The Many Worlds of Roger Kimball

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Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is a historian and critic,

cultural and political critic.

He's an author, essayist, and columnist.

And he is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Today we have a special show where we've got Roger Kimball has joined us.

He is the editor and publisher at Encounter Books and the editor of the New Criterion, which is one of my favorites.

I highly recommend it as a magazine.

Lots of, I especially appreciate the criticism the

book reviews that come out of the new criterion.

And I never buy books, but I have bought a few and the reviews have been spot on.

So anybody that's interested in culture, the new criterion is an excellent place to find information on all sorts of topics from politics to art.

So we have a special show ahead of us.

So hang with us and we'll be right back after these messages.

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We're back.

I would like to also say about Roger that he has seven books and a baker's dozen of edited and co-edited books.

So lots to go to, but I would especially like to recommend for our listeners the tenured radicals, how politics has corrupted our higher education, which has been through three editions since 1990.

And I'm not sure that we shouldn't tell or consider Roger a Nostradamus of sorts.

And the second one that's really revealing about political correctness is the rape of the masters, how political correctness sabotaged the arts.

So those are especially probably of interest to our podcast listeners.

So welcome, Roger.

Thank you.

And I'll go ahead and hand this over to Victor.

Roger, it's good to hear you.

Hey, I thought maybe our listeners

would like a little background.

So

you grew up in Maine, but you went to Bennington

I did.

I did.

What was that like in the 1970s?

Yes.

Well, I went to a Jesuit high school in South Portland, Maine.

I was actually born in Shaker Heights, which is just outside of Cleveland, but I was moved at a tender age to Maine.

And so since having been born in Shaker Heights, by the way, since that's more or less in the center of the country, I always write down Native American on those forms when asked,

since I figure you can't get much more Native American than that.

And being a person of a sort of pleasing pinkish hue, I also regard myself as a person of color.

But we'll leave that

for

another day.

Yes, I grew up in Maine, went to this Jesuit high school.

And at that time i thought i wanted to um i thought i wanted to be a poet so i i at in those days there were very few places that one could go and um major in poetry um you can it's a probably an index of the the uh one index of the decline of of our educational institutions that such places are now rife but that too is a topic for another day but i i i didn't wind up going to bennington

and writing poetry.

I majored in, I did a double major in philosophy and classical Greek.

But it was awesome.

Who was your professor there?

Who was your Greek professor?

Well,

the Greek professor was a chap called Claude Fredericks, who he had no degrees.

He did not graduate from high school.

He did go to Harvard.

Back then, you could even get into Harvard without having a high school degree.

But he left Harvard after one year.

And it was really an autodidact.

I mean, he was

a man of the world.

He knew a lot of languages.

And

my classes in Greek with him were usually with just two or three other people.

So it was pretty interesting.

I learned as much about.

Were you the first class to be integrated?

I mean, was it a woman's

never?

it had been a women's school.

It had been a women's school.

Back in those Halcyon days, there was no confusion about which was which.

But no,

I think

the first class that had men was in like 1969 or something.

I think I went in 72 or 3 or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So,

yeah.

So no,

I was women, but I regarded that as an advantage.

And then you went to graduate school at Yale.

I did.

Yes,

right afterwards.

I didn't know what to do, so I just decided to keep going to school.

I had several really good teachers at Yale.

Probably the best.

The two best were probably Carsten Harry's, who was the chairman of the philosophy department, and a chap called John Harrington, who was actually the happiness chairman of the Classics Department.

He was one of the

Hescalian scholars.

Yeah, I heard him speak a lot.

He was, yes, yeah, he was very nice to me.

I just presented myself at his door one day and asked him if he would tutor me in Med Evil Latin.

And he said, yes.

You know, how many teachers would say yes to a student from an entirely different department?

So we met.

Yeah, he was great.

He was great.

He was famous in classics for being a kind person, as well as a great Aeschylian scholar, as I remember.

And yes, yes, his book on Escalo.

So when you get done with your masters, then what do you do?

You just, you're a public quote unquote intellectual and you're in New York area.

So did you, who did you work for?

Well, I was, I was, I thought I would, you know, have an academic career.

I, I wrote, you know, probably most of my dissertation and then moved to New York and didn't finish it because I realized that I was not going to have an academic career.

So I probably should have finished it because it's good to finish what you start, but but I didn't.

And,

you know,

it's strange.

I always thought of myself, in some ways, I guess I still do, think of myself as a liberal in the sense that Edmund Burke was a liberal.

I believe in, you know, colorblind justice, advancement according to merit, you know, disinterested judgment, all of that sort of thing.

But

those cardinal liberal virtues have now been enlisted in the index prohibitorum of reactionary vices so i i understood even at yale that um if if i were going to have an academic career um i would probably wind up in montana or something nothing wrong with montana but i didn't i didn't fancy doing that sort of thing and so i moved to new york

you gotta come to fresno state

Yes, yes, I would agree.

But

I moved to New York and began writing.

I think the first piece I wrote was for a very academic magazine published by the Dominicans called The Thomist.

It's St.

Thomas Aquinas.

I wrote a bunch of things for them, but they didn't pay or anything, of course.

And so eventually it was borne in upon me that

writing such articles was one thing, but one needed to make a living.

I started doing other things as well.

How did you get to know Bill Buckley?

I can't remember when I first met him, but I believe it was probably after I published my book, Tenured Radicals, because that was a subject that Bill, of course, was interested in.

Many of your listeners will know that he wrote a book called God and Man at Yale, which

the argument of which is not entirely dissimilar from the argument.

uh i was putting forward in tenured radicals and um we became friendly and then we lived, you know, I lived pretty close to him and I began sailing with him.

And we became actually very good friends.

We're Catholic and we used to go to a Tridentine, write Latin Mass with Bill and a couple of his friends, my wife and I, and would often go back to his house for

dinner following.

So I got to know him really quite well.

But I think it was because of my book, Tenured Radicals, that

we we were first introduced i think i first met you or something you i think you blurbed who killed homer in 1998 maybe

i can't remember or you reviewed it and i of course i can't remember i did i did blurb it i did blurb it whatever the yeah whatever the book was uh

i think it came out

it would have been around that time yeah yeah that was how so then what's what yeah

that's a great great book What I think our listeners need to remember is that, so you have a dual publisher, editor, present, various titles, but the fact is you run Encounter books and you run the new criterion journal.

But in each of those cases, there's only been two people at the top.

I mean, there was Peter Collier with Encounter, then you, and then there was Hilton Kramer, and then you, and there's been nobody else since or before.

So you inherited kind of a very,

very great predecessor, didn't you?

Both of them were great.

Yes, no, Hilton was

incredible.

Yeah, both, yeah, and Peter too.

In fact, we're just about to start a, we have a Hilton Kramer Fellowship at the New Criterion, which we've had for probably a dozen years now.

It's a year-long fellowship for

some young person.

Most of them have been recent graduates, but

he doesn't have to be, you don't have to even have graduated from any institution to apply.

And we're just starting one in honor of Peter Collier at Encounter, which I hope we'll be able to start it this summer, but we'll see about that.

He's a wonderful

issues, but he was.

I've had a lot of editors.

He's a wonderful editor.

When I did the World War II book, I just happened to meet him once and he said, what are you doing?

And I said, I'm working on a...

a large book on World War II.

And he said, would you like me to edit it?

And I said, well, it's for basic books.

He said, I don't care who's it for.

And I said, Well, I'd like to pay you.

No, no, you're not going to pay me.

And I said, Well, Peter, you edited

it, he came up with the idea and edited Mexifornia.

And I, and he, he, of course, did a wonderful job on the World War II book.

I owed him so much.

I really liked him a lot.

He was the one, Roger, they gave me

the dying citizen.

Oh, is that right?

No, that's terrific.

Yeah, no, he was an amazing editor.

He edited

my book, The Long March, which was one of Encounter's first titles.

And

there's no question that

he definitely improved it.

He's a very meticulous editor.

So there's a new criterion come out.

It comes out four times a year or more?

No,

it's a monthly, but

we go into a state of estimation in July and August.

So it's 10 times a year, monthly, September,

how many people are.

Every now and then we,

I guess we are, all together, we're seven people now.

Yeah, seven people.

Same as Encounter, actually.

Yeah, we have a managing editor and executive editor, a couple of business types, and

a few other associate editors.

I know, I should tell our listeners, I know a little bit about Encounter because the Bradley Foundation helps it, and I'm on the committee or chair of the committee that oversees that help.

But tell us a little bit about Encounter because it seems like, under your directorship, you've expanded your titles, the sales, revenue, everything has grown.

And you're getting that's true.

Are you the place now because of the cancel culture where people can find a home that are accomplished conservative authors?

It seems like you're getting more.

Well,

we are certainly, yeah, we

are certainly a place.

And it is true that Encounter has grown a a lot over the last several years and our list has expanded.

I mean there are certain areas that we try to emphasize but you're absolutely right Victor.

We are the beneficiaries I guess of cancel culture in the sense that some of our most popular books came to us because they were canceled elsewhere.

And this can happen in various ways.

For example, I think that the book that is

certainly, if it's not the, it's certainly one of our all-time bestsellers is a book by Thomas Sowell called Black Rednecks, White Liberals.

We publish this because

it is a great book.

We publish this because Yale wouldn't do it.

or they wouldn't do it the way that Tom wanted it to be done.

So,

you know, this sold very well when it first came out.

And it's because of the obsession with race these days.

It continues to sell.

This is a dozen years later or maybe more.

Continues to sell 10 or 12,000 copies a year, which is extraordinary for a book

that old.

And then

we published a book by Hep.

Well, McClay is Bill McClay's book.

You see,

that's an interesting book, too.

I mean, that was, you know, when I first came to Encounter,

I was determined to try to challenge the,

to use

one of their words, the hegemony of Howard Zinn's anti-American book on American history called A People's History of the United States.

Now, this book had, you know,

held in, you know,

a vice, really,

American history in high schools and even in colleges.

It sold literally millions of copies.

And it was

basically the leftist Marxist view of the United States, that

it was kind of the 1619 project of la lettre, you know, that the United States was

exploitative and horrible in all sorts of ways.

And

it's really a terrible book, especially because it

held such a monopoly on

the educational institutions.

So I've always wanted to

provide an alternative to that.

And finally, a few years ago, Bill McClay agreed to do it.

And his book, Land of Hope, an Invitation to the Great American Story,

is

really a terrific book.

It's been adopted by school districts in Florida and Oklahoma and Texas and elsewhere.

We haven't quite displaced Howard Zinn yet, but that is the ultimate goal.

And we've also, it's become a sort of cottage industry.

We've published teachers, you know, guides and a young person's edition, all sorts of things.

So it's really, that's one of our areas of emphasis is trying to take back

the education

in this country.

We have in the works a multi-volume book on Western civilization co-authored by Jim Hankins, James Hankins of Harvard, and Alan Gelzo of Princeton University.

And I hope your listeners will not think less of them for their institutional affiliations.

They're terrific writers and exhibit great independence of mind.

And I think that this book is going to do for the Western Civ classes what Bill McClay's book did for the study of American history.

And we have other things like that in the works.

We have a book on economics, we're working on science, we're working on

logic and rhetoric, we've got a bunch of things things like that.

And we're very fortunate to be able to partner with

some

what you might call dissident institutions like Hillsdale College and Great Hart's Academy and so on.

These are places

that share our passion for taking back.

the study of Western civilization.

So

that's something that's very much on the front burner of what we're doing.

But just to go back to your question about cancel culture,

it's really quite remarkable

the number of books that have fallen in our lap because other more traditional or mainstream or legacy publishers refuse to take them.

So Heather McDonald, for example, wrote a book that we published called The War on Cops.

We got that because her usual publisher said, oh, we can't publish a book defending the police.

That would be, you know,

so that was a bestseller.

And

it's the same with, you know, there are

many other books that we've published that came to us in the end because other publishers, you know,

they were too woke.

We published a book by Ryan Anderson with what I think is an amusing title.

It's called When Harry Became Sally, about the transgender

stuff.

This is a few years before it became all the rage.

And it was a modest bestseller.

And then somehow Amazon and other entities that were selling the book took notice of it and they canceled it.

Ryan and I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal.

And we began selling it through our website.

And in short order, we had sold another 15,000 copies of it.

So in a way, I'm grateful to Amazon for canceling that book.

Yeah,

before I want to ask a question, but before I do, so if our listeners, and we're going to go to a break very soon in a second, but if somebody wants to read your commentary,

you appear in what, do you write four columns a week for various venues?

Well, I write a weekly column, you know, or near weekly every now and then I have to miss one for American greatness.

And I write a weekly column again, you know, every now and then I miss one, but usually for the EPOC Times.

And I write several times a month, the spectator, the Spectator World, the American version of the London paper.

So and then I write for the new criterion every month.

And I write for, you know, you know, places like the Wall Street Journal and other places.

So I'm not hard to find.

So you're writing almost seven or eight hours every day, aren't you, Rod?

Well, no, not necessarily.

I would say I write three or four hours every day.

Wow.

Three or four hours every day.

Well, let's take a break and we'll be right back with Roger.

We're going to hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back with Roger Kimball, editor-publisher of Encounter Books and author of a lot of books that have changed our views of academic life in the right direction, as well as the editor-in-chief.

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And we're back with Roger Kimball.

I'd like to ask you now, Roger, did you, did you, we'll turn on the second half of this interview to contemporary events.

Did you, my impression when I saw at Stanford, the law demonstration against federal justice Kyle Duncan was we've seen that a lot at

many institutions where the students, especially professional students, these are not undergraduates, these are professional class students in the profession, in this case law school.

And what was striking to me about this, we've seen,

it's happened to me, and I know it's happened to you, when you give a lecture and people, I was at the University of Oregon once, I was at Washington and Lee, I was at the University of Southern Alabama, where people will disrupt and you'll turn around so I can have a vivid memory of the University of Oregon.

And the administration does nothing.

They're people there, the dean,

but what was interesting about this was

Three people we understood within administrative responsibilities did nothing, but the diversity, equity, inclusion dean had a pre-written script as if she'd anticipated the disruption.

And then she hijacked the dais and turned it around on attack on the speaker.

I had never seen that before.

And then, yes, no, I thought the, I'd never seen that.

And then, just juxtaposed, yesterday, Charlie Kirk went to Davis.

There was a violent disruption to stop him.

And the president or the chancellor of UC Davis, a man named May,

he issued a video, video, basically a call to arms for people to go out

and

be disruptive.

The president did and

attacked

Charlie in personal terms.

I've never seen that either.

It seems like we're reaching a new stage of this campus that

the insurrectionaries are the people in the president's office or the administrators, more so than even the student.

Yes.

Well, it used to be that the insurrectionists were on the outside wanting to get in.

But for many years now, they have been running the asylum.

And,

you know,

just a step back for a moment.

You ask, why is it that we

give to our institutions of education, especially higher education,

all of the perquisites that we do.

They're tax exempt.

They're often in very beautiful places.

They come with lots of prestige.

If you're a professor at Stanford, that's a big deal.

Why do we do that?

Well, we do it because,

well, we do, I think, I mean, I know

why we used to do it, because we thought.

I know too, but I don't know why we do it now.

I don't know why we do it now.

You know, they were supposed to be, they were supposed to preserve and transmit the highest values of our civilization.

We looked to these places as repositories of wisdom and as crucibles of

enlightened debate about the most pressing issues.

We look to them as repositories of important knowledge.

But on all of

these cases,

they have,

if anything, inverted that.

So they are now about destroying our civilization.

And what just, and I think you're absolutely right, Victor, what happened at Stanford a few days ago has turned the ratchet another few days.

This lady,

the associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or whatever DEI stands for,

I mean, it's not, she clearly came prepared for this.

I'm told that there were meetings a few days before

that she was part of.

So this, as the judge put it, judge duncan he said this is a setup i think he's absolutely right and she got up there and said you are a horrible human being you have caused harm to the people in this in this room of course it was packed with with uh with people who were um you know there only to protest and they treated this this federal judge abominably i mean it's full of obscenities yeah

placards Placards.

Yeah, and it was really quite extraordinary.

And then she said, of course, we're for free speech, but you are a terrible person who really, and she, this bizarre metaphor she used, is the juice worth the squeeze?

Meaning, is it really worth it having free speech?

Maybe not.

Maybe for really horrible people like you, Judge Duncan, there shouldn't be free speech.

And then after that, after it was all over, the next day, the majority of students at Stanford occupied

the administrative offices of the law school in protest.

Why?

Because the president and dean of the law school had emitted some totally innocuous, non-apologetic apology

to the judge.

Yes, it really was.

There was no, it was, what I couldn't understand about the president, our president, and

the law dean, Ginny Martinez, was that

they issued these, you call them non-apology apologies, but that's what they were.

They were,

well, what happened was entirely antithetical to Stanford's commitment to free speech.

And we're going to monitor this in the future.

And you think,

well, that's like telling a criminal who breaks in and steals something out of your store that what he did is antithetical to your store's philosophy of jurisprudence, but you're not going to do anything to him.

There's going to be no deterrence.

And so they turn around the next day.

And when Lawdean offers her course, they not only, they line the corridors, they dress in black, and they try to stare her down and intimidate her her for that anemic apology.

So I don't.

And then what was weird about it is every element of the pathology of the university was apparent.

Stanford, you know, I always go back to that image during the George Floyd days when I was getting out of the parking lot and a car, a BMW convertible.

pulled up two guys in cutoffs and flip-flops the car must have cost ninety thousand dollars and they had a b lm sticker i was reminded of that

when one of the people yelled out, at least I thought I heard them, you couldn't even get into Stanford.

Marxist revolutionary, so worried about his own sense of elitism that one of the things he's attacking a judge from the South apparently is, well, you couldn't be with us.

And I almost wanted to say, well, I'm not sure it's that.

I don't think he would get into Stanford, but I'm not because of his aptitude or qualifications, but it's probably because of his gender and race that he couldn't get in.

And so, what's really weird is

the whole woke movement has appropriated this aristocratic, elitist kind of, you know, I mean, this arrogance.

It's really strange that how that absolutely.

The arrogance.

It's very weird.

The combination of arrogance

and

smug, unearned entitlement is extraordinary.

And by the way, you know, I see that the Claremont Institute just published this database of money that has been funneled from various corporations to Black Lives Matter and adjacent enterprises like, you know, the NAACP, all that, you know, various Black

enterprises.

And the numbers are extraordinary.

The total number is $82 billion,

$82 billion with a B.

Now, you know, so

Apple gives $100 million over the course of

maybe 10 years to pledge this money

for black this, black that.

You know, 3M in,

I think they're headquartered in Minneapolis where

that chap died of a fentanyl overdose while resisting arrest.

$30 million.

And some of them are Citibank.

It's a billion dollars.

So what's the moral?

If you're one of these guys, you say, okay, we burned down Minneapolis, then what happens?

Well, all these corporations funnel money in our direction.

Maybe you should keep burning stuff down.

The same thing is that you're not going to be able to do it.

It reminds me of, yeah, but it's kind of mayoff, it's mafia protection money, right?

It goes back to the 80s.

Exactly.

Remember the 80s, Toyota used to give Jesse Jackson all this money so Operation Push wouldn't demonstrate against it and and

hurt it slowly.

I don't remember that, but I'm sure that's a good idea.

Yeah, but I mean, I was just thinking, Stanford has a $37 billion tax-free endowment.

If they said you're now a political organization and you don't respect the spirit of the Constitution, and therefore you're not a nonprofit exempt, and they taxed it,

then they would pay

taxes on the interest they earned on $35 billion.

That could be, I don't know, $3 billion a year.

And at the tax rate of maybe 30%,

they might pay

a billion dollars that they would not have to do things like fund these groups.

And I think everybody has got to the point now where they want these universities to be taxed.

They're not tax-exempt organizations.

And they think that would be salutary, that they wouldn't have this free-floating cash.

The Wall Street Journal had a great article.

I know you and I discussed it about that euphemism list they had at Stanford and the snitch list where they asked people to

rat people out that use words like American and immigrant.

But the funny thing about that was at the end that they had kind of a Parthian shout by the Wall Street Journal and said, and of course, there's 16,000 graduates and undergraduates at Stanford, and there's 15, 15,000

administrators and administrative staff are almost one to one.

Yeah, it's amazing.

It's unbelievable.

I think at Yale, they actually outnumber the administrators, outnumber the faculty.

That's something that we don't talk about with Woke.

Woke is

very similar to the commissariat system in the Soviet Union where completely.

The ITs were hired to spy on people, to spy on the army, to go into university, and they were complete mediocrities.

It's the lives of others is that, you know, that

movie.

You know, these people, they think that George Orwell's 1984 was a how-to manual, not a warning.

And when you look at the incompetence of the Soviet army in 1941 and 42, it was partly because all of these ideologue commissariats were telling these.

three and four or their equivalent of a three and four star general, oh, you cannot have a strategic withdrawal.

It would be against the people's interest and got thousands of people killed until a famous order i think it was in october 1942 where stalin said there will be no more commissars stalin said that because it was yes and at some point i think these universities are going to have to say you know what we've hired a whole cadre of incompetence and they're mean vicious people and they know that otherwise they would not be able to have a successful academic career.

They don't, it's not that they commit sin.

I mean,

the sin isn't one of omission that we're wasting money that could be put elsewhere, but they commit sins.

They make things worse.

And

what we need is academic leaders, people like John Silver, who is the

John Silver.

Larry Arn at Hillsdale.

He's practically unique.

But, you know, I once had the idea of starting a not-for-profit enterprise that would have the public service

of keeping and preserving intact the testicles of any man who became president of a university until such time that he stepped down.

But, you know, you, I mean, at Stanford, what's his chat?

I mean,

I don't know him, but I mean, I could imagine him saying, you know what, we're going to close the Stanford Law School for two years because they're clearly,

something has gone terribly wrong here.

But of course, he wouldn't do that.

He doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to do this.

No, and I was on Laura Ingram last night and she asked about it.

Yeah.

And I think I'm going to go on Fox business in about an hour or two.

But this is what my point was, that this is not new.

I went through Stanford Law School, Roger.

Do you remember when Trump impeachment hearings and the Stanford law professor out of nowhere was asked to testify, and she started attacking 13-year-old Baron Trump?

She said, Oh,

he can name him Baron, but he's sure no Baron.

Then we had the Stanford Law Professor who started weighing in.

She just went nuts about the Johnny Depp divorce trial.

And she started to attack the Mexican-American lawyer and said she's a pent-up girl or something.

And then she went after Johnny Depp and said, I hope he dies.

And I hope his body is devoured by rats.

This is a Stanford law professor,

another one.

And then we had the Bankman Freed parents that both of them, you were told by none other than the New York Times told us that, and I remember that article came out about a month ago.

It said, well,

Mr.

Bankman, Professor Bankman, and Professor Freed were a little bit more involved in the FPX

real estate transactions and gifting.

And she ran a dark money,

close the gap.

She kind of partnered with Silicon Valley to transfer monies to PACS for them on the left.

And then he was a consultant to Elizabeth Warren.

And then when they had a bail, $250 million,

I was asking somebody at Stanford.

I said, you know, when I walk to my apartment, I hear these helicopters.

Oh, that's a paparazzi.

SBM or whatever.

He's on campus about a mile away and he's there because the former Stanford law dean, Larry Kramer, helped bail him out.

Yeah, of course, it wasn't $250 million.

No, it wasn't.

It was just a house or something.

something.

It should have been 25 million, 10%.

If any of us listening get a DUI or something, it's 10% of the bail.

They did not put up 25 million.

Not at all.

And then I was thinking about Stanford.

You know, Stanford, for all of its arrogance with Berkeley, were kind of the engines behind the 20th century California miracle.

Stanford burst Silicon Valley, Berkeley Hill.

That's where everybody here in this state learned engineering.

They divided the engineers of the California water system, the reservoir system, the architects, they all were trained at the UC and Stanford campuses.

Yeah.

And to take that legacy, and they birthed Silicon Valley.

And I'm thinking, my God,

in the last

few years, there's been Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos Pomp Lonzie scheme.

She had Stanford community people from Hoover and Stanford on her board.

And then we had Sam Bankman-Free.

Then we had the euphemism scandal.

Then you remember the admission scandal where the sailing coach was trying to sell admissions into Stanford?

Yes.

And then as we speak, and then we had the medical school and the faculty senate go after Jay Bhattacharya and Scott Adams for the crime.

for the crime of telling the truth

telling the truth that vaccinations were not an absolute protection from either being infected or being infectious and masked

yes yes yeah and and there may have been a leak from the wuhan lab all of that was and they censored them and they went after them and then

they made they made their lives miserable and now of course on every one of those counts they've been proven right they're yeah

so what's the restitution

what's the restitution none the stanford president weighed in against scott and i'm thinking now we have the Stanford Delhi, we have the Stanford Daily almost daily, Daily is daily, calling for the resignation of the president because they claim that 30 years ago he joint authored a paper that Dr.

Deborah, I don't have any idea whether that's a valid

I've read about that.

Yeah.

What gets me about that is that these students,

and yesterday, Roger, they were in the faculty center.

A number of them signed a letter, I think 100 of them.

One of my Hoover colleagues signed it, demanding that Rupert Murdoch be removed from the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution.

I didn't know who was going to be able to do that.

People are so self-righteous.

And then you look at all of these scandals.

And, you know, it's just mind-boggling that that wonderful, great university would be so directionless.

to turn over all these resources to these maniacs that are destroying this name.

It's incredible.

You know, our friend Peter Thiel had a great idea, which was that every university that had an endowment over X, so you say what X is, you know, let's say 10 billion or whatever, has to pay a certain percentage of their endowment every year to some

charity.

You know, so Harvard is very concerned about the plight of blacks in America.

So why don't they spend a 10% of their, was it $47 billion,

whatever their endowment is, something on that order, and give it to Howard University or something.

I don't think they'd be too keen about that.

But they're socialists.

That's a good idea.

They're socialists, spread the wealth.

But you know what?

Yes, exactly.

Well, I don't really like poor people, at least not in real life, only in the abstract.

I was going to write a book called Retaking the University.

I even wrote a kind of introductory essay about it and so on.

And then I realized that they couldn't be retaken.

That, you know, they're too rich, they're unaccountable.

That's the question.

That's the thing.

I can't answer it.

That bothers me so much because, on the one hand, the University of Austin and Ralston and all these alternatives are great.

But then on the other side of me, it says, you know, why do we give over all of these institutions that weren't theirs?

I can't remember my mother going to get a bachelor's degree with her sister, my aunt, in 1940,

43 from Stanford and a law degree in 46 and my hope my grandfather mortgaged this little ranch to just i mean stanford was not like this and yes i thought why do why do they get to take over these institutions and they have this iron control then they force us to start something anew when what we should do is fight them and say they that doesn't belong to you i'm sorry it's not yours well we're we're not willing to to employ the same task you know unfortunately and maybe maybe we will learn to do that But you know, people talk about Antonio Gramsci's idea that for the for the Marxist revolution to succeed, we needed a long march through the institution.

Yes.

Well, that happened.

That happened in the 60s and the 70s.

But what people may not be fully cognizant of is that that long march left behind it all of these seeds that have sprouted and are now blossoming with their toxic fruit.

And

they are destroying these institutions from within.

How you recover from that is

that's a deep question.

I wish I had the answer to it.

I don't, but I can tell you that institutions like Stanford and Harvard and Yale and Princeton, I mean, all of them have, you know,

when you say that they're woke, that means that they have turned their backs on their fundamental mission.

They no longer do what they advertise themselves as doing.

No, they don't.

And

we need to call attention to that.

I don't think

we use, I think we should stop using the word woke.

I think they're just absolute Marxists, cultural Marxists.

Yes, well, yeah, wokeism really is the

euphemism.

Yes, it's the current allotrope for cultural Marxism.

And, you know,

it's kind of like what Herbert Marcuse was talking about in Eros and Civilization, this weird compact of strange sexuality and

the wretched of the earth, Franz Fanon's phrase.

It's very toxic.

And the enemy

for them are people like you and me.

I know.

I've been called up by the Stanford Faculty Senate for the crime of going on Tucker Carlson.

Yes.

and saying that if there was

if there was irregularities in the 2020 election, my guess was they were committed or done in March and April when a concerted effort by democratically funded law firms, cherry-picked justices and bureaucrats, and overturned the intent of the legislatures on balloting laws and made them, you know,

no ID,

no

deadline 10 days after, voted harvesting, doesn't have to match the registers.

All of that exemptions.

Okay, we're going to take a break, Roger, and we'll be right back with our final segment.

And I thought, Roger, we'll turn to something that you know a lot about because you published Julie Kelly's book on the Nevercompers, and you and I have a lot of former friends, I guess,

that are in that despise us and what's left of the Republican Party, I suppose.

But we'll be right back after this word from our sponsors,

and we're back with Roger Kimball what do you what you think there's going to be a defining moment Roger when we we have this I'm not discounting Nikki Haley or Pompe you know I want to be fair pence and pompeo but if it turns out that it's DeSantis and Trump

how how does the

the bulwark the dispatch these people we've all known the David from as Bill Crystals,

Charles Sykes, Jonah,

how do they pivot?

Do they want to come back into the party?

Or do they,

if DeSantis starts to rise, do they transfer their animus to him and say that he embodies Trumpism and somehow?

But my point is, if Trump becomes inert, I'm not saying I want that to happen or that it will happen, but if it does happen, then what do they do?

They've lost the reason to be, right?

They're not never Trumpers anymore because they're never Trump's existence, maybe, but not never Trump candidate.

What do they do?

Well, right.

Yeah, well, right before

we started our conversation today, I saw that

Charlie Cook, who is

not part of the Trump fan club at National Review, has a rather tart essay about Bill Crystal,

who is the former conservative,

is one of the leaders, perhaps the leader of the Never Trump movement, who

called on National Review to

repudiate what Ron DeSantis had said about Ukraine.

I read that very carefully, by the way, when they attacked him for saying we should not be involved in a territorial dispute.

They were saying, well,

he's reduced the greatest land war in Europe.

World War II started over various territorial disputes, like taking Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland.

But my point is that

if you read the whole statement, he said we should not escalate by giving them troops on the ground, Americans boots on the ground, or F-16.

He did not say pulling away.

the defensive ability to save lives in Ukraine.

He never said that.

So I didn't understand what he was saying.

No, absolutely.

Well,

this is

somewhat to one side of what you were asking.

But I think that I would not necessarily trust Bill Crystal to give us a dispassionate and accurate pracy of what Ron DeSantis said.

I think what you just said is accurate.

But he see, I think what Bill was saying is that Ron DeSantis was not as eager and gung-ho for a war with Russia as he appears to be.

But

you're asking what it is.

It's very strange.

What they will do,

I think the reason I brought up that exchange between Bill Crystal and Charlie Cook is I think we will, a lot of them

will say

Ron DeSantis is too Trumpist.

So we already know that Liz Cheney said that, that,

you know,

at the conclusion of the January 6th Entertainment Committee,

that

several things that Ron DeSantis said were too trumpets for her.

She couldn't support him.

Well, now we get into the

interesting.

That's a good point, Roger.

Now we get into the interesting territory because

if you look at the alternatives to Trump, and let's just take, for example, DeSantis,

and you look about his attitude toward taxes, fewer taxes,

less government, self-sufficiency and energy, tough, determined policies toward crime, race blind or, you know, content of your character, not color of your skin, approaches to race.

That is exactly what the David Frums, the George Will, the Bid Crystals have been yelling at us for 40 years.

And so the question is,

that's not going to work, but it opens up the real analysis.

I think that their means of existence is now so heavily leveraged by useful idiot left-wing money that they don't have free will.

Because

if a crystal came out and said tomorrow, okay, Charles

Bill Crystal said the following.

Okay, I've looked at DeSantis.

I don't want to build a wall, but I was pretty much for legal only immigration.

And I like the idea of getting self-sufficiency.

I like he's going to increase the defense budget.

I like the idea it's going to be racially blind.

I have reservations about late-term abortions, all the stuff they've been yelling at, Monacharin, all those people.

If they said that and they wrote that, then what would Pierre Amador and all these donors do that fund the bulwark or the dispatch and all, I mean, what would their source of income become then?

They would be orphans, would they?

That's a very naughty question, Victor.

And I I think we all know what the answer is.

You know,

I always found it mysterious

during the Trump years, I say, you know, now,

Bill,

what is it that you don't like that Donald Trump is doing?

He appointed all these conservative judges of the stamp of Samuel

Scalia, of Scalia, Antonin Scalia.

He made the country energy independent.

He cut taxes, he built up the military.

he's a big supporter, none bigger supporter of Israel.

He brought peace to the Middle East.

He secured our border in the South.

Which of these things do you not like?

And,

you know, I

felt that about all of these guys.

You know, what is it here that you don't like that he's doing?

You don't like his taste in neckties.

You don't like his taste in fast food.

I don't know what it is, actually.

You don't like his character.

One prominent never Trumper

wrote a piece.

He said, you know, he's quoting Heraclitus.

He says,

character is destiny, and Donald Trump has a bad character.

Well, I don't know quite what that means.

He's divorced.

He had affairs.

How does that distinguish him from

many, many, many, probably most other presidents?

Yeah, I have a friend that said that to me.

So just as a joke, and I think I mentioned it, I said, you know, I said this to her.

Well, the reason I can't vote for Trump, and I did vote for Trump, so I was being facetious.

She didn't know that, was I don't like presidents that pull down their pants and hand their phalluses and say, does this foreign leader have anything?

I don't like foreign leaders who have their own daughters arrange to have a sexual liaison while they're in the White House.

I do not like my presidents inserting, I don't know, foreign objects and the private parts of young interns.

I don't like that.

That's why I can't vote for Donald Trump.

And she said, you mean he did all that, didn't he?

And I said,

I just described

LBJ, FDR, and Bill Clinton.

And Bill Clinton, yes.

And I never heard anybody say, I can't vote for FDR because he's having an affair with Lucy Mercer right when his wife and his own daughter is helping him escape the gaze of Eleanor or L B Jake should be impeached because he had a group of people that he grabbed his penis and said, Does Ho Chi Minh have anything like this?

Or he was constipated and

if he didn't like a staffer, he said, come on here and take notes while he was defecating on the toilet.

That's that's that's all documented.

I think it was Robert Garrow's book.

That's my point of Robert Garrow's what?

Yes.

Yeah, I don't know where the standard is, is it fluid or what was it about?

I don't know what it was about.

What was it?

I don't know.

I wish I knew the answer to it.

But I mean,

I think it's some deep visceral slash aesthetic objection.

But I don't quite, it's not to what he does because what he did, they should applaud.

But, you know, but I'm sure that, you know, every Republican candidate since at least Ronald Reagan, maybe before, has been described as literally Hitler, literally Hitler, right?

So, remember what happened to Mitt Romney?

He was a horrible man because he kept his dog on the roof of his car.

He had an elevator, remember?

He had an elevator, and he was he was mean to a kid in high school.

Remember that?

I mean, it's just

so DeSantis will he will get, if he's the candidate, he will get the full treatment.

What

the Trumpers will do?

Remember, digital, digital brown shirt?

Uh, the old, I think, think John Glenn even said about,

or no, who was it?

Said, oh, John Glenn, the astronaut, said that it's the old Nazi thing about Bush.

They all call him a Nazi.

I wrote an article about the ad Hitlerium about that.

Yes, no, it's extraordinary.

But what I don't understand is that

there's another theory that's not so cynical about money is that maybe a lot of these people as they age, Roger, wanted to get back where they always wanted to be.

In other words, that you talk about the march to the long institutions, the people who do books, who hire people for foundations, who grants,

you know, corporate money, all of that is on the left, the arts, it's all controlled by the left.

And maybe they feel that they'll be favorably

appreciated.

They'll be have a new group of much more powerful and influential friends.

I don't know what it is, but maybe they're one of them which wanted, they maybe always wanted to be here, and now they're getting back to where they feel it's much more comfortable.

They're tired of being ostracized by the cultural wealth.

Maybe, maybe, you know, I just don't, I mean, you know, I'd like to think that they have some intellectual integrity someplace.

I just don't understand what the principles are.

I mean, at least some of them.

Some of them are pretty clever, you know, but

I just don't, I mean,

they can't be 100% beat up, or or maybe they can.

I don't know.

But it is true that they're supported almost exclusively.

There are some exceptions, but largely, let's say, by

left-wing money,

whether it's Pierre Ahmadjar, who you mentioned, or other sources of left-wing money.

It's quite interesting that they're really being used as tools by all of these entities that, you know, a few years ago, they would have been,

you know, fighting vociferously against.

But now

they're part and parcel of the very thing.

I don't quite understand it.

I remember that I wrote for years for Commentary Magazine, and one of the editors was Gabe Schoenfeld.

Remember him?

Vividly.

Yeah,

Encounter published a book, a good book, actually, on anti-Semitism by Gabe.

Before I was the publisher, I would have published that book.

It was very good.

I thought he wrote, I thought you published a book on intelligence by him.

No, he wrote one good book on intelligence, I thought.

No, well, if he did, it wasn't published by Encounter, at least I don't remember that one.

Yeah, yeah.

I worked with him and I found him

affable, confident.

I didn't know him very well.

But then

in 2019, he wrote like 2,000-word sophistry or something in the service of evil.

And

I was speaking to Hudson that particular day on the need to stand firm with Israel.

And the day that he wrote out, he said that I was an anti-Semite and I had playing the same role as a Hitler apologist.

It was unbelievable.

I remember that piece.

I mean, I wrote a really reply, but

I mean,

what makes these people completely flip out?

I did, and then National Review the one of the last podcast no it was with Ricochet

and no they were these are people that I like and one of them was Mona Charon who had a lot of respect she they just went nuts and

and you've probably had that same experience of knowing people your whole life that suddenly don't talk to you or they they they just freak out of their eyes Yeah, I've met Lynn Cheney.

I've even had a dinner with her.

And I never, I always thought that while she was a neocon that maybe did not learn the full lesson.

I mean, I was for the Iraq war, but the idea that

you're going to

go in an optional military engagement in the Middle East today, it's not going to work.

The cost-benefit analysis is not worth it unless it's, you know, an existential interest of the United States.

But my point is that I can't believe that

when she would be that same person would be so obsessed with Donald Trump that she would not allow contrary witnesses or there would not she would be opposed to a wide variety of republicans serving with her on that committee or she would not allow um the release of those videos that might not confirm her narrative what happened to it i just don't understand it's it's it's i don't i don't quite understand it either it's uh it's it's uh

it's a very strange thing it's maybe in the fullness of time we will it all will be revealed but the moment, it still remains very shadowy.

I think it'll be revealed in this election because this will be the first election, Roger, where Donald Trump,

there's a possibility.

I mean, it was clear that he was a nominee and he won.

I understood that they hated him.

And then the re-election,

that was step one because...

They bought into good old Joe Biden from Scranton, the working man's moderate, and everybody else within it with a bit of sense that this is a non-compost, empty vessel whose only job is to carry a hard left agenda across the finish line and disguise it with a thin veneer of senelity.

And

what he's done has been absolutely a disaster.

So

they revealed that when they voted for him, but now

There's going to be an array of Republican candidates

and to various degrees.

And one of them may be, if you just take, for example, Nikki Haley, she seems right out of central casting for the former Neville Trumpers worldview, isn't she?

Sounds to me like she is.

Yes, she probably, I'm not sure where she is exactly where she is on things, let's say like Ukraine, but on many other things.

Yeah, she's pretty, I think on Ukraine, she's almost right there.

So my point is that it'll be very interesting to see.

Let me just finish, Roger.

We have just two or three minutes.

How's this going to work out with

DeSantis and Trump?

And when I mean how,

is there a way that one person wins

and there's not a breakaway?

Or

if Donald Trump should not get the nomination, will he gracefully agree to accept the nominee or he forms a third party?

Or will it get very vicious?

I mean,

even hillary and obama um

were friends again but i i don't know i don't well at least at least partners in crime yeah yes i don't you know i don't know the answer to that uh victor it's it's um uh

i i would be content with with either i i believe that you know as harold wilson said a week is a long

politics a lot could change

but at the moment, I think it's going to be either Donald Trump

or Ron DeSantis.

I think if somebody said, well, who do you really think was most likely to be the nominee at the moment?

Again, a lot could change.

But at the moment, I think it's most likely that Donald Trump will be.

But you think

that might not be.

Are you worried about the standard exegesis that says, if you look at the polls, Donald Trump

can win the nomination, but DeSantis

would have won the general election.

Is that

yes, of course?

I hear that.

Yeah, I hear that.

I'm not sure I

think there's,

I think he would,

I think that Donald Trump is likely to do well in the general election too.

What I'm not so confident about is that the problems that plagued the 2020 election, and they were

very wide, I'm not sure that that the Republican Party has effectively addressed those problems.

You know, Trump says he's going to be doing ballot harvesting and so on and so on.

You know, I think

Ron DeSantis would in many ways be the safer candidate

because

he doesn't bring out the

billionaire.

Yeah,

he doesn't have all the baggage.

You know, they would go nuts over him as they would Trump, but I don't think he'd go quite quite as nuts.

It's a juvenile impulse on my part, I recognize, but partly because Trump would drive them nuts, I sort of

harbor the hope that maybe he would be the candidate.

But I hope, you know, I hope would be perfectly happy if it turns out to be Ron DeSantis, too.

Yeah, I hope that

they can at least agree on the person who loses endorses the winner.

And that didn't happen, as you remember.

Yes.

We were told that all of these candidates were going to endorse.

Ted Cruz did,

but a lot of them didn't.

And I

didn't.

Yeah, I don't know.

Carly Fiorina.

She didn't.

Yes.

And

I'll just say it seemed to me that each candidate has something that people wanted to know.

In the case of Ron DeSantis,

he had a masterful technocratic ability to get things done.

But they wanted to know if he

was a MAGA guy and could rile up the base.

So when he sent people

to Martha's Vineyard, the illegal aliens, or he took on Disney, or he took on Critical's race theory,

he showed, I think, everybody that he can.

he can have that base support.

And now Trump,

everybody knew about Trump's got that phenomenal ability to round the crowd.

But what I hear when I travel or people come up is that

they don't want

that Glenn Yunkins sounds like a Chinese name or

Mitch McConnell's Asian wife or Ron de Sanctimonious or we got to redo the 2020 election, do it over again.

So the question with him is

wonderful four years of governance, some sloppy appointments, an Almaroso, you know, maybe a Scaramucci,

but

can Donald Trump curb the gratuitous

stuff?

Not that you or I are bothered by it, because that's just, I don't, but that mystical 4% to 6% swing vote that we need, given that we haven't won 51% of the national vote since 1988.

and lost six out of the last seven popular votes.

Maybe it's seven out of the last eight popular votes.

So we've got a very that's a very good question.

Very good question.

I don't know the answer to it.

Every time, it seems to me that every time Trump makes a gratuitous statement or he's got that type of publicity, he goes down.

And every time he gives a very thoughtful video, goes out on a policy, or he says something in a speech that's well thought out, it goes up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I thought his speech at CPAC was quite brilliant, actually.

And it did two things.

One, his

pledge to dismantle the deep state, I think, resonated with a lot of people who would be likely to vote for a Republican.

His talk of retribution, too, by the way.

But then also,

I was struck by his.

He was kind of a bubbler of new ideas, you know?

What was on the frontier?

Yeah.

I mean, I thought, you know, oh, I have no idea whether it would work, but what a great idea.

It's a new idea.

Why don't we try that?

How about having parents uh appoint principals oh you can't do that the teachers unions have to do that or the educational experts why does that work i like i like that you know there's a lot of good ideas you know or a lot of fresh ideas anyway he's an old man but he's he's a the source of some fresh ideas so i i think that that was pretty good uh it's really but you know we'll see we'll see it's early days it's kind of it's kind of ironic that the democrats problem is that they have no candidates or qualified or any good and the republicans is that they have too many

that we're running.

Yeah, well,

those two are very attractive to me, Ron DeSantis and

me too.

Me too.

And I like,

I think everybody's,

we'll see,

we'll see what the polls, where the, it seems to me that Donald Trump is raising a lot of money in a grassroots fashion.

I get all these emails every day.

Everybody does.

And then Ron DeSantis is lining up a lot of the donor class.

Yes,

he's done that very effectively.

And the question will be, well, can DeSantis have a grassroots fundraising that matches Trump?

And can Trump get the donors lined up to match DeSantis?

Because money is in, and then put it in the context that in the last election, it was three and a half times

Trump was outraised.

In other words, the Democrats had at their disposal three and a half times more money.

So it's amazing, isn't it?

Yeah, they're going to have to raise money and they're gonna have to watch the cold.

Well, Roger, we're out of time, and I really appreciate this.

I hope everybody

can put a new criterion and to Roger's columns in American Greatness, Spectator, Epic Times,

and follow him each week, as long as they're almost all of them are on Real Clear Politics as well.

And any final comments, Roger?

No, no, let's let's we have to all pray for the Republic.

It's uh, yes, it's undergoing one of its stressful moments, but

despair is a sin.

So

we don't want to be optimistic.

That's Dr.

Pangloss's fault, but we do want to be cheerful.

Yes.

Instead of cry, root for the beloved country.

Yes, there you go.

Okay, well, thank you, everybody, for listening.

This is Victor Hansen and our guest, Roger Kimball, and Sammy Wink, signing out.