their way of thinking, they...

They are so magnanimous because they

allow people to get into Harvard or Yale or Stanford or Princeton who that otherwise do not achieve.

And this is a matter of data, by the way, if anybody says, how dare you say this, Victor?

It's a matter of proven data that they do not have the same GPA and SAT scores as other groups.

Okay.

And so they always look at the elite top end, but what they do not want to get into is the school system in Baltimore or the school system in Los Angeles or the school system in Chicago, where literally in schools of two and 3,000 people, not a single student is reading at grade level,

much less computing at grade level.

And we know why,

because there's no incentives, there's no rewards, there's no punishment as far as the teachers.

They're well paid for all the white,

the groaning.

They are well paid.

And I have been a teacher for 30 years, and you do not work 12 months.

I mean, I wrote all summer long, and during vacation, I corrected pay.

I get that.

But you're getting paid for nine to 10 months.

And most people don't have that

and they don't have that leisure.

So it's not drudgery.

And the point is the teachers' unions forbid any discussion of reform.

And we know what would be the solution.

You would have competition.

You would have a promotion of homeschooling.

You would have a promotion of charter schools.

You would give vouchers for private academies.

And in that conundrum, students would self-select.

And those who didn't offer competitive education would go out of business.

And that's just the way it is.

And so, what would be, why would a liberal oppose that?

And the answer is a teachers' union.

And he's made a concentrated, concerned calculus that on the one side, he would like to help minority kids and underprivileged whites and everybody that are trapped in terrible schools that are institutionalized mediocrity.

Or

he takes on the teachers' union and he doesn't get any money from them, but he gets a lot of abuse.

And it's a no-brainer.

He's a politician.

And that's just a commentary about how the left looks at questions of parity and equity.

They always look at the back end, the top end.

They never look at K through 12.

In other words,

If you had an honest, concerned, humanitarian government and you were worried about the lack of parity between African Americans and non-African Americans, whether they define as whites or Asians,

then you would say, we're going to go in there to the inner city and we're going to offer competitive education.

And we're going to talk tough.

We're going to have mandatory Latin.

We're going to have a uniform.

We're going to train these kids.

so that they compete with people at Andover or Sacred Heart or wherever they are.

And we're going to show you can do.

I'm talking from experience because in 1984,

I was farming and, you know, I went up to a Cal State campus nearby and I talked myself into a part-time Latin.

They had no Greek.

They had no classics program.

And with the help of Bruce Thornton and a couple of other scholars, we built a classics department that served primarily minority students.

And it was not, oh, you're Latino or you're an illegal alien or your dad came from from Cambodia and you're mom, it's that your third language, English is your third language.

None of that.

It is, we are going to assume that you want to be competitive with people who have greater advantages than you do.

If you want to do that, I'm not going to force you to do that.

We offer a pathway.

And I will stay till 9 o'clock at night and tutor you.

That's what it needs.

And we're going to make you more competitive.

We're going to have you, when you give a report in class, you're going to have no

When you start to talk in English, you're going to have perfect diction.

We're going to correct your grammar.

We're going to correct every mistake on your essays, but we're going to ensure that you're better trained than people with a lot.

And it worked.

Over 21 years, I said, at the top end, we sent 50 people to Ivy League caliber law schools, medical schools, PhD programs, and we sent a whole legion of people to teaching government service.

But it was very hard because there were absolutely no allies on your side whether it was the chocolate studies department or the black studies department or the faculty unions you name it there was nobody on your side and nobody wants to fight that and i lasted 21 years man i was totally burned out

and

you do you have any allegiance from any of all these hundreds of

I see them all the time, Jack, when I'm in the San Joaquin Valley, which most of the time.

Yeah.

Because the way the CSU system works, you had to average 100 students in four courses.

It was called FTE, okay, full-time equivalent enrollment.

And so a faculty member had to average that.

So if I was offering Latin with 30 students, I was okay.

If I offered

history,

humanities of the Western world with 60 students, I was okay.

And now I'm up to 90.

So then I could offer introductory Attic Greek with 15 students, and then I could offer

Xenophon, second year, third year Greek combined with six students,

and then I could teach an Overdo, which I wasn't paid for, a fifth class.

And I did that for six years,

five classes, five different preps, and I could teach Cicero or Livy or something.

And out of that package, then

you were able to have a sustainable program and then my point is this is that i would have over 100 twice two semesters so 221 years

you know you're getting up to four or five thousand faces that you had in class and you bump into them in their 30s 40s and 50s now i do all the time i had a group of maybe 40 students that went on in classics, either getting a master's degree in prep schools or PhDs.

There must be 15 or 20 of them.

In fact, the chairman of

the classics program right now at Cal State is absolutely one of the most brilliant students I've ever had, Christy Easton and her husband Curtis.

And he went to Yale and she went to Brown from Fresno State.

And I've never had, I don't think I've ever had a student of that caliber.

She was absolutely phenomenal.

I had other students

almost as good, or maybe in different areas as good.

So, I had some students that,

you know, I had a guy named Sal Diaz that was just brilliant.

And

I had, they were just phenomenal students.

And some of them I'm very close to.

Some of them,

maybe it's my fault, Jack, because

I started to become maybe 15 years ago writing more op-eds and more political 20 years ago.

And

that made me sort of an albatross because a lot of them continued in education.

And when I was teaching them, say, from 1984 to 2004-05,

there wasn't the woke pressure on students.

So I think in some cases, people said, oh, you were a student of Victor Hansen.

Oh, my God, he must have been awful.

And on a few cases, I don't want to mention any incriminating names.

they became radically woke.

And that was kind of a

blow, I think, because I didn't want, I didn't care what their politics were.

I really didn't, I didn't care if they're Republican, Democrat, left.

But I did really inculcate the Western tradition that free speech and free discussion, and we were going to judge people in the content of our character, and race and ethnicity were incidental, not essential to your personas.

That's my message.

I told everybody.

And

I had a daughter who was at the university school.

And she would come by,

and

she was in

14, 15, 16, and 17.

So we would go up to school together, and she'd come by my office.

So I would take her home to Selma.

She was in the public schools there.

It was a public school, but it was a charter.

It was the first time I ever put one of my children outside the Selma schools.

And she would say to me, she'd kind of laugh and said, do you have any white students in your office?

Not that she cared.

She just said, every single student is either Hispanic or Hmong or Black or poor white.

She would say that.

She goes, What happened?

I said, I don't even notice.

I didn't.

And it was completely.

And then the point of all this harangue is some of those students

found that it was advantageous to re-emphasize their ethnic pedigree and the sense of victimhood.

And I had been big advocates of them as far as, and that kind of shocked me.

And so I,

you know, I'm kind of a loner anyway, so I don't get involved with some of the students because my attitude was always when a student came to me and said, I want to get a PhD in classics, I try to convince them not to because of the job market.

But if they said history or science, I'd say, okay, or I want to go to law school, or maybe I want to go to medical school, I want to get an MBA.

and they'd always have, they'd shoot for

so-called stars.

They'd say, I want to go to the best places.

I'd always say, you know, this is Fresno State.

It's going to be very hard to get out of here because people have institutional prejudices.

But, but, if you want to go to the Iv League, I will do everything in my power such as a person has power being a professor at Cal State Fresno.

But I did publish a lot, so I knew a lot of people.

So I said, But, but you have to do what I suggest you do because I'm not going to write a recommendation for somebody that's going to fail.

So our BA is equivalent to, our MA is equivalent to their BA.

So if you go to Brown or Stanford or Williams and you get a BA, for me to get a competitive student, I needed six years within a master's degree.

I said, you're going to have to find a way to support.

And none of these kids had any money, period.

So they were working 20, 30 hours a week.

I said, it's going to be almost impossible.

But I will support you anything you want to do.

I will teach you how to write.

I will teach you how to write in Latin.

I will teach you how to write in Greek.

I will teach you whatever you need to do.

And I will give you independent.

I think at one semester, I had nine independent studies and five courses.

However, and I said, if you need to use my pickup, you can use it to move into your apartment.

If you need a loan, I had a student who came in once and said, I don't have any shoes.

I said, okay, go here's some money.

That was a kind of full service department.

And Bruce Thornton did the same thing.

but we were friends with the students we were the friends we you know i dressed i didn't i'd look back and i my daughter said to me she came in one day and she goes you're a slob dad come on you got jeans and t-shirt can't you up your and i said okay susanna i'll i'll do it so i started to you know i have one last funny story i was farming i had no clothes when i started and i had no money So my dad, he had lived through the, I think I told you this, the love boat generation.

Remember the polyester stuff?

The bell bottom.

The leisure suit.

Yes.

So one day he said, well, you're going up there and you need some clothes.

Oh, my goodness.

And I said, my wife will go to Costco or whatever.

And you go, no, no, I got a whole, I got a whole closet full of them.

I don't wear them.

So he dumped them there.

Powder blue.

I first went up there.

Yeah, it was like a bell-bottom polyester.

And then I went up there.

And the guy who became my best friend was a brilliant scholar, Bruce Thornton.

I've been very lucky in this life to have co-authored some edited books with two brilliant people, Bruce Thornton, who's a columnist, and John Heath, who had probably the best sense of humor of anybody I've ever met.

And he was a master of pro stylist.

I just, those two guys made life worth living when you worked with them.

But

I didn't know him, Bruce, at the time.

So I walked up and he was kind of in your face.

So you saw me and he said, who are you?

I said, I'm the new Latin teacher.

And he said, well, I'm in English, but the love boat's that way.

Oh, I hope there's a photo of this floating around somewhere.

I'd love to see it.

I looked like a complete fool.

I really did.

I mean, everything went wrong.

When you get, when you're farming for five years and you're, you don't cut your hair and you wear a beard and you're in the middle of nowhere and you're kind of pissed off at the world.

I guess you would.

And you have kids and you don't have money and you do stupid things.

And like I would, I always had a shotgun in the back of my truck because I, you know, you drive out and you're checking the water at night and you see a coyote or something, you know, or a stranger.

And I just forgot about it.

And I would drive in.

I never thought of it.

And one day I parked a little bit over the white line and the faculty and the campus police came to give me a ticket and he looked in and he saw a gun, which is against the law, you know, on a CAQ campus.

And unfortunately, it was loaded.

And he said, who are you?

You're not to be in the faculty parking.

I said, I'm a faculty member.

So I showed him my AD.

He says, that gun loaded?

And I said, it sure is.

And he said, you know, that's a serious crime.

And I said, I'm a farmer.

I'm sorry.

I'm not.

It's an 1898 Winchester 12-gauge pump.

It's not, you know, it

doesn't always shoot.

So he was very kind and I became a good friend.

He would.

But it was stupid things like that.

It took me two years to acculturate

world again.

You've more than culturated.

Hey, Victor,

quick thing as we end here today.

You mentioned

the Selma school system.

And

I just saw by coincidence earlier this week that Bobby Cox, the great manager of the Atlanta Braves, is a project.

He's not famous.

He's the most famous.

Well, one of the most famous.

We also had a,

Joe Berry was one of the few people who struck it rich in the Kalondite during the Alaskan Gold Rush.

He was a very well-known Selma.

And then we had also Brother Antonias.

I don't remember him.

He was a Catholic monk that became a poet, very famous, Brother Antoninus.

And he taught at UC Santa Cruz.

And then Bobby Cox.

And the thing was, the whole, it's funny you said that.

I didn't know you were going to bring it up.

The Cox family was very well known in Selma.

They owned something called Cox Pump Service.

And they were the largest in our little town to service pumps.

So when I was a little boy, the Cox brothers, or I think there were three of them, and that was Bobby Cox's father.

And they would come out and service our pumps.

Sometimes they bring the kids.

And then Melvin Cox was a year behind me, Bobby's smallest brother.

And I was a young kid when Bobby Cox was in high school.

I think think I was, it must be 10 years, at least younger, maybe more,

but I was six or seven or eight.

And he was always in the local Selma Enterprises, this phenomenal shortstop, I think he was.

Yeah.

He played for the Yankees for a couple of years and then on from there to all the great managers.

Yeah, he was, he, he, his found, I mean, they were all.

salt of the earth people that worked very hard and they had a successful business, but he did not grow up in privilege.

I can tell you that.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, that's all the time we have, except I'm going to say I have one very small comment from a kind soul who, like many people, go to Apple or iTunes

and leave comments and/or show zero to five stars.

Practically everyone gives you five stars, Victor.

And this is from KL Whitaker, and it's titled None More Interesting and a very short comment.

Don't miss an episode.

I garden alone no more.

Nice picture.

That's a nice comment.

I'm glad that

I really like gardening myself.

And

that's a good comment.

Yeah.

Well,

you are alongside people gardening, tractoring, whatever they're doing during the day.

It's wonderful.

I had a person call me yesterday.

I think our audience is getting bigger.

And the person was saying that they were on the, they had somebody come over and she was saying that she was talking to me.

And the person was said, well, I'm listening to the podcast.

It was kind of a coincidence.

And I think that's what we're trying to do in the podcast is give people an alternative view of the universe because it's so hard to do.

Yeah.

Give us hope.

And I mean, not just the listeners, myself.

The more that I talk, I try to articulate things and work it out myself.

So it's good for me to do it.

Yeah, well, you did a pretty good job of it.

Hey, Victor, thanks so much for all the wisdom you shared today.

And thanks, folks, for listening.

And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Sanson Show.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.