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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

The star namesake is Victor Davis Hanson, 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.

His official website, The Blade of Perseus, can be found at victorhanson.com.

You should be checking that out.

You should also be subscribing.

And I'll tell you why a little later in today's show.

We're going to begin by talking about accreditation at colleges and how, like every other process that goes on in higher education, it has gone terribly.

Woke, Victor knows a thing or two or three about accreditation.

So we will get his thoughts on that and plenty more.

The Stanford law school speech debacle, that's still an ongoing.

New things are happening on that front.

And

what else?

We have Ultra.

Victor's written a series for his website that's worth

talking about.

So we'll get to that.

We'll start off with accreditation right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

So Victor, first topic Victor, I'd like to get your thoughts on.

is accreditation and as many know accreditation is what colleges go through every X amount of years I guess once upon a time made sense, right?

Is the school that's claiming to teach biology actually teaching biology, et cetera?

But like everything else, wokeness has infected

accrediting agencies.

There are several in the country.

So, National Review, and I'm going to just read a little piece from

a segment from a National Review article published today by Robert Manzer.

He's the president of the American Academy for Liberal Education, and his piece is titled The Arbitrary Monopoly, Crushing Higher Education.

And Victor, let me just read the beginning of this piece and then get your thoughts, because you've been through this several times as

a professor and your involvement over the years with several academic institutions.

So here's how the piece begins.

In early February, the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina voted unanimously to develop a new school of civic life and leadership, inspired by Arizona State University's highly successful School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership.

The trustees, these are the trustees of North Carolina, sought their own great civics program and more protection for campus

free expression.

Similar initiatives are underway elsewhere, but this initiative has received considerable attention because it drew a public rebuke from the president of the university's accreditor.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the president of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commissions on Colleges, S-A-C,

S-C-O-C, what an acronym, stated publicly

that either, quote, we're gonna get them to change it or the institution will be on warning, end quote.

People who want great civics programs to succeed may wonder why such apparent intimidation tactics are being used against a new one.

Some may also wonder whether such tactics are linked to a growing effort by accreditors to promote an alternative civics on college campuses, one centered on, quote, equity-mindedness, end quote.

Still others may wonder why we have accreditors at all.

Victor, I'm sure you're not surprised.

that accrediting agencies are implementing wokeness, but give us your thoughts on this and maybe you have some experiences that you'd want to share with your own

accreditors.

Accrediting was everybody knew I've been accredited, and I've been an accreditor on a board.

I think at one point I was asked to accredit the military history program at the Naval Postgraduate School.

What you traditionally do, you go look at the curriculum, you talk to the faculty, you match faculty profiles with the courses, you look at the grading,

and you make sure that it's all at an academic standard that one would expect.

And it was.

It was a wonderful program.

When I was being accredited, I remember somebody came in to accredit the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, and the accreditor came in.

They're just professors, Jack, that want a little extra money.

Usually are retired professors.

They come in and they say,

Professor Hansen, I see you're teaching four classes.

What are you doing?

Here's your syllabus.

Blada.

And that was it.

And so, and they want to see if, you know, if you have a Spanish program, do you have X number of upper division classes if you're offering a master or not?

They don't, what would not get you accredited if you're saying, Powell State, San Bernardino, or UC Irvine offers a master's in Russian language.

And then you look at, and there's one faculty member and they're doing independent studies, you know.

So that's kind of stuff, but not now, because like everything else, it's warped with this woke infection.

And so now

it's to what degree does this academic program

focus primarily on diversity, equity, and inclusion?

And so what they really hate, Jack, are civics because people now

in response to these horrendous polls were, and I quoted them in The Dying Citizen, where you see people,

do you know the Star-Spangled Banner, 12%?

You know how, you know, the words of the Oath of Allegiance, 15%.

You know what Iwo Jima is?

Do you know what the Battle of Gettysburg was?

Do you know who John Adams was?

Do you know what the Gettysburg Address was?

Do you know who Woodrow was...

They don't know anything.

And because they haven't been taught that, because the sins of commission are that they've had this diversity, equity, inclusion stuff that to the degree these names even came up,

you know,

they were in a negative context.

I admire the career of Harriet Tubman, but compared to who won the Civil War and freed slaves and who destroyed the Confederacy, you could argue that Ulysses S.

Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman did a lot more, and yet they're not taught at all.

So, and then there's the act of omission that we don't have have time for what matters because we're

Stanford University's got 15,000 academic staff that are not teaching for 16,000 students.

So that's what it's all about.

And they hate civics because civics, given all these polls and the historical ignorance of today's young people, they think, you know what?

This diversity is ruining the country because everybody is identifying by their tribal affiliations.

First, I'm Chicano, I'm Asian, I'm Black, I'm this, I'm that, I'm transgendered, I'm LGBTQ plus blah, dah,

and they don't have any common core.

When they ask people, do you have a positive view of the United States?

People under 30, it's about 25%.

And the Democratic Party, if you

It didn't used to be this way, but identifying as a Democrat makes you far more likely to say that you don't have any particular affection, be severe Republican for the United States.

So it's an effort to address that and say that race is incidental.

It's not essential to who we are.

We're Americans.

We have a common core.

We have a common history.

We have common values.

We have common borders.

We have our own unique, singular.

physical living space between Canada and New Mexico and the Atlantic and the Pacific.

We're not perfect.

We sin like all humans do, but we are uniquely self-corrective.

That's the message it's doing.

It's trying to,

you know, people need to know that.

They need to sing the battle hymn of the republic.

They need to know,

you know, God bless America.

They need to know America and the beautiful.

Anything that can draw us together and de-emphasize the tribalism.

Tribalism is a pre-civilizational impulse.

It's all through, I mean,

pick up Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, and the first thing he starts in with is: before the age of the city-state, people were transitory, migratory, and tribal.

And it's always an enemy of meritocracy where you pick people on the basis of your first cousin blood ties.

And so that's what the civics is trying to restore to this earlier American common knowledge, a common body of knowledge.

You go to the football game, you go to a movie, and you happen to bump into another American, and they have enormous areas of common reference.

Today, when I see somebody in my town, I have no expectation they can tell me what July 4th is all about.

They can maybe, I don't think they know what Cinco de Mayo is all about, what particular occasion that was.

But my point is that if you don't have a common custom or tradition or legacy or history or shared value, you have nothing.

And that's why the diversity, equity, inclusion inclusion industry hates us.

Second thing, very quickly, is, Jack, there's hundreds of thousands of these people today that are in this racket.

They don't produce anything.

They're like Soviet Commissars or Maoist Red Guards or Robespierre's Jacobites.

They're auditors in the broadest sense of the word.

That is, they're parasitical on the productive people in the university.

They don't correct papers.

They don't give exams.

They do not lecture.

All they do is monitor.

They monitor faculty.

They monitor other administrators.

They monitor students to make sure that they think in a preconceived fashion.

That is, that the United States is culpable at its origins.

It got worse during its maturity and it's terrible now.

And that people of color and all marginalized people, regardless of their class, I'm talking again, LeBron James or Michelle Obama.

They have legitimate grievances as part of the oppressed club.

And a lot of people say

two things.

Whatever you think about the United States, if that's the attitude, it's not going to exist.

It's a nihilist attitude.

History is very unkind to people who don't think you're better than the alternative.

If the majority of Americans are brought up in their universities and their families and their communities and their case to think that we're no better than Mexico or we're no better than Belgium, then we're not going to exist.

And number two, there is a central paradox to this entire discussion of the diversity, equity, inclusion programs versus the civics program.

If,

if everything

is so bad in the United States, why do you want to be a part of it?

Why is this the number one destination of immigrants all over the world that takes more legal immigrants than all other countries combined.

If you think that this is a terrible racist country, why did seven million people break through the southern border?

Is it because some of you are going to say, well, Victor,

don't think it's because of our constitution.

It's because they want money.

Okay, well, how do we have the money, the wherewithal to give it to them?

What unique system?

We're now more naturally wealthy than is Mexico.

Mexico is one of the most naturally wealthy country in the world.

Why don't they have money?

Why here?

Why don't they go to the Caribbean?

Why don't they go to, I don't know, why don't they go to Russia?

What did we do to make us successfully economic?

What were the values we inculcated?

And that's what's so weird about the woke.

They can't answer that question.

They cannot answer that question.

If they hate the country so much, why do they want to be a part of it to change it?

But they keep saying

they want the salary of a diversity, equity, inclusion.

Where did that salary come from?

Where did the system come from?

Where did these snotty-nosed kids at the Stanford Law School?

Where did they get the wherewithal, Jack, to do what they're doing?

They think they own the university.

They've only there three years, three years.

Three years they can say to Judge Duncan, scum, hope your daughter's

arrayed.

You couldn't get into Stanford.

We're Stanford.

No, you're not.

You're not Stanford.

Well, it's a private university.

I don't care.

It's not private.

It says it's private, but it gets $1.8 billion

in federal research money.

It gets $2 billion in income a year off a $35 billion endowment that's tax-free.

So, Jack and you and me, Victor, and everybody listening, we pay that as taxpayers by not getting that revenue on $35 billion of annual income that comes off that fund.

And finally, there's $1.7 trillion in aggregate student debt.

There's about a third of a billion dollars of Stanford students who get federal guaranteed loans.

So don't tell me, Stanford law student, that you speak for Stanford and that's your private woke territory.

And Judge Duncan, better not come into your territory.

No.

No, that territory belongs in part to the taxpayers who make sure that your income that pays your fellowship is not taxed as income.

It pays for you with that guaranteed student loan, and it pays for you for all the research grants and projects that your faculty are doing

through federal monies.

And that's what they don't understand.

These universities belong to us, the people.

And we have, I don't care if it's UC Berkeley, a public, which we own 100%,

or it's Stanford or Yale, that we provide so many concessions and exemptions at our financial expense.

We have a say.

And that's not even getting into, Jack, the alumni.

The alumni say to the three year, we were there four years, we were there three years, and we've been giving money and we endowed scholarships that you're getting.

So we have a say.

The taxpayer has a say, and the donors have the say, and the alumni have the say.

And just because you happen to reside on the campus for three years, or you're some woke administrator that comes in and out on your cursus and norm on your trajectory for better and better and higher paying jobs, and you're at Stanford, don't think that's your university.

So, we have a right to say that this is our university, and we're going to have a civics program to inculcate a common American brotherhood.

And that's what they're trying to do.

And it's a fight.

This virus, remember, has permeated every aspect of society.

It's like the coronavirus that can destroy the whole body politic.

I mean, my God,

diversity training for American and Delta and United pilots.

My God, medical schools that are letting people in not on the basis of test scores or competency.

My God,

people who are in engineering school that are predicated on woke criteria.

The DMV.

And if you want to know why these institutions are starting to falter or why you have near misses in airlines, or why you have more and more accidents, or why if you go in California, that

you go down the 99 or the 101 and you see Road Warrior, these people don't know how to drive, there's no information.

It's because these institutions have been woke and they're crumbling because we have abandoned the idea that we're going to hire the most capable person.

And then when a person does not get a job because he did not not have the qualifications, he does not say, I'm a victim.

This was racism.

This was sexism.

This was homophobia.

This was transphobia.

They say, I am going to beat this person next time.

I'm going to be better.

I'm going to take night school.

I'm going to be an apprentice, whatever it takes.

And that's why we were so unique.

And

we're doing exactly the opposite of what our fathers, grandparents, and great-grandparents did.

And we're seeing the results.

We really are.

San Francisco is going in warp speed backwards.

So is Portland.

So is Seattle.

So is Minneapolis.

So is my hometown.

I just drove into town again.

I always say that to the listeners.

I just drove in to my hometown again, and I just drove back onto Wolf Avenue.

And it's just covered.

I said to myself, this is a drive through fifth century Roman Empire, 15th century Byzantium.

Here's a big standpipe, and it's covered covered with one gang, the Sereños,

painting over the Norteños, painting over the M13 graffiti.

Here's a dishwasher.

Here's a refrigerator.

Here's a cooktop.

Here's diapers, all on the side of the road.

Here's potholes of the size, if you went into this pothole, you would have to lift your car out with a friend.

This is America today.

And

part of it is we have no sense of civic identity and no commitment.

Very funny from the left.

They gave us JFK, remember, who said, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

That was written by, I guess, Ted Sorensen and the best and brightest leftist, but not anymore.

It's this is a horrible country and I want to take every dime I can get out of it and then destroy it.

But the dimes all say e pluribus unum on them, but

the meaning is

be careful what you wish for.

I was going to save this to the end of the show and read the comments, but a guy wrote here, just in line, what we were just talking about, it's from a guy named Nordic Alex.

That's how he signed his comment on

Apple.

Longtime listener, first time poster, I want to comment on the DEI situation.

I recently was involved in a promotion board, and of the seven questions asked of the candidates, two of them were specifically targeting the candidates to provide DEI examples of their career.

It's happening in the middle management class.

So that's

not too much.

So if you're two candidates

and one of them has designed a bridge and the other designed a highway bridge that collapsed, then who's going to write the most engaging diversity statement?

My entire life, I have been engaged in diversity, equity, inclusion, advocacy.

Here's it.

That's what's going to happen.

It's It's not going to talk about his expertise because his expertise is merucatic and it's discriminatory.

It's not equal because he's superior.

And then

who suffers?

The guy on the street, the poor Joe on his way to work, and he drives in a bridge that collapses.

The whole society, you know,

I keep going back to the Middle East, but I've spent a lot of time in Egypt and Libya and Morocco and Algeria.

And I've gone to Syria, I've gone to Kuwait, I've gone gone to Saudi Arabia.

I've gone to Jordan.

I've gone to the West Bank.

And these countries have enormous natural wealth, and yet nothing works.

You go to a hotel room and everything is broken.

Turn on the TV set, the knob is off.

The lock on the chain is broken.

And you ask yourself, why?

And then when you get informed Middle East people, they'll tell you that there's no meritocracy, that everybody hires from their own tribe.

Nobody's responsible for the civic core.

And there's no accountability.

It's all about tribal identity.

And that's, and you're going to have to be, if you want the United States standard of living to be the same, and a recent poll said 78% of Americans think their children will not live a better life than they do.

That just came out.

Right.

And that's because they understand that there will not be accountability, that if you hire someone, it'll be on the basis other than expertise and experience.

And if they're fired, it will be appealed on the basis of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia.

And that's not going to work.

The society is already starting to crumble.

It doesn't work.

I was looking at real estate.

I was very interested.

There's a whole new real estate market, Jack, in the California foothills.

Maybe from above, I don't know, Grass Valley, down 49 all the way to Course Gold and south.

And who, it's people fleeing the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

They have, they're thinking, you know what, I got to get out of here.

And I can't leave California because of my job or my grandkids or my kids or whatever.

But they're going in areas where they feel that it's like, you know, a fortified farm in Tuscany when

the society is breaking down.

They want to get away from it because they feel

there's no legal protection.

There's no transparency in government.

There's no honesty.

There's reparations down the pipeline.

They just say, I can't deal with this.

This is pre-civilizational.

And I'm going to go up to Auburn or I'm going to go up to Grass Valley or I'm going to go up to Sonora or I'm going to go up to Oakhurst, but I got to get away from it because it's chaos in the cities.

Right.

And that's the first sign of institutional civilization breakdown when the cities become dysfunctional.

And that's what, because they're they're complex, C.

Jack, they're complex.

They require a specialization of labor.

They have very sophisticated power and water and sewage and safety issues.

And you need people with expertise to crowd 8 million people or 5 million in an unnatural cement, concrete, asphalt environment.

And if you don't have the best people that are capable of doing that,

you know, you go in the bridges into New York, you see all those trucks going in with food and packages, and then you see the ones going out with garbage.

And that's a very sophisticated idea.

And if those people are not being selected by their expertise, then

right.

Well, we discussed this a few episodes ago about South Africa, Victor.

It's not so much...

Of course, there's white flight and there's racial stuff going on, but it's the hiring of incompetent people based on we need to hire half the people have to be women.

Well, but this is a water sewerage treatment plant.

We need people who are competent and they're not getting them.

And the country

they won't because there will always be a reason why this particular...

Look at Yugoslavia.

It's the whole, we're creating a Yugo.

Remember the Yugo?

This is a Yugo culture in this country.

of no responsibility, no standards, always complain,

binary between victims and victimizers.

Everybody's sick of it.

They're all sick of it.

They think, you know what?

I didn't give a damn when it was the Classics Department or the English department, but you screw around with United Airlines

and you screw around with the local power plant, with the Brownouts, you screw around with this sewage system, you screw around with the ER doctors, you screw around with nurses, and that's my life.

And I don't want to live that way.

Right.

And, you know,

we were talking about accreditation.

And what's the epidemic right now is

if you don't believe in merit, there's one thing you've got to do immediately.

You've got to destroy the ACT and the SAT.

And we've talked about that.

And that's been in the news this week.

85% of the colleges are dropping it.

And they don't even understand that that was intended for the poor.

That was an anti-aristocratic, anti-oligarchic method of allowing everybody in the United States a shot at taking the same test, regardless of their income, regardless of their race.

And they could do just as well as the kid that grew up in, you know, midtown Manhattan or in Carmel or in Malibu.

They had the same chance.

That was what, and it was going to be blind.

just take and now they've destroyed that because they feel that particular groups don't do as well as other particular groups.

And yet the Asian community outscores the so-called white community, even though they have many of them are immigrants with linguistic problems.

But

that is anything like that and what the SAT or ACT represents has to be destroyed because they're barometers of merit.

And I know that when I took the SAT, I was out in rural California.

I had wonderful parents, but I didn't know what the SAT was.

I think the night of the SAT, I went to a football game and stayed up till two in the morning, and my mom got very angry at me.

But the point is, I did okay.

I got in college, but then when I wanted to take the GRE,

I said to myself,

you got to get almost a perfect score to get in to a good graduate school.

So don't do what you did with the SAT and just think you can wing it, smartass.

So I spent like three months with vocabulary cards.

I talked to people.

I studied those little books.

And I did very, very well.

But my point is a person can do that.

Anybody can do that.

You don't have to have parents that are

multi-millionaires and go to SAT camp.

And so I don't know why they're doing this to destroy any barometer of merit that cannot be influenced by a diversity, equity, and inclusion document or something.

I think if everybody said no, if everybody tomorrow on the faculty said, I'm not signing that damn,

what have I done for diversity, equity, inclusion?

I'm just not going to do it.

You do your worst.

I'll do my best.

I'll see you in court.

I'm not doing it.

And they did it in mass.

And I think, you know, if all the women said, you know, I know that they've spent their entire lives in college and said, you know what, I'm not going to participate in a

woman's sport.

My grandmother, mother, great-grandmother did not spend their entire lives for Title IX equality to have biological men reap all the rewards by just jumping into these sports and using their physical advantages that they were born with.

So we're not going to go out anymore.

There is going to be no female sports for a year.

We're not going to go out for basketball.

We're not going to go questry.

We're not going to do any of it.

Not until you insist that we have biological females.

I think if everybody did that across the board on all of these things,

it would be,

I think, every time an airline pilot is in the air and he has and he knows something's going on, he should say, you know, the airline pilots association, rather than worrying about being woke, should say, we have a crisis.

We cannot guarantee, based on the airline's directives and mandates, that we're getting competent people.

Right.

And

I had a conversation with a pilot not too long ago, two pilots,

one retired and one an active pilot who was flying on a commercial.

And he said to me, the active pilot,

if things continue to go as they were, I would not fly on this airline in five years, four years.

Now they're co-pilots, the people who came in without expertise and have not achieved a record of achievement,

a record of excellence that was formerly a a criterion and mandatory.

You know, they haven't achieved it, but they're co-pilots.

But they're going to be pilots very soon.

That'll be about three to five years.

I don't want to fly anymore.

It's too dangerous.

And I think everybody's, I think the military is the same way.

What we saw in Afghanistan isn't the recruit, it wasn't the corporal, it wasn't the sergeant, it wasn't the captain, it wasn't the major, it wasn't the lieutenant colonel, but above that,

that's where you start getting in real trouble.

This has happened to a lot of civilizations, and

they get complacent, leisure,

whatever you call it, but they don't go back to basics.

They're doomed.

They have to reinvent themselves and say, you know what, we're too arrogant.

We've got to go back to what made us what we were.

In American terms, that is, let's go back and try to adopt the attitude of the 1940s and 50s, at least on personal responsibility.

Another thing is very important, Jack, is that

we have advanced miles against tribalism.

That is, when I was a little kid,

I watched the civil rights movement unfold when I was nine and ten.

And the idea that African Americans were treated justly and respect and equally, that was the achievement of that.

And

women as well.

And that was the point of those reform movements was meritocracy.

That if you have a talented African-American who is a professor and he wants to apply to work at the University of Alabama, you don't use commissariat tactics that he's not white, therefore he doesn't get a job, and we lose that talent.

That was the whole idea of it.

But Martin Luther King said, and now we've gone full circle and

we're adopting the

policies of the old Confederacy.

Right.

Really

Hey, Victor, we've got to take a little break, but

when we come back from it, I want to have an accreditation-related question and then also a little follow-up on what you raised earlier, Stanford University.

And let's get to some of those things right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

So, Victor, well, first, I want to recommend to our listeners to visit VictorHanson.com, The Blade of Perseus.

That's Victor's official home on the internet.

And you can find links to all his books, links to appearances on other programs, other podcasts, radio shows, links to his articles that he writes for American Greatness.

And then you'll find articles that he's written exclusively for that website.

They're called Ultra Articles.

And you can't read them.

unless you're subscribing.

And it's five bucks to get your foot in the door and $50

discounted for the full year.

I calculate Victor writes about two books worth of original material for Victorhanson.com.

So if you're a fan of Victor's wisdom and of his writing, you cannot not subscribe.

So do that, VictorHanson.com.

Just try it out, five bucks, and you are going to wish you had done it sooner.

So Victor, before we get to your thoughts on the follow-up

of the Judge Duncan incident at Stanford, where the law school dean has,

well, has pushed back.

Maybe not in the, maybe there may be a little mealy mouth nest in some of her sticking to her guns.

But before we get to that, I just have one more question that relates to the accreditation front and the DEI front at higher

higher ed levels.

And that is, this is what bothers me, red states, states where there's a governor and control of the legislature.

I would pick Ohio.

I don't want to pick on Ohio, but Ohio has that set up.

The Red State Republican

lawmakers have the opportunity to defund these kind of programs to fight.

This is where a fight could take place.

We're not going to fund this crap anymore.

We're not going to fund the accrediting agencies.

By the way, I have no clue how the accrediting agencies get funded, but there doesn't seem to have been any sort of,

I don't know, kneecapping on the bottom.

Yeah, I think there's two things that going on.

One is Romneyism,

I guess that's the right term, that a lot of Republicans feel that socially, culturally,

that it's acceptable not to be alienating or not to be counter-revolutionary,

but to be conservative on fiscal issues and and where it's safe to be, but on these hot-button trans issues or diversity, equity, inclusion, don't rock the boat because they just

becomes a social stigma and we don't want to go there.

Kind of, I would call it a Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney view of the world without any thinking about how this disease started.

It started through complacency.

The other thing is, and I've noticed this too, while the vast majority of people who are leaving, say, California are conservative and they enhance the red state fee days of, say, Texas.

There's a lot of people who are, and I can speak, some of them I know in my own family and friends.

There's a lot of people who are leaving California.

They don't like to talk about it, Jack, but they're leaving the 13% tax rate and they're leaving the crime in San Francisco Bay Area and they're leaving the terrible schools and they're leaving the dangerous freeways and they're leaving the rampant crime and they're left wing.

Or as Joe Biden would say, Jack, and they're left wing.

And

they are leaving.

And so they go, that's why I don't know if Arizona is

a red state anymore.

I don't know whether Georgia is a red state anymore.

I don't know whether North Carolina is a red state anymore, because they have so many people who say,

wow.

This is a much better place to be.

All they need is somebody like me that can bring them culture.

And so a lot of these push are coming from

out-of-state people on the left that

want to destroy the very,

you know, they want to strangle the people.

Yeah, kill the mill and ghouls.

Yeah, that's what they do.

They're ideologues.

So that's something to take into consideration.

It's,

you know, I don't know what makes a Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan tick.

i really don't i think it's predicated on a sense of self or a sense of public image or i am a moral person or

uh i know that in the long term my policy will help more people but in the short term it will look bad i can't take that criticism kind of for yeah the worst thing you could be called is a racist even when you're not that i think is the the that word has to

that word has to be reappropriated by conservatives to to talk about these people we can have all discussions we want we've had them for 230 years but nobody got away with just collectively damning an entire people

uh in civil discourse is white supremacy white rage white privilege white white that's every night every you it's almost like it's a cross a lens, you know, a crosshairs you can fire on anybody.

You can't, you're going to have to say anybody who collectively demonizes another race, I don't care who it is, is a racist.

When you say white supremacy and white privilege, what are you talking about?

You're talking about the Oklahoma diaspora guy that lives up in Oakhurst, California?

So what are you talking about other than you hate those people?

And it's not very hard to find quotes.

You know, I wrote an article not long ago with Ellie Mistell, the great Harvard lawyer, who said, when I come out of COVID, I don't want to be anywhere near white people.

And that's very common to say.

And we had that Beverly Adegelo Jelo, the woman who said pretty much what Scott Adams did, only in reverse.

Well, she said the same thing.

I don't think black people should be around whites.

Was her career destroyed?

No.

And so.

It's,

I think we're at the breaking point.

We're getting near the breaking point.

And everybody has to stand up and say, you know what?

You're the racist.

You are the racist.

You are the sexist.

You are the hater, not me.

You are.

You've got to remember that.

And this is what I think you're doing.

You're a hater and you're illiberal.

Somebody needs to tell those.

We're getting to the Stanford law students, Jackson.

You mentioned the letter from the dean.

Was it 10 pages?

10-page letter, pushback against

that was, of course,

lots of reaction, critical, hostile to her for her initial criticism of the students' reaction to Kyle Duncan's attempt at a speech.

And also, this, the dean, by the way, her name is Jenny Martinez.

Also, her criticism of the DEI,

law school's DEI guru, who's

Steinbach.

And she put out a 10-page response to all this

this past week where she

stood by.

You know, I'm sorry if I had to do it, I'm going to do it again.

Steinbach is on leave, although she wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

Victor is like what she wrote about what she said happened and the video of what happened are two very, very different things.

So

one thing that was to me

quickly just disappointing was that

the dean, again, Dean Martinez,

said she would not, there would be no disciplinary action for any of any of the students, what they did, the terrible things they did,

but there would be some educational stuff going on, whatever the hell that means.

Let me ask you a question.

Let me ask you a question, Jack.

Let me ask our listeners.

So let me give you a hypothetical.

We have

a

radical abortion activist,

and she is coming to Stanford Law School to make the case that partial birth abortion should be legalized.

And they've invited her to speak at the law school because they welcome all forms of speech.

And

there is a pro-life group of law students that are very upset.

So the first thing they do is take all the pictures, the photos of the pro-choice, pro-abortion

group that asked this abortionist to come, and they put posters all over campus with their pictures on it.

The second thing they do, they talk to a dean, and that dean is pretty conservative.

Let's say he's a Catholic man in his 50s, solid Republican.

And they say, you know what, this radical activist is coming, this judge, she's for abortion, and she's for partial birth, and she's going to lecture about all of her cases.

And we want you, and the dean says, well,

there'll be three other,

don't worry, we'll have three other administrators there.

And I'm going to write a speech in advance.

And so as this very well-known female judge, pro-abortion, pro-life, comes to Stanford Law School, she's met by a bunch of religious people,

conservative students, let's say 100 of them, and they jeer her.

One guy yells out to her, hey, I hope your daughters are raped.

Another says, you're scum.

And they disrupt her speech.

And then the conservative dean says, you know what?

The poor woman, who's the federal judge, turns to the dean and says, is this going to happen?

What's going to happen?

Okay, let me intervene.

And then she says, you don't know what you're doing when you're coming here.

You advocate killing unborn children.

That is terrible.

You're complicit in that.

And so you have to understand that is the juice worth the squeeze worth the juice?

Because you're offending the sensibilities of my conservative pro-life students.

Okay.

What would be the reaction of Ginny Martinez to that disruption and those placards that had the word clit?

I don't know, prostate,

every type of obscenity.

What would Ginny Martinez do to those conservative religious students who called a federal judge?

I think they would have been expulsion in 12 hours.

And what would she have done to the dean who hijacked the poor woman's, the federal judge's lecture and then lectured her about the evils of abortion?

She would be fired in 24 hours.

So that is a fact.

And when I saw that letter, anybody who writes 10 pages has a problem to begin with.

And it was, there's a term in classical Greek, everybody knows it who studies it, men de.

On the one hand, on the other hand.

Antithesis.

So that's 10-page apologia was men de.

In other words, one paragraph on, well, sort of, we have to worry about

that we have a rule about Stanford, i.e., subtext.

I'm afraid that, you know, my job could be

if

there's a national reaction against this chaos and the alumni are not going to give money and cut us off and then the debt.

But I'm also afraid, on the other hand, that maybe these students, they've already disrupted my class.

They maybe do a Game of Thrones, Walk of Shame to my class.

So it was back and forth.

On the one hand,

and she couldn't do this, and she couldn't identify the protesters.

She couldn't do that.

I'm thinking, oh, wow, they really identified the January 6th protesters pretty easily, didn't they?

You have a whole, they don't even release the video, the official video of the event.

They will not release it.

The students who disrupted it don't want their identities, but they know every one of them.

And so all she had to do to remain credible is it's with great reluctance that I, Ginny Martinez, Dean of Stanford Law School, will have to suspend.

We're going to have an investigation, a thorough investigation.

If any Stanford law school person is identified, not just by being rude, we can tolerate that, not by a pointed setup question, we can handle that.

But if anybody had an obscene placard, if anyone said you are scum, if anybody said

those perpetrators are going to be suspended from law school, and there would be an outrage, but that would be a deterrent.

And I swear to God, you would not have another race because these people are all careerists.

And you tell a Stanford law person

who thinks they have

delusions or visions of grandeur, that they're flunked out or they're kicked out or they're expelled from Stanford Law School.

And that is catastrophic for their trajectory.

Somebody will say, well,

it's so good they can just go over to, you know, University of San Diego law.

No, being kicked out of a law school is not is not good wherever you end up.

And that would stop the whole thing.

So she could have done that.

But had she done that, she would have to know that to save their existences, they would protest her.

protest against her a lot more.

So she chose to pass it off.

And then, you know, she thought, well, I'd kind of be a hero because people have such a low expectation of stanford and we're so cowardly and we institutionalize this woke madness that the fact that i even made a little peep against it because i had to because i'm getting

and i as i said i just spoke down in palm springs to i don't know a huge crowd i thought it was big and it was pretty affluent and i must have had jack i must have had 15 people come up to me and said i'm a stanford law graduate i am ashamed I'm never giving them a penny.

And one person said to me, and I'm writing a column right now as we speak, he said, Victor, who owns a law school?

Who owns a law school?

Do I own the law school?

I give it money.

I support it.

I help.

I'm proud of it.

Don't I own a chunk?

I said, you own a chunk.

As I said earlier, the federal government, we, I, as a taxpayer, own Stanford University because I give it an endowment exemption.

I give it a student loan guarantee support, and I give $50 billion or whatever it is.

And

excuse me,

$2 billion of the $50 given for research to universities, $2 billion go to Stanford.

So

you're a trifecta, and I'm a trifecta.

I'm a graduate of Stanford University.

Do I say that they tarnish the credibility of my degree when people associate that university with what that debacle?

So there's a lot of owners of Stanford University, besides the snotty nose law students right he has a responsibility as a law dean to represent those constituencies she should have said

the people who disrupted this proceeding do not represent stanford they're passing through they're transitory just like i am but there are people that are always their money and their gifts and their endowments and the federal government they have to be considered too she didn't consider them at all.

And it's going to happen again if there's no pressure.

What's the purpose?

Victor, also, if you're the dean of any school and something like this happens,

that this was a very calculated event.

It was planned.

It was organized.

In fact, according to

the Washington Free Beacon, did a report, it was organized in part by the National Lawyers Guild, which is a truly left-wing, if not Marxist

lawyers organization.

And I want to recommend Alan Dershowitz of some infamy, but he wrote quite a long piece this past week in a Gatestone Institute, which is a terrific rundown of the history of this place.

Anyway, if you're the dean of this school and you see that some outside force has manipulated your institution and it's turned it into its plaything,

I would think you would be deeply concerned and be on the warpath to protect the integrity of the school that you are supposedly in charge of.

I would think that would be true.

I would say that, you know, Stanford Law School, I think, has about 70 to 75 professors.

And I would be, if I was dean of the law school, I'd call in all the faculty and say, we have a problem.

We have two professors, the Bankman Freeds, who are involved with their son's financial scandal that was one of the biggest meltdowns and had property put in their name, and they're under investigation.

We have another professor who attacked a 13-year-old boy in a congressional hearing, Baron Trump.

We have another professor who publicly wished that Johnny Depp, an actor in a divorce, should be killed and his corpse should be eaten by rats.

And now we have this protest.

So, out of our 70 or 75 professors, we have some high-profile embarrassments.

We only have one conservative, Michael McConnell.

He was the advisor, and he's been under criticism to the federal society.

Deserved criticism.

Yes, he's a colleague of mine in Hoover.

He's a fine person.

He's an ex-judge.

But I think at this late stage of what's happening to the law school, you don't recommend to your

federal society people who have been attacked and and ridiculed to suck it up, you know,

buttercup.

And so what I'm saying is that dean could say we need immediately, because they believe, Jack, in diversity, equity, inclusion, we need to get the most experienced people, but instead of a diversity, equity, inclusion statement, we're going to have a conservative statement because I need at least 10% of.

seven professors that can give a diverse point of view and I don't have them now.

And then the second thing she could say is, I want to tell all law professors that you're public intellectuals.

And what you tweet or you say in social media, to the degree it brings disrepute on the university.

And by disrepute, I mean threatening somebody or worshing for somebody's death.

or calling somebody scum or talking about somebody's daughter being raped.

If you do that, faculty or student, you're going to be expelled.

And that's just the way it's going to be.

And that's what we want.

And then I would call up the alumni

associate, and I would meet with 100 lawyers who went to Stanford Law School, just go out and take questions and answers.

That was one of the most frequent questions I had in Palm Springs.

People wanted to talk about Stanford.

Everywhere I go, that's what everybody wants to talk about.

They can't believe it.

As one person said, and I had written that earlier,

we expect the students to be rowdy and unsophisticated and mean and terrible.

That's what kids do.

But the diversity, equity, inclusion joined them.

She aided them.

She fueled them.

She attacked a federal judge.

If that's true, there's no hope.

And there isn't.

Well, Victor, I know you've written about it's the accumulation also of other incidents beforehand with the use of language and the coordination with suppressing the social, you know, know, conservative social media

on the internet and the host.

Stanford is Stanford's

well, the value of its brand has been clear.

Everybody who has some interest in Stanford, my interest is not, oh, it's a prestigious degree.

My interest is different.

My grandfather mortgaged the farm that I'm on in 1939 because he had this.

He never went to college.

He was a poor farmer and he had three daughters.

And he thought, you know what?

They're not going to be able to do physical work on the farm, but maybe if they had an income, they could keep the farm going when I'm gone.

So he mortgaged it and he sent my aunt and my mother to Stanford.

And they got undergraduate degrees.

One got a master's and became a community college professor.

The one got a law degree and became the first

second California appellate court judge who was a woman.

And

his attitude about Stanford was this allowed my family upward mobility because it was merucratic.

And my girls took tests to get in there and grades.

And we had no money and nobody knew who we were.

And we were living out in Fresno County.

And the same with me.

When I, you know, I was at UC Santa Cruz and I was classics and a professor came up to me and said, you know, Stanford University is very strong in classical philology.

I don't agree with it.

This guy was, you know, the kind of hippies.

But if if you wanted to be a classical scholar, you'd either go to Harvard or Stanford, but Stanford pays your entire way if you can get in.

Now, you have to get this score in the GRE, Victor, and you have to have four years of Latin and four years of Greek.

You have to be able to read German and French.

You need to spend a year.

I said, I can't do all that.

I don't have you, if you want to do it.

And I did that, and I got in.

And then when I got there, they said, this is the hardest program.

of any graduate program.

You're going to take three hours of Greek lit, three hours of Roman Roman lit, test, test, Jack, three hours of Greek history, three hours of Roman history, Greek composition, Latin composition,

12 seminars,

a whole year of composition training and rapid reading in Greek and Latin.

And then you're going to have an oral,

and then you're going to have a thesis defense.

And we want to tell you people that half of you are going to flunk out.

Half.

Excuse me.

Is the thesis defense defense also in Greek and Latin?

No, but

what it means is

when I say philological, it's based on the idea that you have to ground your arguments with a knowledge of text.

So you don't just say,

you know, Socrates was considered a blowhard.

Ha ha.

You say, in the text of Xenophon's memorabilia, a character named Sunshut says he was a blowhard, and this is the Greek word he uses.

So it was an effort to make every single statement correspond to a known text.

And I had a professor I didn't like because he was so cruel, but his point was, there is no speculation in my class.

There is no hot air.

But my point of all this is not that

it was a great department or a bad department, but the point was they had standards and they had a sense that if you graduated, your degree meant something and we were going to train you and you were not going to like us, but you were going to leave, as one professor said,

he was, he watched a lot of movies.

He said,

he was talking about a very stamina thing about a coup.

You know, we, he said,

I may be a son of a bitch, Victor, but I'm your Stanford son of a bitch.

So you may not like me, but when you go out of here, I will make sure that you, when you interview for a job or you're a professor, wherever you are, you know Latin and Greek.

That's like a brand and you can, and you know.

He was right.

Yeah, he was.

And I have a lot of respect for them.

And it was a very hard time.

I was 21, and I was up there, and I didn't like the university.

And I studied 20 hours a day to not get flunked out.

And I did very well.

But my point is, they had standards.

and they were part of that university.

And for this, this whole movement at Stanford, and you mention it, but it's an, I get up and I say to my wife, another day, another scandal.

It was the Thuranos for months, Elizabeth Holmes and the Stanford, I won't mention their names or colleagues of mine, the Stanford people who were on the board of trustees of Thuranos.

And then we had Bankman Freed.

He's on the campus, paparazzi helicopters, I can hear them from my apartment.

Then we had the Stanford dean that bailed him out.

Then we had the word euphemism list.

Then we had the snitch list, Jack, the snitch list.

And that was anybody who hears a professor say a word, i.e.

anybody who doesn't like a professor and thinks he heard a word can report him anonymously.

And then we had the anti-Semitism where we had the Ben Shapiro

bug begone posters all around campus.

And then we had the admission scandal with the yachting coach trying to sell admissions into Stanford.

Then we had the sordid sexual harassment problems at the business school.

And then we had the president of Stanford currently under investigations for unethical conduct in a scientific paper of 30 years ago.

Then we had the Stanford Internet Observatory and they're knee-deep in the 2020 suppression of information deemed unhelpful to Joe Biden.

I can go on, but I'm losing my breath.

It's overwhelming.

It has one common denominator.

People at that university do not live up to the criteria of expertise that that university used to demand.

That's what I'm, and they're using criteria to hire, promote, tenure, admit people who do not meet their criteria.

That's very important when I say their criteria.

I didn't say that Stanford had to have, you had to have a 750 minimum on the SAT score.

They did.

I didn't say you had to have a perfect GPA from a reputable high school.

They did.

They set the standards, and now they're violating their own standards.

And,

you know,

you could have flunked out, right?

But you could not, I cannot imagine any of these law students, the law school students flunking out for any reason.

If you got a B, Jack,

I got a B plus in a seminar, a B plus.

And I had to meet with the chairman.

He looked at my 12 and he said,

you got a B plus?

I said, yeah, I did.

He said, did you deserve it?

And I said, actually, I deserved a B, I think.

And he said, why?

I said, the professor was terrible.

The class was terrible.

I wasn't enthused.

And you know what he said to me?

I don't give a damn whether you're enthused or not.

Are you telling me in this particular class about classical archaeology and the panellic games, there's no value to knowing that?

I said, no, I'm not.

Are you telling me that you know more than that professor?

No, I'm not.

Are you telling me that you can't learn something from that professor who's devoted her whole life to that field?

I said, no, I'm not.

Then you

should have gotten an A.

It's your damn fault.

And if you do it again, you're going to be in trouble.

That's what he told me.

Wow.

And that was a type of, that was that whole university, you know, that was, it was, gosh, it was.

Well,

it earned its brand and deserved it.

So, but and that was what they all were.

They were all, I'm not just singling out Stanford.

Berkeley was like that.

Berkeley Classics Department was just phenomenal.

Harvard was phenomenal.

And you look at that generation that came out of there and you look what they did in the field.

They created it, especially in things like Greek epigraphy, but they had standards.

It was just.

overwhelming.

And then, you know,

it was a small field because, you know what, it's very hard hard to get a degree in it.

Now they want to

destroy the standards.

So you don't even have to, you do not have to know Greek to major in classics.

It's just a fact at some universities.

And the people who say they do it, I had a, I won't mention names, I had a student last week tell me that

I won't mention the classics department, that the professor could not sight read Cicero or Caesar or Elysius or Xenophon, could not pick up a text of Xenophon and read it.

That

they couldn't do it.

That's the easiest, that's the most accessible Greek

in Latin.

So that's what's happening.

But this is classics.

This is happening in engineering and, as I said, brain surgery and everywhere.

And

we're in a bout of madness, a hysteria.

It's like, it's sort of like the Duncan Yo-Yo craze of when I was eight or the

Hula Hoop craze when I was five, where the whole democratic society engaged in collective madness.

And I keep thinking it's going to end.

I think the COVID lockdown created the paranoia, the George Floyd, I don't know what, it was a perfect storm, but this country went mad in a ritualistic, cannibalistic, suicidal mode.

And it's got to stop because it's, it's, it's well i i wanted i'll if i need to i need to sum this up victor so

back to suggesting people subscribe you have a um you have a series of of pieces that you've written for the website on um you know can we stop can we stop this madness before it before it gets us and i want to recommend to our our listeners that if you read that series it's it's really very very important very spot on to what you were saying

But we're out of time.

So

this is, you were terrific tonight, Victor.

Really terrific.

I thank our listeners for listening.

And

for those who subscribe, great.

By the way.

Sorry, I went on a rant, Jack, but

this is the cause.

This is the ring that binds them all.

This one issue is meritocracy.

You destroy meritocracy, and then every other issue is periphery because it affects everything.

And without it, we're not going to have the standard of living.

I don't know that this is proper Latin, but if I were you, I would say rantio ergo sum.

So you can, we want you ranting.

What people don't want is to hear the voice they're hearing right now.

So let me just read one comment from iTunes.

By the way, thanks everyone who listens and leaves comments.

On Apple, iTunes, you can leave zero to five stars, and you can also leave comments.

We read them, read the comments also on Victor's website.

So here's one from

Joyful One Waiting, who writes, BLM, pay your own reparations.

This is about a couple of episodes ago, we talked about the massive amount of money that corporate America and others, philanthropies have

designated for Black Lives Matter and other similar organizations.

So Joyful One Waiting writes, this is one of the few sources where I listen to each podcast regularly and repeatedly listen to, drink in the wisdom of BDH and history.

So glad he willingly and freely shares with the world for those who are willing to keep learning.

How about asking BLM and all their billions of dollars to pay reparations to their own?

Simple, matter settled.

And about Jack Fowler, who I'm sure is a fine individual, is a long-winded, lousy interviewer.

Please have him step aside and let BDH have his own show.

Joyful one-way.

I just have to say joyful One Way.

I have those attacks on me.

I have attacks that say exactly the same thing about me, believe me.

Yeah, leave Sammy alone.

And

people send me things that are very cruel.

And I don't want to say anything more because if you don't, I'll just finish today by saying

we got on the law, Dean.

The first thing she said was, and I can't be too hard on the students because they're getting death threats and all these.

And I'm thinking, okay,

wounded fawns.

Anybody who's in the arena gets threats.

I've had people say, I'm hunting you down.

I have people that show up at my house.

I have people that I've been in an airport that have physically assaulted me, knocked my hat off.

I've had people and

not

very many of them, but people.

And this idea that these poor little law students are in this singular, unusual situation where all these right-wing bullies are after them because they were so obscene and provocative and cruel.

That's just crazy.

We all, any public, any person who has an opinion or gets celebrity runs that risk.

And before they shoot, shout down a federal judge, they should realize it.

Just like before I write a column about, say,

if I write a column about Mark Milley that's critical, I expect to get a lot of pushback.

And the same thing, same with Adam Schiff or any of the other people.

That's the hazard of the game.

And we're all grown-ups.

So don't give me this.

I'm glad you're doing it, Victor, because you do it better than anybody.

So thanks, my friend, for all the wisdom you shared today.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening.