Our Merry Band of Censors and Other Lawlessness

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Hello, ladies. Hello, gentlemen.
This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show. I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayna Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College. He has got a website, an official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus. Its web address is victorhanson.com, and I'll tell you about that later and why you should be subscribing.

Victor, there's a number of woke topics to talk about today, and then we'll get into a little Biden immigration policy if we have time towards the end.

But I think we need to start off today's episode by getting your thoughts on the Southern Poverty Law Center. And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. So Victor, I'm looking at a Washington Examiner piece, and it's titled, titled Southern Poverty Law Center Goes After Parental Groups.

And here's the first two short paragraphs of this article.

On this year's hate map, hate map, and quote, year in hate and extremism, end quote, report, the Southern Poverty Law Center included 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, 12 chapters of parental rights and education, and many local chapters of U.S.

parents involved in education.

An entire section of the SPLC report is dedicated to the, quote, assault on inclusive education, end quote, which begins by comparing the condition of education debates in 1960 to those in 2022.

It then goes on to list some of these groups' ideas that are supposedly akin to those of neo-Nazis, things such as saying Critical race theory is anti-American and supporting a ban on gender, identity, and sexual orientation instruction for children in kindergarten through third grade.

You know, truly shocking stuff.

Victor, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is corrupt in its own way, has this undue oversized influence because many other organizations and businesses look at their, you know, their, their hate list.

Oh, you're on a, you're on the Southern Poverty Law Center hate list. We shouldn't invest in you.

Or if you're one of these donor donor-advised funds through maybe Fidelity or Vanguard sometimes, well,

no, we can't give to that group because they're on the SPLC hate list.

But their influence is massive.

Well, that's why it is. It's got the Jesse Jackson formula that if you're a corporate...

If you're a corporation, just like when Jesse Jackson would threaten to boycott Toyota or something, he became fabulously wealthy, his Rainbow Coalition, because what? Anti-poverty.

And then you say, well, you know what? I don't want that guy at my back. Here's a million bucks.

So the Southern Poverty Law Sister has that list that apparently means a lot in liberal America, or it's a taboo to be on it, that you're discriminatory. So they, to shield you, you give them money.

And it's a very highly refined, I guess it's a shakedown

process. You know, it was started by that Morris Dees.
I remember Julian Bond in this early 70s. And the idea was that it was was going to continue on an economic front,

the civil rights movement. It was kind of bogus because already then they were talking not about equal opportunity, but mandated equity.

But it's kind of like the Holy Roman Empire that Voltaire said it's not holy, it's not Roman, it's not empire. So it's not really southern, it's everywhere.

To give an example of what I mean, I spoke at the American Freedom Alliance about five years ago on immigration.

And

they put, they send out people

incognito, you know, to hear things. And there was one of their operatives.
And then the next day I was told I was a racist. And then I wrote an article about it, pointed out that

would they please tell me exactly what I said? And then they just never heard from them again. But that's their operation.
They send out people all over to monitor things.

And then they disclide that some people who are conservative are racist.

And some people who who are liberal may, if they say blatantly racist things like Joe Biden, remember, have you ever heard the Southern Poverty Law Center say, we oppose and abhor Joe Biden because he gave the eulogy on the death of

one of the eulogies on the death of Strong Thurman and Robert Byrd, or he praised segregationist James.

Eastland, or he talked about a racial jungle if Bussing went through, called two of his assistants' boys, put you all back in chains. Hey, junkie.
Hey, you ain't black.

Hey, Barack Obama, you're the first articulate. You could go on, hey, everybody, you can't go into a donut shop without seeing an Indian.
All that stuff. Did they ever say, you know what?

This is just too egregious. We're going to cite it.
No, they don't. And that's not what they're there for.
They're there for getting, you know,

I don't know what they get, $130

million a year. They got a huge endowment.

It's like $400 and $500 million. It's huge.
And of course,

they accuse everybody. And then we find out that this white male privileged raging supremacist, Morris Dees, had been, what, systematically sexually harassing women that were in his employment.

And they accused him, not me.

not me, but they accused him not just of sexual harassment, but racial harassment, that this white person was using his position, quote unquote, of power to establish, quote, unquote, a hostile workplace, quote unquote, to coerce younger women,

either to embarrass them sexually or racially or to coerce them in asymmetrical power sexual relationship. So I don't think they have any credibility at all, but they're very dangerous.

And you don't want to be on their list, apparently. And they use that to frighten people.
But they have nothing to do, as I said, using the Voltaire quip. They're not Southern.

They don't have anything really to do with poverty. They're very wealthy, as we just mentioned.
They have all this money.

They deal with corporations of the same class. It's their money versus corporate money.
And most of the corporations are left-wing now anyway. And they don't have much to do with the law.

It's mostly political activism. And they're not a center of anything.
It's just a, I don't know, it's a quid pro quo leveraging organization.

But centers access, they're a legal jurisprudence research think tank. No, you're not.

I love when you do that mockery thing, Victor. You know,

my desire is that conservative media, instead of just generally being content with pontificating,

would assign some writers in a project on a thing like this.

Who are the companies donating?

What are the corporate foundations? What are the donor advised funds

that are kowtowing to this place?

Oh, I would imagine

with

Nazis.

Don't you think they... If we had the confidential donors list, that we would start to see names like Disney and Target and and Anheuser-Busch,

American Airlines, all of those people probably. Yeah, well, I don't even know that it'd be confidential.

I think you can find on the foundations, the corporate foundations have to list who they're giving money to. And I assume a lot of them are giving money to this racket.

So, well, anyway, that's my wishful thinking, and I'm entitled to it. So, Victor,

let's talk about some

woke professor in Ohio. So, here's

another one of those, huh? Yeah, well,

they are plentiful. They sprout like mushrooms after every rain.

Well, it's pouring then. So this is a headline from the Daily Mail.

University of Cincinnati gender studies professor, who's 28 years old, defends giving students zero, a zero grade for using the phrase biological woman.

And the professor brags about failing students who offend her woke beliefs on gender and race. That's a headline.
Let me just read the first few sentences of this story.

A gender studies professor has proudly boasted of failing students who do not adhere to her hyper-woke beliefs after a student complained of receiving a zero grade for a paper that used the term biological woman.

Melanie Rose Nipper, a 28-year-old adjunct professor of sexuality studies at the University of Cincinnati, vehemently stood by her grading practices Thursday.

This is two days ago from when we're recording. She did so after student Olivia Krolzick, not a guy,

complained about being failed for using the previously uncontroversial term biological woman, now branded offensive over claims it excludes trans women.

Nipper told the Cincinnati Inquirer that her support of free speech ends when, quote, you are, intentionally or unintentionally, participating in a systemic harm of some kind.

I love that word, systemic. That means you can't find any evidence, so it's like error.
It's everywhere, but only certain people with detection abilities can find out that it's systemic.

There's systemic oxygen in the word error. You don't know it, but we can find it.

Well, Victor, this is... Well, I mean, first of all, you know, when I was an academic at Cal State, there were

And there were professors of sexuality. I remember a very successful one.
And they were either in the psychology department or the biology department. And their research was things like,

what are the causes of impotence? Or

what is the role of sexual intercourse for happiness or depression? Or

what are the physical-mental interplays between sexuality? But that's disappeared. It's all gender, gender, gender, gender, gender.
That word was not even used. It was sex.

And it's all about now gender fluidity, etc.

The other thing is, you know, and I know in Canada, the United States, if a professor had said to the class,

if you are not a Christian and you do not espouse Christian views in your paper, I'm going to give you a zero. They would be out on their ass in two seconds.

And everybody knows that. So

it's all about gender. It's all asymmetrical.
And then there's not, there's an issue about what's not being taught.

You know, if you go back and look, I was looking the other day at a Stanford University catalog in the 50s and the 40s.

And there was about 10 disciplines. There were mathematics, there were physics, there was engineering, there was biology, there was literature, there was English, there was history.

There wasn't any word in the entire catalog called studies. Not one.

No gender studies, no race studies, no Latino studies, no black studies, no Asian studies, no leisure studies, no environmental studies, no peace studies.

All of those areas, if they're legitimate avenues of inquiry, can just be incorporated under philosophy or biology or something. But we've fragmented the university into these,

they're not disinterested, they're not empirical, these advocac in the popular culture, comic books, movies, whatever, and we've given them this academic cachet to make them look scholarly or important.

They're not.

They're just a bunch of people BSing about gender and trying to, you know, bully people in to adopt the idea there's three sexes or people are fluid and they don't know what they want to do at any given time with what type of sexual activity.

So that's what they're all about. And it's bastardizing universities.
And you know what? The Chinese,

our big problem in the world is that there's a 1.4 billion Chinese

and in matters of trade and matters of military readiness, in matters of imperialism, in matters of subverting international institutions, in matters of interfering with the United States internal politics, they are past masters and they encourage this stuff.

They love it. They have 380,000 students over here.
They're not taking, they don't send a Chinese student, child of a Communist Party member, to study gender studies at Stanford, believe me.

They're all in the engineering department, the math department, the computer science department. And so we are spending trillions of dollars of capital, labor, investment, time, and chasing our tails.

We're fighting over

what he said or she said in the workplace at the water cooler.

We're talking about whether there was a microaggression, whether this person didn't use the right pronoun, this person didn't capitalize black.

And it's just a complete wastage of our resources why our elemental enemies are not doing that. And they want us to do that.

Kind of reminds me, I might have mentioned that metaphor before, you know, in 1453,

Constantinople, contrary to popular historical consensus, was not doomed. They had 7,000

soldiers plus a population of 50,000, vastly diminished, but of that 50,000, 25,000 were kind of militia that were repairing the walls, providing ammunition to the frontline fighters.

And there was about 100,000 Turks, but they had the most impressive fortifications in the world, the Theodician walls. And I'm just thinking of that the other day when you had Vienna, 1683,

siege of Vienna, until the Polish cavalry came down. They were almost beaten, but they only had 20,000.
They only had 13,000 more than was at Constantinople.

And they didn't have the walls of Vienna, I've seen them, they don't even compare with the walls of Constantine and they won. They resisted that siege.
And

why did the Greeks and the Byzantines not, you know what they were fighting about? They were fighting over orthodoxy. They were fighting over formulaic expressions of the Holy Trinity.

They were fighting over. Helioque.

Exactly. They were fighting about, can we restore, can we heal the great schism?

They were still some bastardized iconoclast.

They were doing all of this stuff when people were, even the emperor Constantine XI said, can't we just for once heal our differences with the Western church and bring in, you know, 50,000 Italians or some of the best fighters in the world and bring them in and save this,

you know, this bulwark of Christendom? No. And that's what we're doing.
We're doing all of these woke, silly stuff, reparations.

Whoa, we have $35 billion.

How can we pay you $800 billion? Well, we'll take it on installment. For what? For what?

And that's what we're doing. And I don't know if we're going to make it if we continue to do this.
We're going to have to have some radical leader who comes in.

And I hope it's

a Republican comes in and they have control of the House. And unlike.
Last time we did it,

George W. Bush had control of the House and the Senate.
So did Donald Trump the first two years. But you have to strike when you have that power.
I hope that Republicans can do that.

And then they're going to say,

you'd violate the code of military, uniform code of military justice, and you call your commander Mussolini,

you're going to pay for that because that's against the law. You go in and you lie under oath, Mr.
McCabe or Mr. Mr.
Grcome or Mr. Britt, you're going to pay for that.
It's against the law. And Mr.

Fauci,

you lie

and you're not transparent, you're going to be fired. You're going to have to really get tough and follow the law.
I don't mean tough in the vindictive way. I mean follow the statute

and be symmetrical and say, I'm going to prosecute this person for this particular crime, but I'm going to do it across the board.

So if some Republican grandee, conservative goes into Congress and lies his head off, he's going to be prosecuted, not the stuff that we see.

I don't know if we're up to it, but that's the only thing that's going to save us. You have to have a leader that says, you know what, I don't care if you hate me, more power to you.

You do your worst, I'll do my best. No Twitter, no

horse face stormy like Trump was doing. Just get down to business, get even, don't get mad.

And because it's really, it's 11th hour.

Yeah.

Victor, it might be nice also

back in the University of Cincinnati to see

Ohio as a state with Republican governor, Republican legislature. Why don't they cut off funds

institutions that engage in this sort of

I guess it's because of the courts? There's so many liberal justices, state and federal, that they go to court and say it's a civil rights issue.

And the courts.

are, you know, they're really led a part of the legislature now. So it's hard.
That was what I think in fairness to Trump, when they say, well, you know, Ann Coulter will attack him every day.

They didn't build the wall, but he redid 500 miles of the faulty wall, which wasn't a wall. It was a rickety fence.

So when they said, oh, he only fixed the old wall, no, he built a new wall because the old one was worthless. But the remaining 700 or 800 miles.

It wasn't that he just said, I don't want to buy it, build it. It was that people in the Defense Department said, we're not going to use defense funds.

And then there were thousands of lawsuits that tied him up in court. You can't tell me that Stephen Miller didn't want to build the wall.

He just didn't have the power to do it, even though they controlled the Senate and the House. They got tied up in court.

Hey, Victor, before we head to a break in some other topics, I'm just curious: in your career as

a full-time professor, while these

studies departments were emerging,

were the type of of professors and teachers who were,

you know, women's studies, et cetera, different

collectively? If you can paint with a broad brush here, were they a different type than would be in

the more standard historical departments?

The difference between a first

generation antihistamine and a second generation. In other words, they were pretty upfront.
They were feminists. They came out of the Betty Friedman movement of of the 1960s and 70s.

And when you dealt with them, they were starting women's studies. It was all

basically nuts and bolts. They wanted equal money for equal pay.
And

in Title IX, as I said, they wanted women to have the same expenditures per capita as men.

You can argue that was unrealistic, but they did not say, we want to have an equestrian team and then we want to get a bunch of male cowboys that have transitioned to dominate it, if you know what I mean.

Or they had women's basketball. Almost nobody, I want to be very careful.

Women's softball, they won the national title, they were very popular, had huge crowds. But women's basketball, for some reason, didn't draw very well.

But they didn't say we need to have biological males that have transitioned, and none of that didn't exist.

There were people who were transgendered, but it was different. And so

they had been trained. The second thing to remember about these women's studies, there was a professor, I'll give you an example, Lillian Faderman,

and she really started women's studies at Cal State Fresno. But the point about her was that she was an English professor and was classically trained in literature.
So if you talk to Lillian Faderman,

about Shakespeare or Milton or any of the classics, she would know them. The problem with these generations, they were taught by

gender studies and female professors in the activist mode. So

they don't know anything. They just know activism.
I found that I was a chairman of the general education committee for, I think, three years, and people came in. We had a critical thinking component.

Just think of that. The state was so worried under Pete Wilson that people were not objective thinkers.

So they mandated in the Cal State system of 23 universities, biggest university system in the world, you know, 25,000 faculty. At that time, we had over 400,000 students.

I think it's up to a million now. But anyway, we had to examine every course in the general education to see if it had a critical.
And I remember a new young woman came in about

30, and she was a new gender studies. And she was not class.
She was the first generation that had been only took gender studies in school.

They had been established long enough. And she had her syllabus.
And I said, this is not critical thinking. You start with a premise,

you start with conclusion Z,

and then you work back to evidence A. It's all deductive.
The purpose is to tell the student how to think, not to give alternatives and arguments for each and let them make up their own.

And that was the big, for me, that was a watershed. It was true of all these disciplines.
In classical studies,

I know people, Jack Winkler, David Haupern, all these people who were gender studies or

what was, you know, homosexuality in ancient Greece or the sexual ambiguity of the cult of Aphrodite at Ephesus or whatever, something like that. But the point was that they came through that system.

And they knew Greek and Latin, and they could write in Greek and Latin, and they had read Herodotus in Greek, and they knew what archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphic studies were, but

epigraphy, but not the people they taught. So then the next generation of classicists.

And so I got, it got so bad right before I retired, if I had an opening, we hired six classicists, I would ask students,

applicants, just to read Caesar Elyseus, Elysius and Greek, and they couldn't do it. And then

I was told by one candidate they were going to cite me because you're not supposed to do that, apparently. But the moment.

Really? Yeah, I guess that was American. We even changed the name of the American Philological Association, APA.
Now, you know, it was considered too

discriminatory because it asked people to know Greek and Latin. So my point is this generation that's so arrogant,

if you took any English department at Yale or Harvard or Stanford and the person in that field was under 50, and you asked them,

you took them, and then you took their

two generations earlier from the 1960s or 70s, still left-wing, really left-wing,

and you asked that person to talk to this other person. You asked them questions.

Who is,

what is Spencer's fairy queen?

Even novels, if you said, Sun Also Rises, or Can't Go Home Again, or what were the titles of Conrad's six major novels? They wouldn't know. This generation would not know.

But those guys, I had respect for them. I was trained by them.
I was trained by, you know, John Lynch or Mary Kay Gamel or Gary Miles when I was an undergraduate, and they were all left-wing.

Doctor, I'm going to ask you to be a psychiatrist here some more.

Is the arrogance a manifestation of

knowledge of ignorance? Yeah, yeah, it is. There's connect.
That was a very

That's a theme in all Sophoclean plays of Eubris that Oedipus is charged with being arrogant, but he's ignorant of what's happening.

And that's the same thing with even Antigone in a little bit, Eubris. But most people in our modern society that are so quick to judge and to pontificate, they're stupid.

I was watching Rachel Maddow last night. So here we are in the conservative side.

And we believe that this indictment was a mechanism to get rid of Donald Trump.

When I say get rid of him, I'm not sure whether they want to hemorrhage him as a living corpse candidate, but it's unfair to him. And they do not want him to be president, but I don't know the timing.

I don't know, I don't think they want to

so demolish him that he drops out and then you get a Haley or DeSantis or some other candidate.

I think they want him to be nominated and they feel that he will be a viable candidate, but he will be so hemorrhaging from writs and delays and gag orders that they can control the tempo and then ensure that he will lose in the general.

That's their plan. But I didn't think anybody would explicitly say that

or they hate him so much they want it. But Rachel Maddow, who thinks she's so smart, I think she was a Rhodes Scholar, such as they are today.

And she was pontificating on her show and waving her hand, you know, all this. And then she just said,

don't you think to a guest,

don't you think that at some point, can you envision a federal prosecutor saying to Donald Trump that we're going to drop these charges if you get out of the race and quit politics?

And that, bang, that was it. What a stupid person to do that.
She just gave the whole game away.

For all that sophistication and veneer of not knowing, she just was so arrogant she had to get down to the brass tacks that they're doing doing all of this to destroy a political candidate.

What does that matter, Rachel, whether he's a presidential candidate or not? The law is a law or is a law.

When Alvin Bragg comes into office and Donald Trump is there and he says there's nothing there and he doesn't indict him, and then when Donald Trump says, I'm going to be running for president, and suddenly he's got 30-something indictments, that's not the law.

And so when you say that,

you're suggesting that they can measure, measure, massage the law, and to calibrate it on whether Donald Trump is a candidate.

And that was the purpose to make sure that you should say, if you really believe that he's guilty and you really hate his guts, you should say, you could oppose the question, you know, well,

he's a candidate and it won't do any good to say that he's not going to run. They're going to go after him as a private citizen because that's the law.
But she couldn't even do that.

She was so stupid. And that's what the left did.
They're arrogant, and they're not stupid.

But I would look back at my professors, and it never entered my mind when I was a student or afterwards that I disagreed politically with John Lynch or Mary Carey, but my two mentors had taught me Greek as an undergraduate in Latin.

It was always, wow,

they didn't,

I filtered out their politics. but not in class.
I had no idea what they were. They were superb teachers.
They treated everybody the the same. They were wonderful.

They were wonderful. They really changed my life.

UC Santa Cruz professors, believe it or not, for a left-wing lunatic school, their classics department was wonderful and it was traditional and it was language, language, language, grammar, syntax, philology, morphology, metrics.

It was

and it was not just esoteric. And then when I went to Stanford, they were all left-wing.
But that PhD program, man, those guys, they were all Europeans, left-wing europeans you know what

they they knew greek and latin like they did english and i can remember lionel pearson going to a class and in a very thick british accent talking and we had to take dictation

and i couldn't understand his english but we had to take dictation and write it out in english and then he said i'll be back in 10 minutes and you had to translate it into greek and then he would come in and say i'll be back in 10 minutes translate it into latin

and

that's the type of expertise they had and they trained us but there was no politics. Yeah, you could not do that today.

No, no, no, no, no, no. And even my thesis advisor, Michael Jameson, was a hardcore leftist.
When he visited, he wouldn't visit me when I returned to Stanford at the Hoover Institution.

He said, I can't set foot in there. I'm sorry, Victor.
We'll have to have neutral ground.

But

as far as his, and I don't think he was particularly fond of me, but that didn't influence. He was a masterful pro-stylist.
So what if I turned in a paper or

he would correct the style? And

he was a very brilliant guy. And I,

you know, it was hard working with him. He had idiosyncratic ideas, but

he was one of those things.

All of them were that way. And I really appreciate it.
But the people that were left-wing that came out of that, then they didn't teach that type of expertise to the next generation.

By the third generation, which we have now in the university, they have no knowledge of that.

And so if you have no knowledge and you can't do it, and you're at Princeton or you're at Howard University, then you just abolish the language requirement. You say, you know what, Greek's racist.

It's just a construct of all these wealthy white people to hurt us. So we're going to,

and then they don't even know their own history.

You know, Frank Snowden, a black classicist, was one of the best professors there was in the field in like 1968 at Howard University. He made that department, but they don't even know who he is.

They don't know his expertise. The best Latin professor, Jack, I ever had as far as knowledge of Latin, it was a tie

between Michael Wygotsky and Gregson Davis. Gregson Davis was from Antigua, African-American.
And

he taught me Latin composition, how to write in Latin. And he had a sense of humor and he was witty, but my God, he knew Latin.
He knew it backwards and forwards.

And I would write an essay and I'd turn it in, and he'd say, This is really good, but 70% of that vocabulary is not found in Cicero.

I'm sorry,

don't sneak those Caesarean phrases in there, Victor. And

I say, that thing right there is a poeticism from Libby. That's not good Latin.
And that's the kind of exercise. And then he would say, you know what?

Every once in a while, I'd like you to finish that sentence with a hexameter.

In prose, in prose. So your prose, Latin had to end in hexameter.
And he goes, you got too much hiatus. Don't you know that you don't end a word with a vowel and start with another one?

Where'd you learn that, Victor?

That was the kind of person he was. He was very left-wing.
He was a wonderful, he was a saintly guy.

That's what I get upset about academia. It's this politics.

I don't believe them, Jack. I don't believe it's sincere.

I think it's an excuse to be lazy and not have any academic expertise and just go go in there and rant and rave about narratives and you, me, me, me.

I do because I've seen these people and they don't.

Yeah.

Well, we're suffering and we'll continue. Hey, Victor, we got to have to take a break here when we get back from it.
We'll talk a little. We have two things to bring up.

One is some early on censorship of outlier candidates in 2024. And then, believe it or not, some Biden administration hypocrisy,

hard to believe they could be hypocrites, on the border. And we'll get to your thoughts on these matters right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show. I would like to encourage our listeners to visit Victor Hansen's website, The Blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.
That's where you go.

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It's for me, Jack Fowler. I write Civil Thoughts, a free weekly email newsletter for the Center for Civil Society at Anphil.
And we are passionate about strengthening civil society.

My newsletter comes out every Friday. I give

12 to 14 recommended readings. Hey,

came across this great essay in City Journal. And here's a link and here's a few paragraphs.
I think you'll like it. It's free.
We don't rent the list to anyone. So

we're not trying to, there's no setup here. So anyway, you go to civilthoughts.com and sign up for that.
And I know you'll like it. Victor,

in the Wall Street Journal this past week, Jed Rubenfeld, who is a Yale law professor and a First Amendment professor, has an interesting piece. It's called The Censorship Machine is Running in 2024.

I I think it's already up and running. Here's the first paragraph or two.

He writes: Meta, the

Facebook,

slapped 180-day suspensions last week on the Instagram accounts of people working for Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign.

That before a single message has been posted from those accounts.

This came shortly after LinkedIn shut down Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's account, apparently for expressing disfavored opinions on China and climate change.

This censorship, writes Rubenfeld, should worry anyone who cares about democracy in America.

It isn't only anti-democratic, it's a thumb on the scale that could easily tip a tightly contested election.

Victor,

your thoughts on the ongoing and maybe relentless, maybe it's never going to end censorship of

inappropriate

politicians. And who would have thought of all people, Robert F.
Kennedy, who's, by the way, I've seen him in some polls at like 20% against Biden? I'm not president of his fan club,

Kennedy, but

I guess, you know,

if he's being perceived somehow as a threat to Biden, the lords of the major social media platforms are going to try and shut him up. We've been down this road before with Donald Trump.

Anyway, Victor, very interesting column, your thoughts.

Well, it's kind of amazing because Robert Kennedy Jr. has been out of politics for years.
He has no constituency. He has no office.

He hasn't been an activist. He has a voice disorder that is, I think it's an autoimmune disorder that he sounds like he has no vocal cords, which is

essential for a politician. You have to be a rhetorician.
So he comes in there with challenges, and yet he has no money. I knew you say, well, he's a Kennedy.

Well, the Kennedy fortune has been filtered out with hundreds of relatives by this point. And it's fourth generation or third, fourth generation, I suppose,

maybe even fifth. But my point is that it's amazing that he's pulling that high.
And it shows you that there's a lot of people.

maybe in the Democratic Party, left, center, and right, that don't like this stuff, this woke stuff, because he's kind of an old throwback to his father's generation.

And I can relate to some of it because my parents were, they weren't liberal Democrats, but they were conservative Democrats. And

that party doesn't exist.

It bears no relation to what we see today. And so

he's trying to say things, you know, be careful about big pharma. And be careful about vaccine mandates.
You know, this mRNA vaccine did not have the same

testing period that we usually demand of pharmaceuticals. And be very careful of some of these

pushes and advocacy of Pax Lavid and all these other big pharma, supposedly

viable cures for COVID when there's other ones that are off-label or natural that probably are just effective. Or be careful of the lockdown.

Or maybe we need to make sure we have, i think he had one time he was involved with bringing oil wasn't even venezuela to people in people in new york he's his um cousin cousin his cousin i suppose the former congressman from boston was uh was a who's whose wife was in maybe his wife committed suicide no his wife committed suicide wasn't that i thought it was his wife committed suicide she he did but then

he had the marriage he had the marriage

he's got a lot of problems i mentioned his voice i mentioned he hasn't and then when he gets,

if he gets up to 25,

they're going to destroy him. They're going to go back to his past and say, you know, you made your wife have an enoma and you got another woman to replace her.
And

they're going to tear him to pieces because they're vicious. But the other thing that I think he's up against is people have to just

wipe clean their memory banks of the word Democrat. It doesn't exist.
They're not Democrats. They're not progressives.
They're woke revolutionaries. They're French Jacobins.

They're basically Bolsheviks, and they believe in power and they believe in destroying people. They're monopolists.

These are not people that are, you know, in the old, even the old racist Woodrow Wilson progressive movement that want to break up. you know, the trust, break up J.P.

Morgan's financial, break up the Rockefellers oil monopoly, break up the vertical integration of Carnegie. No, no, no, no, no.

Google buys out 200 companies a day at their height.

Facebook owns everything. They all have market shares that by any classical

definition are monopolies and cartels and trusts. They believe in absolute power and stifling competition.
They're not civil liberties people.

If the American Civil Liberties Union of the 1950s and 60s were alive, they'd be in constant warfare with these people. I didn't support the American Civil Liberties, but you got to give them credit.

They were not biased. They defended Nazis if they had.
They defended anybody, porno people, anybody, left, right,

and they went to excesses. But nevertheless, they had a consistency.
These people in the ACLU are not that way. They want to suppress conservative traditionalist expression.

And so when you put all that money, $9 trillion of market capitalization in Silicon Valley, and you give them monopoly control of the means of communication, and we're looking on the horizon of artificial intelligence whose coding will be written by these people and controlled by, we're up against it.

We really are. And we saw that with the FBI.

The story about the FBI and Silicon Valley was not just that James Comey's FBI was paying Twitter, and we know by extension, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that, paying,

or he said that they were involved, $3 million to be a contractor that wouldn't be subject to government regulations and could suppress free expression for the sole purpose of helping Joe Biden and probably earlier

Hillary Clinton.

The story was that

chief counsel for the FBI, I don't know why we need a chief counsel, Jack.

I thought the Department of Justice was full of chief counsel, lawyers everywhere, but I don't know why you have, but they made about, you know, a couple hundred thousand.

He goes over and sets up the Twitter FBI deal, and then he retires when he gets a little controversy, and he makes $8 million a year.

And that's all of these people, that EPA person under Obama, the disgrace, she used that pseudonym to tweet things as if she was a pro. She goes over to Apple.
They all go over there.

It's kind of like the civilian counterpart to the defense contractors. You go in as Lloyd Austin from Raytheon, your Secretary of Defense, he'll go back to Lloyd Austin at Raytheon.

Well, same thing with Democratic administrations. They draw from Silicon Valley and then they

scamper back home and get more money for their expertise and their lobbying potential.

It's a very corrupt system and it's very scary because they're monopolists and they have a lot of money and power.

And what's even more scary about it, scarier, I should say, is the republicans have no clue how to deal with it they they don't have the money they don't have the knowledge they don't have the resources they right

when you try to set up an alternative like parlor uh no they just they they squash that right parlor basically it was google and amazon

and apple got on the phone the three of them and said you know what

what's our market share of apps they probably said 90 let's just shut them down and they will have no ability to have anybody get on an app. And that's the end of them.

And then they said probably to themselves, if they file an antitrust suit or they sue us, what do you think the parliament are worth? Not what we're worth.

We probably have assets of nearly a trillion, two, three, four trillion dollars. We'll squash them.
And they did.

And

so finally, you know, parlier almost went broke and then had to kind of beg to come back under different auspices. and they let them back on their app under their conditions.
And that's what they do.

And

I think that's why they win elections. The left wins elections now.

And they can, you know, you put 419 Republicans are out there bragging that

a big philanthropist gives them 5 million or 6 million, not 419 million,

Mark Zuckerberg, to absorb the work of registrars in key precincts in the last election, more drop boxes. Oh, we'll hire our guys.

We'll train them how to do mail-in and ballot curing and third-party vote harvesting. So we don't know what we're up against.

I think on the money front, Victor, it's got to be a scale of a thousand to one.

They outspent Trump by over a billion dollars in the last,

yeah, but that's

in a specific campaign, but their nefariousness through the culture, through the, you know, I think 19 of the top 20 foundations in America are left-wing.

You got to see what they did under Obama. We were working to a racially irrelevant society.
We were pursuing

Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of content of our character, not the color of our saint. Your persona is incidental.

Your persona, race is incidental to your, it's not essential to your persona. That's where we were.

And then Obama came along and cooked up the idea that he thought because of declining birth rates and immigration, that the so-called white population was only 70%, no longer 90%.

He was accurate in that. And then he said, you know what? We're going to go back to the one drop rule.
Anybody that has one drop of non-white blood will be eligible for affirmative action.

And they are. And they're now people of color and mixed race are people of color.
And there's no such thing as class. And we're all in a binary now.
And we have 30%.

And these people who are 70%, except the bi-coastal elite, who are the good white supremacists, the good white privileged, the good white ragers,

they're going to destroy you unless you vote for us. And they racialized the entire political system so that we had this ridiculous situation where,

you know, a guy

driving a garbage truck or a plumber who's making very little out here in the San Joaquin Valley, who happened to be Mexican-American or an Asian mail carrier, or

a black mechanic, suddenly thought they had the exact same interest as Don Lamon and Oprah and Megan Markle.

And the same thing as the white elite instead of Gavin Newsome and Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

They were all the same because they all agreed on this racially, this racially obsessed fixation.

It was really strange what they did. It really changed politics and it really

sidetracked what had been

a good trajectory toward integration, assimilation,

incorporation, intermarriage, all the good things that were happening and they destroyed it.

Well, a more perfect union means we were an imperfect union, but there's no question it was becoming better.

I've talked about who cares about my life, but growing up in New York City in the 60s and 70s, and on a daily basis, you could cut the racial tension with a knife.

And just no question it had gotten much better. And then

Barack, as you have explained.

Victor, we have time for one more topic, and that's about the Biden administration now preaching to us about the safety of

immigrants being transported around the country. And we'll get to that and your thoughts on that right after this final important message.

This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad Ryan, real United Airlines customers.

We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat.

I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
That's how good leads the way.

Back with the Victor Davis-Hansen show. So, Victor, on, I saw this on Twitter.
I know it's been reported on widely.

The White House

spokesperson,

Karine Jean-Pierre, your favorite person, laments. She was lamenting the other day about how I think DeSantis had sent some,

put some, as he did last year, flying some illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or

Nantucket, I forget which island now. Anyway, some were put on a plane and flown to Sacramento.
And Jean-Pierre says,

this is dangerous and unacceptable. You're putting people's lives at risk.
This administration that

how many illegal immigrants have died crossing the Rio Grande or

while they're in

alleged protection of the United States government.

No concern for their lives in this regard. No concern for them being hostage to these coyotes that transport them in trucks and leave them to die in deserts, et cetera.

But if you put them on a plane and send them to Sacramento, that's a bad thing. Also, Victor, kind of weirdly related, New York City, Mayor Adams, who's been out there a little bit complaining to the

Obama, the Biden administration about the border crisis because it's costing New York City billions of dollars a year. Now, one estimate is $4.5 billion a year.

He has encouraged people. Oh,

we should take them into their homes. Don't you remember Eric Adams when this all all started? He said, I'm going to show Ron DeSantis and Abbott and all these border governors and states.

I'm going to go meet them at the bus station, shake everybody's hand. Welcome.
We have hotels for you. We have food.

And we're going to give you instant parity with the lower middle class of them. And that's what he did.
And that's what they were supposedly going to do in Chicago.

That's what they were supposedly going to do in Martha's Vineyard. And it just, everybody understands one thing about the left-wing left-wing hierarchy.

They're never subject to the consequences of their own crazy ideology. They have mechanisms to insulate themselves.

So they talk a great game about 550 sanctuary jurisdictions, but that's predicated on they're not down in the real ground. They're not living in Parlier or

Orange Cove, California, or Sanger, or my home, Salma.

because we can see it here in the Central Valley, six hours from the border. And I could say, in my one-half-mile radius, we had a Fox crew come out here.

Laura Lorgan, when she was working for Fox, did a Fox Nation on it. And she went around and she said to me, I haven't seen things like that since I was in Egypt.
And I said, I've been in Egypt too.

And what she meant was a farmhouse with

trailer one, trailer two,

addition three, edition four, potter, pot, pot, porter potty, five, six,

50 people living in a house area zone for one family, and dogs with no drivers, no licenses, no vaccinations out in the street. Just chaos.

That's what happens when you bring thousands of people from the poorest regions in

the southern hemisphere and you dump them with no preparation, no audit, no legality, no English, no high school diploma, and you say, okay, go to it, and it doesn't work.

If you want to have legal immigration, you can have a million, perhaps, but you have to integrate them, assimilate them, audit them, and make them legal.

And you should say to an immigrant, what do you have to enhance the United States? Do you know English? Do you have a high school diploma? Do you have some skill sets? Do you have a criminal record?

Or do you understand that when you come here, you have abandoned your own nation and we're going to imprint in a brutal baron new values that you deliberately chose on your own? We didn't do it.

So if you don't want it, don't come. And we threw all that away.
And now we have, what, 6 million entries since a Biden? And where do you put a,

that's the size of the greater Fresno area. Where do you put six of them in California or anywhere?

It's larger than New York, 6 million people. It's almost, I guess that's greater New York now.
Where do you put that whole city of people who are 100% dependent on social welfare program?

Well, you put them in the places who wanted it to happen.

And we know what those are.

They're blue states and they're pontificating elites who said, you know what, I feel so good about myself when I drive my Tesla back home or my Lexus or my Mercedes that I am for

Miss Lazarus, bring me your poor and tired and hungry. I'm so good, but I don't have to deal with it.
Maria's my housekeeper. Juan's my landscaper.
I give them some used clothes. Once in a while,

and that's how I love it. But I do not want those people living next to me.
You understand that?

And if you bust them here and they're in my kids' school, or they're in my neighborhood, I'm going to get really, really angry and call you a racist. And

that's where we are.

But it's okay for Mexican-American people on the border who are trying to establish in their schools advanced placement instead of second language classes that eat up the ability to get children, their children, competitive.

Or it's okay for people on the border whose grandchildren might not speak Spanish and are targeted by Mexican gangs that come across through an open border. Or it's okay

for an overstrapped police department in Texas or Arizona or New Mexico that has to deal with with cartel members that they're scared stiff of, but that's okay.

As long as the people in Palo Alto and San Francisco and Malibu

and,

you know,

Cambridge Mass,

as long as they don't have to deal with it, and they're for it.

I saw a

report today that

in the last six months coming through the border, not everyone speaks Spanish, you know. There were 13,000 illegal Chinese.

I mean, they're coming from all over the world. But I wonder how many CHICOM agents are coming through the border.

Well, you remember that I think it was about 15 years ago, James Comey said that it was 1%

of the students. I think there was 360,000 students in the United States, and they thought that at 1%, he was trying to be very liberal when he said that.

Liberal in the political sense, like I'm not judging people.

and that would have been 3 600

active people and most of the people that are coming officially are members of the the scions and and children or nephews or grandkids of

communist party members and so there you have it and you can't deal with the left-wing mind on this stanford university deliberately hid about 50 million dollars of contributions that came from communist party Party-affiliated companies.

It was fined by Betsy DeVos's Department of Education. And then we had a member on campus who was a neuropsychologist or neurobiologist who was a member of the,

I know you're not going to believe this, Jack, but she was a member of the Chinese communist military. And she was posing as a visiting lecturer of neuropsychiatry or neurophysiology.

and she just disappeared. They indicted her, and then they just, I think they worked out an agreement, and she's just gone.
And what did that prompt? And then we have the

Confucius Institutes, which are, you know, they're fronts for communist monitoring of dissidents and such.

And that got Stanford professors who were angry.

And they signed petitions, you know, don't be so mean to the,

I guess, communist people who are here as agents

spying on dissidents. So it's very hard to deal with the whole problem.

I was just going to say, Noel Coward had that joke song, Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans back in

World War II. And there's that same kind of mindset: let's not be mean to the Chinese people.

They're not clumsy, stupid Russians. Russia offends people.
You turn on any movie like Taken or you name it, any of these action heroes.

Hollywood has a typecast white supremacist, Russian oligarch, covered with tattoos, kind of like those

the equalizer, you know, Denell Washington, Denzel Washington movies, where he's the kind of the equalizer.

And every one of the villains is some white guy covered with orthodox tattoos, missing teeth, psychopathic Russian. Not so with China.
They control Hollywood.

They tell them exactly, you know, we don't want too many black people in your films because our people are racist and they won't watch it. So cut them back.
And they did. Or they tell them,

you're not going to portray China that way. Sorry.

And then during COVID and everything, they have their megaphones. They say, you're a racist people.
Remember the yellow peril? Remember the Japanese internment?

Remember all the way you treated Asians? You're racist. This is the most racist society in the world.

Right during the first weeks of COVID, remember they had McDonald's in Beijing where it said no Africans allowed it.

Yeah, yeah, if you're black and you were in China and you had COVID time, you were screwed.

Yeah, and you go into Africa where they have their Belt and Road Initiative, they have enclaves where they eat, sleep separate from the black population.

They don't want any, they're racist, and yet they channel into the woke movement and call us racist. And they get, and why do they do that, everybody?

They do that because they are systematically stealing military technology through their student consortia.

They have joint ventures where they dump money,

they dump product, they fix their currency rates, they steal patents, they steal copyrights, and they get away with it because of this propaganda.

And when you have, you know, Stephen, what was his name? That coach of the Warriors, Stephen Kerr, wasn't his name? I forgot his name.

And he gave us a lecture about when people criticize China and he said, oh, they don't have mass shootings. No, they just have a million Wakers in a concentration camp.
Right.

They're just cutting out their kidneys and selling them. Yeah.
And so when you have the NBA people, you have LeBron James that can't sneeze without criticizing the United States.

He puts on his Malcolm X glasses and he gets pictured reading, you know, some radical liberation theology for public consumption.

He gets, takes a knee or he doesn't want to, and then you mention China, that guy, and he won't say one word over that dictatorial, murderous government because they pay him over, I don't know, it's a lifetime contract probably of endorsements by companies with joint ventures in China.

It's worth a billion dollars to him.

So

that's something the left,

it has a, it's China fits into their race class, or they don't say class, their race and gender wokeism. China's woke, they think, because they're a commies and they're supposedly non-white.

And they're no different than the Russians, but the Russians are ultra-white and they're right-wing thugs.

And if you're a left-wing thug and you kill a lot more people than Putin did, the Chinese are killing more people than Putin did. I mean, that's just.

Just think how appealing the cultural revolution of the Red Guards are to so many of the woke. You know, that's

that is so funny.

When I went in, my dad was like this old cold warrior, you know, and he'd been a football coach, he'd been a farmer, he was a community college administrator, and he took me up to UC Santa Cruz to the dorm in 1971.

We walked in and there was this guy.

He was out of Central Cassie and he had like spaghetti arms and he had a scraggly beard. You know, that voice of the 60s, but maybe it's still that.

I'm sure you'll go ahead, give us an invitation. Wow, you know that i am taking knobby brown course

that kind of stuff and he had a little beret with a red with a red uh

you know with a really red pom-pom on it or yeah well a red star on the

his his uh beret and then on the side he had a picture a little steel button with mao and so my dad goes wait a minute has that guy got that commie murder mao on his beret i said yes he goes well who is he is he a cuban or what?

And I said, no, he's a student, Dad.

What the hell has he got a communist Mao? Didn't that guy kill millions of people? He said, yes,

as much as I knew at 18. And that was the whole thing.
It was all a charade, you know, that the left just idolized.

Remember that, what was her name that the Obama public relations, I think she's working for Biden now. And she told, she gave an inspirational

speech when she said one of her greatest heroes was Mao.

Yeah. And they fired her.

Well, look, you know, half the students in the world walk around with Tre Guevara shirts on, and he was

a racist.

He was a racist. He was a homophobe.
And he was not just a mass killer. He enjoyed killing people.
He loved to take the revolver and shoot the brains out himself.

He was a total thug criminal. And you know what, Els? All you admire is, he was a spoiled brat of the upper classes, just like Castro was.

And he was a racist. He was lily white like Castro.
And that's what people should realize about those revolutions. They were run by the intelligentsia and the privileged classes.

And they were ruthless. They loved to kill people.
Yeah.

Well,

thrill to it. Satanic.
Victor. We've run out of time.

But we got to do one thing. One thing.
At the end of this podcast, we'd like to thank our listeners for listening. And no matter what platform you do that on, great.

If you happen to do it on iTunes or Apple, you can leave a zero to five star rating

of the podcast. And most people leave a five.
We have a 4.9 plus average. So thank you very much for those who do that.
And we're glad you, of course, we're glad that you like what

the wisdom victor is dulling out here now four times a week, sometimes five times a week. Some people leave comments, write comments and leave them.
We do read them.

We appreciate you taking the effort. Here's one.

And it's titled Field Without Dreams. I started to listen to the Victor Davis Hansen show because his reasoning

on the Tucker Carlson show caught my ears. Then he talked about my beloved San Joaquin Valley.
I was born in Lodi. Grapes grew grew commercially out my bedroom window.

I worked in the packing sheds too. Oh, the joy I'm getting from reading Fields Without Dreams.
Thank you. From a forever learning student, I graduated from the university at 51 years old.

Love your stories and analysis of life. Spring Lodi.

Stuck in Lodi, remember?

Creedon's Clearwater. Clearwater Revival.

I won't incriminate anybody, but there was a relative of mine who was with a bunch of hippies and they saw down the sign, I think, in 1969, Lodi, California, and put it in their dorm room because that was kind of a cult.

Yeah, don't incriminate. I think the statute of limitations is

I know that my lawyer mother got so angry that she told this person when she heard about it, she went ballistic. But

that was a problem in Lodi that they would steal steal all the signs that say Lodi because of that big hit stuck in Lodi.

Well, God bless mama.

It's a very nice community, by the way.

You're it is. I've never been there.
Someday,

I kind of like Selma, despite the things you say about it, but that's I like. I

well,

I have mixed loyalties. My father's from the Swedish town of Kingsburg.
I've been there.

And my mom's from the Selma town.

In the old days, it was Selma was Danish and Kingsburg was Swedish. And now in the old, old days, and now,

I don't know, there's no such tribalism anymore. But I, by volition, live in Selma.
I prefer to live here than Palo Alto. And part of it's cost, but not part of it.

I'm kind of chained and anchored to this.

Yeah, part of the, yeah, you're part of the land. But

I do associate far more with people from Selma and Kingsburg than I do from Palo Alto. I would hope so.

All right, Victor, thanks for all the wisdom you've shared. Thanks, folks, for listening.
And we will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show. Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.