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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

Victor Davis-Hansen is the star and the namesake, and he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You know that Hoover Institution is located on the campus of Stanford University.

And Victor has a really important essay that he's written about not only Stanford, but the whole Silicon Valley area and its,

gosh, its influence, its massive influence on America and the world.

And we're going to get Victor's thoughts on the piece he's written and let him elaborate on his themes.

We'll do that right after these important messages.

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

So, Victor, you know, we talk a lot about Stanford.

We talk a lot about the the Silicon Valley on this podcast.

I don't think we talk about it enough almost because of the just the overwhelming influence this, you know,

few square miles of

Earth have had on America and the culture and the world and the economy.

And I don't know what it hasn't had influence on.

Victor, you've You've written a significant essay in the New Criterion, which is

the scholarly,

I wouldn't say quarterly, because it comes out 10 times a year.

I don't know what you call that,

tenally.

But Roger Kimball is the editor of it.

And I know you write essays for it on a somewhat regular basis.

And this one in the new issue is titled Silicon Valley's Moral Bankruptcy on the Pestilence in Northern California.

Victor, I have this thought of like the wild bunch at the end, where you are just, you've got the machine gun and it's going in every direction.

Of course, I hope you don't get killed.

Unlike the movie, you don't get killed.

I don't know.

I'm going to go back to work tonight and I don't know what's in store for me.

Well, this is this, this, this stings wherever you aim at.

So tell us about this essay, why you wrote it, and its major themes.

Well, the theme is that there's three centers of power that run run California.

And that blueprint is what is fueling the National Democratic Party.

The first is a lot of money and never more money than the history of civilization.

$9 trillion to $10 trillion

in Facebook and Twitter and old Twitter and

Google, or all of them.

And they give 96% of their money to Democrats and they're monopolies.

I think Eric Schmidt once said that Google gobbles up one company a day.

They buy out Instagram.

Whatever it is, they buy them out.

And they either destroy them or they incorporate them depending on their efficacy.

If they're monopolies, if Parliament, after the January 6th things, just is on a trajectory to get 20 million, then all of a sudden Apple bans it from the Apple App Store.

Google bans it from the Play Store.

Amazon cuts it off from, I guess, Amazon web services.

It's a conspiracy to destroy it.

And they have so much money.

I mean, a partner's not going to sue them because they'll just tie them up in court.

So they destroyed it.

And they didn't want any

competition.

And they,

you know, they had this revolving door.

We saw it when he took off, when he cut, when Elon Musk scraped off the wound, the scab, we saw the ugly wound beneath where you had James Baker coming in from the FBI, and you have all of these revolving door people from government that when they get done with their liberal tenures, they go to work for Silicon Valley, and then they go back to work.

When a Republican administration is in there, like Trump or earlier George Bush, they all say that they're, hey, you guys, you should be forced.

You should give concessions.

We're the Carnegies.

We're the Rockefellers of the 19th century.

We're entrepreneurs.

We create goods and services for Americans.

We export our goods.

And then when the Democrats come in, they say, look,

we give 96% of all our money to you.

And it's an unlimited money machine.

So don't screw with it.

And that's why they are immune from any type of

scrutiny, oversight.

And I mentioned in the earlier broadcast, I mean, the CIA was the other government agency.

Adam Schiff gets in.

Adam Schiff calls up and says, you know what?

I don't want this story getting out.

And

they have that Hamilton 68 group that I think Bill Crystal was on it, John Podesta.

We know now that they've tried to smother or extinguish over 600 politically incorrect accounts.

You know, the thing about James Baker, he was an fbi uh general counsel that was caught deeply

up in the entire steele dossier uh misadventure and disinformation he was contacting them about how to leak it he just went over to twitter and made 8 million dollars that's like 50 times more than he made the fbi

and

you know it's uh

I don't know.

Do you remember that woman, Lisa Jackson, that was the EPA under Obama?

And she that Richard Windsor fake name, and she was using it to praise herself?

She went right to Apple.

Eric Holder works for Airbnb.

Larry Summers, you know, I mean, his chief of staff, I think, was Cheryl Sandberg, the Facebook person.

And of course, there's the Obama's Netflix, Los Gatos Netflix.

So

I always quote Molly Ball, and she was the one that just talked about the conspiracy and cabal

of Silicon Valley and warping the election by putting hundreds of millions of dollars to absorb the work of the registrars in key

precincts.

But

what I'm talking about is that

where do they get this image that they are flip-flop billionaires or tie-dye billionaires or they wear their baseball caps?

I see these people walking around the Stanford campus or downtown.

They're all multi-multi-millionaires, the second order of these grandees that work for these companies.

But they have this, you know,

they jam Whole Foods.

They

jump out of a Porsche,

$150,000 Porsche with cutoffs and no socks.

And it was all created by whom?

Stanford University.

I mean,

Fred Terman was a great guy.

And he had two great students, Hewitt and Packard.

And between them, I mean, my God, Jack, they created the Stanford Research Institute, the Stanford Office of Technology, the Stanford Industrial Park.

And that gave the impetus for the entire Silicon Valley electrical engineering startup.

And it was wonderful in the beginning.

It was kind of off-the-wall eccentrics.

And there were people in the Silicon

Valley Bank that were taking risks with up-and-coming people.

It wasn't fossilized or ossified the way it is now.

You know, as I said, nine or trillion to $10 trillion between Mountain View, National Park, Cupertino, and I guess Sunnyvale.

And

it was a very good thing that Stanford did.

But then Stanford, then,

for the former president of Stanford,

I think he's chairman of the Google Board, and the current president is on,

he came out of Genetech and Denali and all of these biopharmaceutical companies, multimillion dollars.

And he's under,

I should say Alphabet, not Google, but he's under investigation right now at Stanford for, I'm not going to wade in because I'm not a scientist and it would be unprofessional me to adjudicate the charges, but the Stanford Daily,

who attacks him daily, their own president, you know, just says that in

three or four papers, he misled people by doctoring evidence.

So he's under investigation, which makes it hard for him

to weigh in.

So you have this Stanford patina that says that we

protect Silicon Valley.

We feed it our electrical engineers.

We started it.

We give it the image because those people are on our boards.

There's lots of Stanford boards and our Stanford people are on their boards and we're joined at the hip.

Now, the problem is that

this allowed this leftist Battina, academic scholarly Battina, allowed these people to be cutthroat buccaneers.

And as I said, they swallow up companies, they destroy people, they monitor them on Twitter, whatever they do.

They put $419 million into campaigns, but they're all nice people with flip-flops, cutoffs, and tie-dyes and reverse baseball caps.

But But Stanford then has its own problems, just like Silicon Valley, the real Stanford.

We mentioned the president.

They're bragging, Jack, and I mentioned this before, that they only let in 22% of whites who make up 67 to 70% of the population.

That's racist.

And

they brag that they don't require the SAT, but if you choose to take the SAT, 60 to 70% of the rare, brilliant Americans that score a perfect score are rejected rejected by Stanford.

Now,

they'll release that information, but they will not release the media and SAT scores of those who chose to take it and were admitted, which is, I think, telling.

And

we've had these scandals.

You know, the Bankman Freed, Freedman, yeah, the Sam Bankman Freed, he's...

under house arrest on the Stanford campus.

His mother was a dark money bundler,

closed the gap for Silicon Valley grandees that gave their money to her, and then she funneled $60 million to radical candidates in the last election.

The father was not just the father of Sam.

He was intricately involved, according to the New York Times.

They're being investigated for a transference of $16 million.

He was bailed out.

He had a $250 million bail.

I thought, didn't 10%, Jack?

Isn't that the rule?

If you get stuck with a DUI and they put you on $1,000 bail, you got to come up with $100, right?

Right.

Well, why didn't he have to come up with $25 million?

He didn't.

$25 million.

He didn't.

They got him out for, I don't know, what is a million?

And the former law dean and a professor put up $500 million.

And then you have these graduates, the Stanford Daily, of course, left-wing, but they have a whole litany this last week of all the scandals of former graduates.

But the most notorious is Elizabeth Holmes Theranos.

Remember her $9 billion?

I think her last days of freedom are while we're talking.

She's heading to the slammer.

Yeah, she's trying to get out of it.

She's sentenced to, I think, 11 years in prison.

11 years.

Yeah.

She got a stay.

She's not quite there, but I think she's going to be in prison.

And I had the utmost respect for my colleague, George Schultz, but George Schultz

was a board member, and he got a lot of people affiliated with Hoover and Stanford onto that board.

And that board, I think, was culpable because they gave the impression that this bankrupt Edison blood testing machine would

give instant and comprehensive blood results.

And there was a brilliant, courageous Stanford immunologist.

John Yannides, who showed that it couldn't be possible, and they ignored him.

They ignored George Schultz's grandson, who very courageously

prompted the Wall Street Journal investigations of the rhyme.

Anyway, it collapsed.

It was a complete

Ponzi scheme.

People lost, I think, the Walton family, the DeVoses, the Murdoch.

They lost billions.

Her partner and paramour, Balwani, remember him?

He was a fraud.

He's facing prison.

I think he's got a larger sentence.

Then you go to the law school and we look at the law school with Judge Duncan.

And we look at Bankman Freed's, what his girlfriend and the head of that crooked Alameda investment who's she Carolyn Ellison she's a Stanford person

his parents are Stanford professors as I said person to bail him out is Stanford then we have the

I don't know what you would call it but the other Stanford Michelle Dobner she posted that she wanted

Johnny dead to be, what, torn apart, eaten by, you know,

by rats.

She wanted his corpse to be eaten by rats.

That's very fitting for a stand.

Then we had the other one who

attacked the other professor, I think her name was Carlin.

She attacked Baron Trump and said he wasn't a real Baron.

And then we had the phony letter from the Stanford students who said the Federal Society was organizing a riot on campus.

Of course, we had the disruption, as I said, of

Judge Duncan.

And it goes on and on and on.

And

so there you have it.

And I haven't even mentioned the Chinese.

We had a Chinese neuroscientist that was arrested on campus.

She's disappeared, but she was a member of the People's Liberation Army.

And then I think that the Trump administration fined them millions of dollars for not reporting.

gifts that were from companies that were connected with the Chinese government to Stanford.

Then we had the euphemism.

Remember that, Jack?

The words that you can't do.

You're citizen, American, immigrant?

That came from Stanford.

So what I'm getting at is, and then they went after, I should say, Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, John Yannides.

It was very funny, wasn't it?

And you had Michael Levinton in there, the Nobel Prize winner.

They had the four most accomplished bioscientists, health care expert, policy experts, immunologists, you name it.

And what did they do?

They

tried to destroy their careers.

100 people in the medical school called for Scott Atlas to basically,

you know, be nothing, to get rid of his license.

They went after him.

They went after the faculty senate went after him.

They treated Jay very terribly.

John, they treated terribly.

And they should have been so proud of them because they were all proven right about the vaccinations and the quarantine.

And they were all

so what I'm getting at is that Stanford has imploded, just like Silicon Valley's reputation is imploded.

It's laying off people that today in the news, the Google president got, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars while he's laying off people.

These are not off-the-wall

Steve Jobs or Hewitt Packard in the garage.

These are hardcore monopolistic capitalists that are very self-centered and give millions of dollars to the Democratic Party,

hundreds of millions for protection.

And they operate under the aegis of the Stanford embryo.

They're connected with an umbilical cord to Stanford.

Stanford feeds them graduates.

Although I must say that you talk to some of them and they'll tell you off the record, hey, man, Stanford took this woke stuff a little bit too seriously.

Now, don't slow it down.

We need your electrical engineers, and we do not want people coming into our companies that were admitted without SAT scores.

So they're starting to give their own test onto the radar.

And then you get to the final leg, you know, Nancy Pelosi, the political leg, the San Francisco political machine.

And it's, you know, it's Camilla Harris came out of there.

Nancy Pelosi came out of there.

Diane Feinstein came out of there.

Gavin Newstom came out of there.

Barbara Boxer, the Chinese lobbyist, registered lobbyists.

Jerry Brown came out of there.

Willie Brown.

And

they control the state.

Used to be the LA.

LA controlled the state.

That was where the money was, not anymore.

The money is in the Northern California.

It turned the Democratic Party into a one-party state.

It runs the state, has super majorities in both houses of the legislature.

There's not one Republican statewide official, and it controls, I think, all but 11 of the 52 congressional seats.

And they all have Stanford connection.

Diane Feinstein, you know,

has a Stanford connection.

She's a Stanford graduate.

Camilla Harris's dad is a a professor, was a professor.

I saw him a couple of times on campus, walked by.

He's an economics professor.

Jerry Brown's sister went to Stanford.

They all have Stanford ties.

And so, and what is their message?

It's hard left.

It's

go to San Francisco and the legacy of all those politicians I mentioned is letting criminals out, highest per capita crime rate in the United States, homelessness, racial animosity, bankrupt schools,

trying to destroy meritocratic institutions like Lowell Heist.

That's their legacy, the San Francisco model that high taxes, they're discussing reparations as we talk, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And so you put them all together, big academia, big corporations that are left-wing Silicon Valley, big new democratic quasi-socialist politics.

And that's what destroyed California.

That in the demography of driving the middle class out, bringing the money in

in tech, and then opening the borders wide open where you had 10 to 12 million impoverished people from southern Mexico come that had to be assimilated, integrated, intermarried very quickly from a host that no longer believed in itself and went to the salad bowl instead of the melting pot.

That is what I was trying to write about.

Right.

Victor, I have to, as a former publisher of National Review, I

claim some culpability

for the failure of conservative organizations to have seen long ago what was going on and actually trying to

put an outpost there just to keep tabs on the lunacy.

Not sure that it would.

Well, of course, I mean, Hoover's there, yes, but Hoover's affiliation with Stanford is.

Hoover's Stanford.

It's growing.

Our affiliation is growing with Stanford.

Yeah.

And it's

the only irony is about all of this is that it's all predicated on these utopians never being subject to the consequences of their own ideology.

But if you mandate 22%

of the incoming class of 2026

is going to be so-called white, I guess we use the one-drop rule of the old Confederacy.

If you're not, if you have one drop of non-white blood, you can go into the mixed race category.

But nevertheless, think of it.

You take, I don't know, 1,500, 1,600, I think there's 5,000, 6,000 undergraduates divided by four.

It's not a lot, Jack.

1,500, 1,200 people, and 43,000 apply for those, you know,

so it's they accept only about 3%.

And in that white category, you've got to get professors' kids, administrators' kids, $10 million donors' kids, and Silicon Valley grandee.

And there's not enough spaces.

So you get this weird phenomenon of all these left-wing people you know who will tell you that their kid did everything perfectly, perfectly.

Best SAT score, best GTPA, best prep school, best everything, and they're not getting in.

And

what do you tell them?

You created it, wasn't me, wasn't our listeners.

You created the system.

Why didn't you think that your monster wouldn't come?

You know, when you shocked him to life, he wouldn't come and kill Dr.

Frankenstein.

So, that's what's happened.

And that,

will it change?

I don't know, but I really think that I really admire Elon Musk because he, as again, he tore off the scab and showed it how rotten it was.

Right.

And they, when you, the next great challenge is artificial intelligence.

And I would just like to warn everybody that the research

and the

money and the political cover is coming from that trifecta.

The greatest place of artificial research is Stanford University and Silicon Valley and the Bay Area politicians.

And you say, well, Victor, they're Bay Area.

Who gives a hell?

Hey, Jerry Brown ran for president three times.

He almost made it once.

And Gavin Newsom may run for president.

And we had two senators that were there for 30 years, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein.

And the most powerful woman in the United States was Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House.

The current second most powerful, now the most powerful woman in the world is Camilla Harris, San Francisco.

So yes, they have inordinate political clout from this failed city.

Well, Victor, there's still some more Stanford material to get your take on, and that has to do with the law school's black students' reaction to the Duncan scandal, the Judge Duncan scandal.

And we'll get your thoughts on that, Victor, right after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

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Why?

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It's not official, but hey, why don't you check that out?

So, Victor,

there is a

good piece in the Washington Free Beacon.

It's titled Stanford,

it's by, excuse me, Aaron Sabarium.

And the headline, Stanford Law School's Black Students Group will no longer

help the law school recruit minority students in the wake of the Duncan apology.

So the Duncan apology is the apology, the mealy-mouthed weirdo apology by the dean of the law school

regarding how the DEI dean blew up that appearance by Judge Duncan.

That was already a hostile environment.

I mean, we've talked about this before, but now

the

black law students group is, law school students group is saying,

we're not going to help recruit.

Victor, your thoughts on that.

I can't understand it.

It's, what do we call it?

It's Orwellian.

Stanford University in general and the law school in particular

is

moving toward repertory admissions where people's demographic,

if they're considered victimized or marginalized people, they are being admitted in greater numbers than their demographics.

And so Stanford is bending over backwards to allow non-traditional students from the African-American community to come to Stanford Law School.

So they are saying,

Well, we're not going to help you.

And they even use the word free labor as if they were enslaved or something.

We're not going to give our free labor to go out and recruit.

Well, a lot of people would say, and then they're attacking the white alumni and the white this and the white, and a lot of people would say, okay, don't do it.

It's not, it's a free country.

If you think you don't want to help recruit people for repertory admissions, then don't do it.

And then they're angry about the doxing.

They said, and they released, I guess this guy, Arnold, was one of the ringleaders of it.

And they said, and they released, well, that's exactly what they did.

They published the pictures of the Federal Society with the sole intent of having people demonize the organizers who asked Judge Duncan.

So then it turned around that some people did the same thing to them and they got outraged, outraged.

And then

it's all about

the

the alumni and the professor.

Who is Stanford Law School?

Do these students really think that if you walk on and you put your toe your first year at Stanford Law School, then you own Stanford Law School because you happen to be there three years?

You don't own Stanford Law School.

Who owns Stanford Law School?

The professors own it.

The administrators own it.

The alumni who went there and give money own it.

The university in general own it.

You don't own it.

But what I'm getting at is we've created a situation of surrealism.

These people are so narcissist and self-infatuated.

They think that they're the center of the universe.

And they are saying,

well, if we don't get our way and you stop apologizing.

So they're saying basically that a federal judge came to speak.

His

speech was disrupted by many of them.

The dean knew that in advance.

and wrote out a script pre-prepared to hijack the lecture.

So when they on queue shouted him down, she stepped forward.

And guess what, Jack?

She read something she wrote prior to it.

Her job is to follow the Stanford laws and rules, which prohibit what the students and what she did.

She disrupted the lecture by taking it over.

And then, when this was a disaster nationwide, it hurt gifting and funding.

Where do these students think, by the way, that their free scholarships come from?

Do they think it comes from LeBron James or Oprah?

No, it comes from a wide variety of people, not just black.

It comes from all sorts of people.

And to insult them and say, well, you know, you're just a bunch of,

it's insane.

It's suicidal.

So they put her on leave.

And I don't think she's going to return because how in the world could you have an administrator who's in charge of ensuring that the protocols that you've published are enforced, pre-planned and premeditated, trying to disrupt the lecture in concert with these students?

And so in a sane world, Stanford would have looked at the situation.

They have a video.

I don't think they've released it yet, official videos.

They videoed it all.

And they would have said, student A, B, C, D, E

disrupted this lecture.

They said that they hoped his his daughters would be raped.

They had placards that were obscene.

They shouted him down.

They insulted him.

They said he couldn't get into.

They humiliated him.

And they would have said, that's contrary.

So you, you, you, you, you are going to be expelled.

Bye.

See you later, alligator.

And that would have been it.

And then the other students,

that would have been, you know, as I said earlier, to encourage the others, the others would have said, uh-oh.

I wasn't there.

You wait.

You think everybody would have just said, we're walking out of Stanford University?

No, they wouldn't.

They would have gone to the dean and said, I wasn't there.

I really didn't do it.

I want, don't tell anybody.

But he did it.

That's how human nature works.

And so instead of that, they were lucky.

But instead of thinking they were lucky to have dodged the bullet, they're now saying

that

even though our constituency is let in

with consistently maybe not as competitive grades and test scores.

And I think that's not an unfair generalization.

We are not going to help to perpetuate that anymore.

And some people are going to go, that's what you want to do, go ahead.

You know, if that's what you want to do, go ahead.

It's a free country, but don't whine about it.

And if you want to publish the pictures of people invited,

with perfect legitimacy, invited a speaker, then the names of the people who disrupted it should be told too.

Get over it.

So what I'm getting at, we've created a whole pampered upper class of people on campus, and they're living in la-la land.

They don't understand.

I just gave a talk down in the desert to a group of people.

I won't mention the group, but it was very distinguished.

There's about 400 people and there were a lot of Stanford graduates and a lot of Stanford law graduates.

You know what?

The main question when the QA was on a topic I didn't talk about.

It was the Stanford Law School.

I'm not giving any more money to that.

That is disgrace.

That's a disgrace to my entire legacy.

I'm not doing, I'm not helping them.

And they're getting calls non-stop about that.

Because

what is Stanford?

I guess what I'm saying is the Ivy League and their systematic

elimination of Jewish candidates.

that merit admission and Asians and what and this disruption that we saw at Yale Law School or that famous shouting.

Remember, those students surrounded that counselor at Yale and shouted her down.

And what we're seeing at the law school, they don't understand.

And the admissions policy, they think they're Harvard, Yale, Stanford forever.

But the word is already getting out that the graduates that are coming out of those schools do not know the law.

They're not competitive.

The brand sucks.

The brand sucks.

It's just like the Coca-Cola.

What was the name of that brand that they issued?

Coke one, I heard it.

I don't know.

Yeah, nobody bought it.

And it almost destroyed their entire brand.

It's like Budweiser.

And

what they're doing is they are starting to graduate because admissions is synonymous with graduation.

Once you destroy criteria that you said were essential to your university, I didn't say it.

You didn't say it.

They cooked up the average mean SAT score to get you in.

They cooked up the gpa and they did it for a reason because they wanted a level of intellectual excellence that their professors demanded but once you destroy your own criteria and then you're saying to yourself we have to that's the beginning not the end that's the alpha the omega is only

let's water down the classes let's inflate the grades Let's make graduations synonymous with admissions.

And that way we can be diverse.

Okay.

And then you send the graduate out to where?

Silicon Valley, PR, HR, coding.

Then they say, my God, this person did not get educated at Stanford.

I'd rather have somebody from Georgia Tech.

So that's happening already.

And I don't think they understand, the university doesn't understand that they've alienated

not some idiot like Victor Hansen, they don't care about him, but they have alienated the

upper professional bicostal elite because they're not letting their children in.

They're using racist criterion to eliminate people on the basis of their skin color, and they are tarnishing the university's reputation by shouting down judges or having anti-Semitic posters or et cetera, et cetera.

Or they have students like this.

that rather than apologizing are demanding, demanding things and saying they're not going to go out and recruit students anymore, as if they have a God-given right to do that.

Right.

But Victor, if they're right, you know, we're not going to recruit,

let the younger black kids go to another college.

If this, if Stanford Law School is so damn racist,

why don't they go somewhere else?

It's not Stanford.

I just checked out.

Listen, there are

six historically black colleges and universities that have law schools, Howard and University of District of Columbia.

leave Stanford.

You're racist.

I'm

not going to go to Stanford.

Why don't they address a fact?

Stanford always bragged, Jack, that of all the California law schools, that you graduated from Stanford and you just soared through the California bar, which had been adjusted, by the way, for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But nevertheless, you soared through.

You know what the flunk rate was of the first try at the bar from a Stanford Law School student?

It was about 4%.

You know what it is now?

It's 14%.

This is just the first year.

That's because this

equity admissions are starting to ripple through the system.

So

six law schools in California had a higher first bar rate success than Stanford Law School did.

They are systematically dismantling it.

And it's going to go down, down, down, down unless they correct either their curriculum or their admissions policy.

And people

are looking at the people that come out of Harvard Law School.

They look at Alvin Bragg, not because he's African-American, but because he's an idiot.

He's incompetent.

He's trying to indict a former president on a misdemeanor that is not valid because of the statute of limitation and enhance it into a felony in a jurisdiction, the federal prosecutorial realm that he doesn't have any jurisdiction on.

And only a person who wasn't educated in the law would come up with that idea.

But he came from Harvard Law School.

And so my point is that if they want to do this and they want to let people disrupt the campus, they're not going to retain that image anymore.

They already haven't.

And

it's sort of like the Chevy brand in 1975 when the Japanese destroyed the American automobile and they had to completely reboot and start from scratch.

And and they were able to pull it off.

But

I don't know if they can do that because of their woke ideology.

But they would have to go back to

a merit-based admission and tough classes, and know the marginalized people this, and the rhetoric of gender, that, and no sexual orientation helps you or hurts you, and go back to that type, and then have very difficult to finish.

And

it's a great university, but unless they do that, they're going to be in big trouble.

And we're going to have more of this.

Because what happens is if you tell people that they are victimized and that you're guilty and you're culpable for their victimization collectively.

And if you tell that student that we're going to adjust or modify or massage the traditional admission standards so that you as an underrepresented victim can come to this school, then it's very

unrealistic to think that that person will not continue to play that role.

They have to, because they have been admitted under circumstances.

I'm not saying everybody was this way, but I think a lot of people have been.

And they are going, because if they didn't, if they didn't worry about diversity, equity, inclusion, they would just do it on merit and then whoever got in would be fine, but they don't do that.

And so when you bring students that don't make their standards, and then you have to adjust all the way down the line, and that makes the student feel they don't like me, I got in, but I can't do the work, they owe me, and you end up with something like this, that, oh, we're not going to give our quote unquote free labor to go recruit minority students for you.

And

I don't know if you ask the United States population, how many of you believe that race should be considered as a prime criteria for admittance to college?

It's about 30%.

I think African Americans themselves don't favor it.

So there's zero public support for it.

So the public will say, I'm not saying I say it or you, Jack, but the public hears this story and they say, promises, promises.

You don't want to go recruit other students that by traditional criteria don't get into a law school like Stanford, and you want special criteria for their admittance for diversity, equity, inclusion.

And now you say you're not going to help that promises promises.

Well, Victor, we have time for one other significant topic, and

it's going to be paganism.

And we're going to get to that right after this final message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So by the way, Victor, before we talk about paganism, I do want to mention that in New York, where I live in the metropolitan area here, that you mentioned Alvin Bragg before.

And when he was running for office,

he had made promises not to prosecute theft

in order to establish racial equity and calling theft not theft, but the crimes of poverty.

This is,

yeah, this is what we have.

Still alluding, we saw in

June, July, August, and September was looting flour bags, looting chickens,

meat market.

I don't think so.

The ones that I saw, they were

in the smash and grabs in San Francisco, they seemed to target they being the criminal.

iPhones, sneakers.

luxury goods, handbags.

I saw that TikTok of that Asian woman's store that had luxury things that that was attacked.

So I don't think it's a crime that's driven by poverty, unless he means it in the generic sense that

because

people

don't have the median income, because there's mostly 75% of these households have no male figure contributing to the income, therefore it creates a cynicism where they go loot sneakers and iPhones they don't need.

I don't know what he means, but he doesn't know what he means either.

Right.

Well, Victor, on to paganism, my friend.

So I received

over the weekend the new issue of Commentary Magazine, and the cover piece is titled The Return of Paganism.

And it's by Eliel Leibowitz, who's, I think, editor-at-large for an online journal, a Jewish journal called Tablet or Tablet Magazine.

And I think that's terrific.

In my civil thoughts newsletter, I'm often referring people to check out pieces from Tablet.

But the title is what it is.

Oh, yeah,

quite good.

And

this is not, paganism is not

atheism.

And this is

the case he's making here, and I'll read a bit from here in a second, but it's the backdrop is also a decline in religiosity in America.

We've discussed this before a long time ago, but everyone knows knows like people who

are increasingly

or decreasingly saying they belong to a faith.

So less than 50% of Americans now call themselves Catholic or Protestant, etc.

So you have this decline.

We call them the nuns, N-O-N-E-S, and now you have this paganism.

So, okay, paganism?

What are you talking about?

In 1990, He writes in this essay, scholars from Trinity College, they tried to say, well, how many people are pagans?

8,000 Americans.

2008, another study found 3,400,

340,000 Americans said yes that they ascribe to paganism.

And then

a decade later, just a few years ago, Pew

surveyed and found 1.5 million Americans professing an array of pagan persuasions from Wicca to the Viking lore, making paganism one of the nation's fastest-growing persuasions.

Even pagan is recognized as a faith by the U.S.

Army.

There are, this is, look, I can't, I'm not, people get sick of me reading this stuff, and I'm not going to do it.

But Victor,

I think it'd be interesting,

referring people to it, go check it out, Commentary Magazine.

But Victor, what is paganism as we look back historically

to the ancients, to Rome, or the ancient times.

What was the role of paganism?

What were the beliefs in paganism?

Yeah, apagonus was paganus

is

a synonym for rusticus.

It means a rustic, an outlier, a country bumpkin.

When

in the great period of Christian conversion in the fourth century AD, that you know, saw Constantine convert, and this was the period in the 5th century AD when you had Ambrose and Augustine, there were people who resisted.

They had resisted Judaism and they had resisted Christianity.

And who were these people?

They were the people on the outliers.

They were not in the cosmopolitan cities.

They were not in the small suburbs.

They were out in the countryside.

And they manifested their religious ossity in two two manifestations.

One,

they either went pre-Roman, in other words, they had tree worship or they went to nature worship or demonic worship, or they still worshiped the Roman pantheon, Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, et cetera, Mars.

but they were not able to be converted.

So they were called rustics, country bumpkins.

And it was always a term of disparagement.

And for all practical purposes, it was synonymous with

polytheatric, theocratic idea, polytheism, that it was many, more than one God, whether it was nature gods or the old Olympian pantheon.

And that was sort of,

rustic sort of became

uneducated disbeliever.

or uneducated

agnostic atheist or on natural unnatural infidel or something like that.

They did believe in something, but it wasn't Christian doctrine.

And by the 19th century, when you look at religious

literature, pagan

has become not just

people who believe in many gods, polytheism, it's anybody who is not really a Christian because the idea came out of the Christian church is what I'm trying to say.

In theory, it would apply to people who were outside the realm of Islam or Buddhism.

They were out in the country and they just reverted to either a natural worship because they were in nature more so.

In Germany, they, you know, tree worship or something like that.

You can read Tacitus's Germania to see some of the

pagan

religious expressions in the first century AD.

But my point is that now it's completely an official term of disparagement.

But

as traditional religion loses its adherence and you have the rise of the green movement and get back to nature,

and

you know, Nietzsche said, you know, if you don't believe in God,

you know, you'll believe in

a doctrine or an ideology or Chesterson basically reverberated that in a different formulation.

But the point I'm making is that these people feel apparently when they lost their Christian God,

they had some desire for

transcendentalism or some type of to be transcendent.

There had to be something other than this world.

And so they looked around and they're pretty left-wing and they don't like traditional Christian religion.

And so they said, I'm going to start worshiping earth.

And Mother Earth, there's a whole cult of matriarchal mother earth.

You go to Crete today and there's sinners there because of the supposed matriarchal or maternal aspects of Minoan pre-Olympian religion of Semitic people who were the Cretans.

No pun intended.

But what I'm getting at is that

it's rising because, A, the church has not been able to reach out to this new generation for a variety of reasons, not necessarily any of their own, but more importantly,

they either do two things, they equate nature with religion, so they have natural gods, or they're nihilist.

They don't like capitalism, they don't like Westernism, they don't like

Americanism, and so they go to the extreme of almost worshiping Satanism.

That's big as well.

So

I guess it's going to continue and continue and continue until you have a great revival if Christianity is going to survive.

But

I think it was a mistake personally on the part of the Pope and other Protestant religious leaders, especially the archbishops at Canterbury, to give in to the woke revolution and to not defend the articles of faith.

And today,

as you know, there's men of the cloth that are on the vanguard of wokeism.

They think that's the way to appeal to people in the contemporary sense.

Yeah, I don't know that everyone knows the recent news, Victor.

It doesn't get enough attention, but there is, you mentioned the Archbishop of Canterbury, that there's quite a fight going on now

between the African-based Anglicans,

which are conservative in nature, and the Church of England, which now grants same-sex marriage.

So it's a symptom of affluence.

It happened in Rome when people, before the advent of Christianity,

there was a dissatisfaction with the Olympian gods among the elite, and they were bringing in Mithra and Eastern Persian, Egyptian

gods, and Sibylla.

Euripides Bacchai even talks about it coming into Greece.

So

there were these different cults from the East.

that appealed to bored affluent Romans.

And I think it's a paganism is a manifestation of affluence and luxury and leisure

of a very postmodern society.

And the people in Africa don't have that luxury.

So they are much closer to the idea that the world is tragic and that this world cannot be the only thing there is.

But when you are in Silicon Valley or you're in the Stanford campus and you're very wealthy and affluent, you think, this is it, this is great.

And I want it to be forever.

but i i don't believe that there is anything after this so i'm going to worship things that perpetuate like electric batteries or electric cars or i'm going to worship things that make you know longevity or artificial intelligence get my brain into a body forever or something that's how they're talking about it's interesting there's nothing eschatological about the case that liibovitz is making in his piece it's about the here and now and he he does pose it and answers a question.

Just what do pagans believe?

The answer, while wonderfully complex, may be still to the following principle.

Nothing is true.

Everything is permitted.

And he also goes on at length about how the paganism is very

tribal and makes comparisons to current politics.

Why did Lori Lightfoot lose the election?

Not because she let chaos on the streets, but because she's a black woman.

You know, so the tribal matters very much.

You know, that was very funny when I was an 18-year-old bumpkin from the farm.

I went to UC Santa Cruz, which at that day was pretty hard to get into.

And

I was on the waiting list, as I think I mentioned before, because.

No, you've never mentioned that before.

Oh, yes.

Oh, my God.

Absolutely.

I got into a lot of good schools, but I could not get there.

Everybody wanted to go there.

And I went there and it was just, it was paganism.

It was just the height.

It was the

tail end of the 60s, 1971.

And it was crazy.

I walked down the dorm and a guy's room had, you know, all the prices of drugs posted on the wall.

I leaned against the wall and my hand went through the sheetrock where they had been destroying the sheetrock and they put posters to hide it.

My father went into the bathroom as he was on load, helping me unload, and there was a guy and a girl taking a shower in the male's bathroom.

It was just shocking.

And one of the things that was so weird is there was a big redwood tree that, you know, how they kind of split when they're very old to have kind of a hollow.

And there was a girl there that lived in there, at least I don't think she really did, but during the day, she would climb in this little hollow and she would read her books and, you know, had a little portable typewriter or something.

And I thought that she was indigent.

So one day,

I was right on the way out of Cal College, and she was always in there.

She was in one of my classes.

So I had one of those cheap, it wasn't Walmart in those days, but those sweatshirts, you know, with a hoodie.

Yeah.

And I just happened to have an extra one.

So I walked by

and I stopped and I said, it's so cold in there and you're barefooted.

And here's.

Here's this sweatshirt.

You can keep it.

It's brand new.

I've never worn it, I promise.

And she threw it back out at me and said, the tree warms me.

I don't need help from you.

I did notice that as it got into January and the fog came in, it's very cold up there on the top of the hill.

She didn't live there anymore, but I don't know if she had an electric heater in there or not.

I wonder if that tree, that little hole is still there in the tree.

It was an act of treason.

She was worshiping tree.

She was worshiping trees.

And I know the person, I won't mention their names, but that person became very successful in a traditional career.

Very successful.

Well, tell me offline so I can

button.

Well, hey, Victor, that's about all the time we have, except that we do thank our listeners for listening, no matter what platform you're on.

And those who

listen through iTunes or Apple can leave ratings, zero to five stars, stars, most leave five.

It's a very highly rated show.

Thank you for those who do that.

And people leave comments.

Also, I'm going to read two today.

One is from Tanana57, and it's titled A Friend.

And here's what he writes, or he or she.

I've added VDH to my podcast library.

He's become a friend in this crazy world.

Since I live in California, and that family in the Central Valley, he feels like a good neighbor who is staying when so many many have left the neighborhood.

Please stay and to be a beacon of sanity for the rest of us Californians.

Tanana 57.

Victor, stay as long as you

have guns behind the walls.

Oh, I'll stay.

I think you'll find me in the orchard one day with a beast.

Bury me under my orchard.

The bee did it.

I used to think it was some intruder who would shoot me, you know, dumping stuff, but now I think it's going to be an angry bee.

Wasp, Where is thy sting?

And then we have another one that's titled, Thank You, Professor Hansen.

Thanks for reminding me that there are still many of us that don't agree with the current direction of our great country.

As a proud tech school graduate, I'm often expanding my vocabulary while listening, as I sometimes have to pause the podcast to check the internet for the meaning of a word, phrase, or reference.

I often feel as if I'm getting a college-level education for free.

I was so disappointed to discover after the fact that you had recently spoken in Oklahoma City and I had missed it.

Please keep blessing us with your wonderful insights.

This is signed, Darrell OKC.

How mean of you, Victor?

This town and nothing.

That was a wonderful group in Oklahoma City.

I'd spoken there once, but

it was a wonderful experience.

I do the same thing.

When I read, I always find words words

that I didn't know when I looked them up.

It's a good way to improve your vocabulary.

I always try to use in columns three or four words that are not in common use, but no more than three or four, not to be ostentatious, just to

see if the readers think that's a good word and they can look it up if they don't know it.

You can get by with that.

I think that's good to have one or two or three words that startle the reader and say, uh-oh, what does that mean?

But if you do too many, it becomes, you know,

self-congratulatory or narcissistic.

If you don't do any, there's no challenge.

So you want to find a happy medium.

Yeah.

You and I discussed once, I don't know if we did it on a podcast that about

not using the word I.

And I wrote something, I'm saying I, but for National Review once about,

it was a one-page piece.

It was about seeing the Milky Way for the first time, which was a really profound thing for me.

I always wanted to see it.

You know, you live in the Bronx, you can't, you can barely see the moon with all the light haze, et cetera.

So I did it purposely without the eye.

And you were taught that also, to not use I.

Yeah.

Well,

I was always taught that in grammar school, but then in composition,

I had a wonderful teacher of composition.

He just passed away, John Lynch.

He was a brilliant teacher, and he would correct, just spend hours correcting grammar and syntax.

That's why

I didn't always get along with my thesis advisor, but he was a masterful stylist.

And I learned a lot from Michael James on how to write.

And then Latin and Greek helped me a great deal.

But I think it's important to

be curious about words.

I was watching,

gosh, what was it?

I think it was Endeavor, you know, that show about, maybe you don't watch, it's a British mystery show.

And

I like it a lot.

And they have a really good character who's the pathologist.

When they find the murder, he comes out and he uses a very arcane vocabulary.

And the other day I was watching, I think it was that, but don't quote me on it.

He used the word nidus in ID US.

And I thought, wow.

What does nidus mean?

Yeah, exactly.

But I knew it from Latin.

Latin is a bird's nest, is a nidis.

And

I had a vague idea that it was a scientific term.

So if you, I think if you have a bacterial infection or you say the Wuhan, I think you could say the Wuhan lab was the nidis of the COVID, you know, the origin or the embryo of where something started.

But it wasn't like the, like a bird's nest, right?

But I'd never heard it used

in a broader sense.

So he was,

he was talking about this killed him and his, but the nidis of his pathologies was this entry wound, you know, and it was the core or the center or the start.

Oh, very cool.

Yeah.

I thought, wow,

he couldn't mean a bird's nest, but

I have never used that English word, and I only know it through Latin, and I didn't realize it was a commonly used word.

Well, you used a word today, and maybe we can close out, but you said resignation, and of course, we we know what that word means, but you know, that is a

that to me would be a Victor Davis-Hansen column that talks about the resignation mindset that we that we have.

Not we, we are, some of us want to fight and keep this great republic, but the resignation of the

that's a very good point because uh, one of the things I've been reading contemporary accounts of the fall of Constantinople by Byzantine Greeks, especially

Venetians.

And

it's kind of sad because

there's a sense that

people were resigned to its loss in the West.

They didn't think they could help.

There were a few brave people that went, but there was a sense that they would be converted or they just gave up.

That empire used to have 25 million people.

And by the time it fell, there was only 50, and the city had a million, it was only 50,000.

And the empire was probably no more than a million and a half or two million.

So, what happened to them?

A lot of them were resigned.

They just thought, you know what?

We're in Anatolia.

We're Westerners.

The Roman Empire was here years ago, but now the Seljuk Turks have come in.

It's Asia.

We're foreigners in a foreign land.

And let's just either leave or let's convert.

Doesn't that describe France in 1940 also?

I mean, was there a sense of resident?

You know, we have more, they have more powerful army.

Yeah, Mark Bloch, who was a great medieval historian, wrote, while he was a prisoner of the German army, wrote a really brilliant little essay called Strange Defeat.

And he was executed, I think, 11 days before the liberation.

It was very tragic.

He was an academic, and he was in the resistance.

And he tried to explain what happened between May 10th and June 25th.

how the French army that had stopped the Germans at Verdun and Ausworth in World War I that was the bulwark of the West, that was in the interwar period, had the ability to call up three and a half million people.

It had better tanks and better planes than the Wehrmacht, and it should have held out and why it collapsed in six weeks.

And he talks about resignation.

What's his name again, Victor?

Mark Bloch, B-L-O-C-H.

Okay.

Very famous medieval historian that wrote during the 30s.

He was very young.

I think he was in his mid-40s.

But he wrote a great book.

It's not really a book.

It's kind of a French impressionistic, kind of like Camud did once in a while, but

it's a essay, Strange Defeat.

And it was basically that they were worn out by World War I, and the victors of World War I did not want a replay.

And the losers, the Germans, very much did want a replay.

And how ironic that was that the humiliated, defeated Germans wanted to go to war again and the victorious French would do almost anything not to go to war.

And even though they had superior weaponry and they with their reserves and with the addition of a third of a million British expeditionary forces, they outnumbered the Germans and yet they lost, they collapsed and they were resigned to it.

They just thought we're not up to that.

They had been teaching socialism.

They had banned the mention of Verdun in many of the schools of the 1920s.

The Dutch, for example, had banned the word of destroyer for a type of ship.

They thought that that was too belliculate.

It's really similar to ourselves.

I don't think we have any idea what Europe was like between 1925 and 1935, but it basically had given up.

And it was socialism.

Socialism was part of it.

And this is very eerie because it's very similar to the current.

The collapse of the efficacy of the U.S.

military is just really one of the most harrowing things I can think of.

What happened in Afghanistan?

It's just incomprehensible.

And then

to hear that Russia and China have these hypersonic weapons and their satellite and all of these things that we find that

we're spending so much money and overhead and our budget's so huge, but our enemies have weaponry that is as good or superior to ours.

And there's no, you mentioned that the autopsy of the Afghanistan debacle, they don't even want to listen to the inspector General and admit that it was

the greatest defeat in American history, really.

Yes.

I don't know how you ever recover.

I just hope that the next Republican president comes in and he looks at two-star, three-star, four-stars, and he looks for people who were in combat in Iraq, in combat in Afghanistan.

and have no desire to go become a pundit or a corporate board member upon retirement.

And all they are highly patriotic and they want to win.

And he makes them a joint chief

and just promotes them.

And no wokeism because that's destroying the military.

Bing West for Bing West for chief of staff.

All right, Richter, he's a good example.

Yeah, I love Bing.

I love him.

My friend, thanks so much.

You are terrific today, as you are all the time.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

We'll be back soon.

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

Bye-bye.

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