Free Speech and Its Discontents

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Hello, ladies.

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This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

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

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I am the man lucky enough to be able twice a week to ask Victor questions that I think you would like to ask him.

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Also has the same duties.

Victor's been interviewing some people too.

Hey, Victor, a lot to talk about today, as there is always.

And the first has to do with your kind of home or nearby, Stanford University.

And it had a free speech conference, but it seemed to have had to have been protected.

from a mob.

And we'll get to that.

And an important document going around that's about academic freedom.

We'll talk, get your views on these things and other matters right after these important messages.

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we're back with the victor davis hansen show so victor i want to recommend to our listeners to visit the james g martin center for academic Renewal.

And there's a

Richard Vetter, V-E-D-D-E-R.

Richard Vetter has a piece about this academic, a free speech conference that was hosted at Stanford.

Victor, you would think a free speech conference would be a kind of thing that would be open to the public or have press or media there.

But this conference had to be invitation only and

it needed protection from a mob.

Of course, now if you're in favor of free speech, you must be up to something nefarious.

I mean, personally, I was at this now infamous conference on free speech a few years ago at Yale that was attacked by Yale students.

We had a mob outside.

Somebody, Greg Lukianoff of Fire, made a joke at the conference, and all of a sudden this mob showed up.

Anyway,

this is the new reality of

not too far from where the free speech movement was created, Victor.

And now we have to be wary of free speech.

So there's that.

And

give your thoughts about what happened there or just the thought that there would need to be protection for

the moment.

But what was strange about this is that Stanford

has a history of not welcoming diverse views.

That when people like Ben Shapiro come,

they get a noisy, boisterous, hostile reception, and there are, they blanket the campus with posters suggesting that he's a bug and he deserves a raid-like reception.

So when this group decided, you know, to have a academic free speech conference at Stanford,

they They wanted invitation only and they had a wide variety of different views.

I mean, they even asked their former head of, as I remember, it was Ms.

Strossen was the head of the ACLU at one point, and she's not conservative.

And there were differences among the speakers.

But then the Stanford community came back and said, well, this is closed to the public.

Well, then they live streamed it so people could see what was going on in a transparent fashion.

But they didn't have very many resources.

They weren't the university.

They were an ad hoc group that didn't, you know, that wasn't like they were going to get a hall of a thousand people and be able to hire security, which you would need to do at Stanford.

And so

it was kind of very strange.

It was Orwellian that the community basically said, well, we protest groups like yours, but you didn't invite us inside the hall, so we couldn't protest and disrupt it.

Basically, that was the message that I got from it.

And I knew a lot of the people who, or I was out of state during that period,

so I didn't participate.

But I mean, they had some pretty diverse points of view.

They had everything on climate change, Bacharia.

You know, he talked about medical policy as it pertains to COVID.

They had Tyler Cohen,

economist, Amy Wax, a controversial law professor.

Yes, there was a, it was weighted more to the conservative side because the university is 93.

I think the latest statistics that I saw at Stanford University, to take one example, were 93, 94% of the campus community,

its precinct voted left-wing, or at least they gave money to left-wing groups.

I'm not sure which rubric is the precise percentage, but the point is it was overwhelmingly left-wing, as is the campus.

So this group said, we're going to have different views.

They're going to be center-right.

but they're just a small voice compared to your megaphone.

And yet you want to come in with in an open forum, and we know what you do because we've seen what you do, and we're not going to allow you to disrupt it, and we're going to put it on the air.

And that's what was so ironic about it.

Right.

The same professors who would have, who did go after

you,

Scott Atlas, Niall Ferguson, it was about two years ago.

They went after Neil.

They went right after him and called him a racist.

They still call him a racist, married to

a Somalia, a A.M.E., who's black.

They went after, we've talked about that at length, Scott Atlas, they went after me for suggesting that maybe the voting laws that were changed in May,

excuse me, March and April of 2020 were weighted to help Joe Biden, which they did.

That's not even controversial because the left, as we keep mentioning in the Mali all the time, admitted such and bragged upon it.

Didn't matter.

They felt that they were going to settle up.

And they were the point was that they were going to pick on people and haul them before the faculty senate and try to intimidate them or have petitions as they did with Scott Atlas or print daily attacks in the Stanford Daily against Neil Ferguson or myself or Scott Atlas.

And then that would send a message to anybody who was slightly right of hard left wing that if you do something and you speak out, this is what's going to happen to you.

And then, like an adolescent, when people said, okay,

we're going to just speak out, but we're not going to invite you inside the tent to burn it down, then they just, you know, like an adolescent, they start crying and said, this is a violation of free speech.

So

Victor, not

cleanly related, but let's stay within the world of the Academy.

And there's another, this has a topic or another issue that's arisen in the last couple of weeks is

this document, this letter that's been circulating amongst

not, I'll say a right of right of left center,

maybe even some left center, a rare professor,

about restoring academic freedom.

It's been reported on in various places.

You're a signatory, a signatory yourself to it.

I believe now quite over a thousand

college professors and emeritus or 1,500 or above, I'm not sure, but I think it's much cut.

It's getting more and more people signed.

Yeah, this came about because of everything.

You know, we've heard odd nausea.

If you are in, if you hear, let me just read a quick little section here and then get to

your view of

what the true benefit of this document might be.

It makes these charges.

Universities and professional organizations are instead moving headlong into institutional, political, and ideological activism.

Departments and other university units make public statements of political views, thus effectively branding as heretics and even bigots members who may question those causes.

Increasingly, centers and quote-unquote accelerators are devoted to political and policy advocacy, advocacy of the supporting ideologies, and suppression of competing ideas.

Professional organizations and journals announce all too often that certain kinds of research, no matter how methodologically valid, may not be published and have turned to advocacy.

University bureaucracies demand that certain authors be included and others excluded from reading lists and classroom discussion.

Victor, I don't know that anyone would disagree that that is a pretty clear assessment of what's going on in the academy today.

This letter

calls for

the universities, associations, journals, et cetera, to adopt what they call the Chicago trifecta.

And that has to do with the quote-unquote Chicago principles that came out in Defense of Free Speech a few years ago.

The Calvin Report, which is a requirement for institutional neutrality on political and social matters.

And the third uh part of the Chicago trifecta is the Schills Report, which makes

academic contribution the sole basis basis for hiring and promotion.

Victor, I think this is good.

This is good that it's being done.

It's good that there are so many

professors and scholars signing this.

I don't know what effectively it will do in any one institution, and maybe that's not its point, but maybe the point is to show that, damn, I'm not alone.

There are 1,500.

Yeah, I think that's the point.

I think they're trying to tell university administrators, deans, and provosts and presidents that you don't have to cater or you don't have to kowtow to these hard left extremists and worry over your job, that if you respect the principles of the First Amendment, then there's going to be people in the university community that will stand up and support you.

And that's what it's aimed at.

But again, it's a small number of people.

And when they mentioned, you mentioned the Schills report, I think that's a half century old.

Edward Schills was a very distinguished public intellectual.

I think he was a professor at one time at the University of Chicago and a very famous guy.

You know, he was a friend of

Saul Bellow, et cetera, et cetera.

He wrote this thing, or he was a primary architect of it a half century ago.

So look what's happened.

The subtext of all this, Jack, is that when Mario Salvio got out in the free speech area at UC Berkeley Berkeley in the 60s,

early 60s, his point was that

you as a university don't have a right to have restrictive rules of expression because you're a public university that transcend what the Supreme Court or what legislation say is permissible.

And there was a big argument and they created a free speech.

The compromise was that you could go out there and you could say the F word or you could you could do almost anything.

And remember, it was the left, it was the ACLU that said, we're going to defend free speech, even if it's goki, Illinois and it's Nazis.

We don't care.

The more free speech, the better.

And it was all the liberal law professors who said, you know, the Second Amendment was never designed.

to protect orthodoxy.

Who would want a law that would protect orthodoxy?

There's no need for it.

The Second Amendment was designed solely to protect unpopular expression, minority expression.

But that's all gone now.

It's completely flipped.

The left is the Soviet, Maoist, Orwellian mindset now.

And the mindset is that we have a mission, and it's equality of result.

It's diversity, equity, inclusion, and radical climate change.

And we'll throw in abortion to the day of birth and we'll throw in transgenderism and these other issues.

And they are so important that we have to have a monopoly on expression.

And we're going to go after anybody who objects.

And I don't mean just go after them and say, how dare you object?

We're going to call you a racist.

We're going to call you a Holocaust denier.

We're going to call you a climate denialist.

We're going to call you an insurrectionist.

And that's what they do.

And so there's people who say,

you can't have a university like this.

And And that Schills document, just to go back to it,

that was a pretty non-controversial idea that you wouldn't use criteria other than academic excellence and

well-known achievement that was a matter of record in hiring and admissions and promotion, tenure, et cetera.

Because what would be the alternative?

The alternative would be tribalism.

You would say, he's my first cousin.

He's a member of my tribe.

She's my daughter's in-law, whatever it is, nepotism or tribalism.

And then that would override meritocracy.

Remember what meritocracy was designed to do?

It was a liberal concept that you wouldn't take into consideration gender, race, class, money, et cetera,

aristocratic background.

You would just say, we're all going to be thrown in the pot, and everybody is free to fail or succeed based on their own talents.

And then then what happened?

The 60s championed that idea, and then they found out that it did not deliver the desirable results.

This particular group, that particular cadre, did not achieve proportional representation.

And by 1970s, they were confronted with a fundamental choice.

If you don't have enough African Americans, just to take one example, that are getting into Harvard or Stanford or Yale, and that's what you want to achieve because their test scores or their GPAs are not competitive as, say, other groups that are quote unquote non-white, maybe Punjabis or Asian Americans from Taiwan or South Korea or Japan.

Then we're going to make sure that they have an equality of opportunity.

We're going to go into the inner city.

We're going to have academies.

We're going to offer Latin.

We're going to create all of these instructional help at the early stage, kindergarten one through K through three.

We're not going to have therapeutic courses like Black Studies that, quote unquote, will give you self-esteem.

We're going to acquire it naturally by your excellence and achievements, what Tom Slow spent his whole life trying to articulate and to persuade people.

And then they said, no, we're not going to do that.

That's a lot of work.

Who Who would ever want to go into South Central Los Angeles and set up a private academy where kids wore uniforms and they took Latin?

But it was, but who's, what was that movie, Victor?

I'm terrible with this.

Stand and Deliver, I think, wasn't it?

Oh, well, the Stand and Deliver.

That would almost, right.

The math teacher.

Yeah, it's for real.

It can be done.

Well, I tried to do it for 20 years at Cal State.

I was farming.

I was 28 years, 29 years old.

And I went up there and it was the closest university.

And I said, look,

I had a PhD from Stanford.

I got it when I was 25, 26.

I've been farming, but I think I could offer a program.

And they said,

we don't offer Greek.

We only have one Latin class.

What are you talking about?

And then I kept at it.

And I was hired part-time.

And then I hired a brilliant colleague, Bruce Thornton.

And then next thing I knew, we hired, and we had at one point five, five professors.

And the whole point was

that that

demographic who went to Cal State Fresno was largely at that time increasingly poor whites from the Oklahoma diasporas, from the southern San Joaquin Valley, especially.

It was Mexican Americans, many of them what we would call not illegal, that's the improper word now, but undocumented.

So African-American, but a lot of Southeast Asian, first and second generation Hmong.

And we went, it was a very diverse group, and we said to them, we're going to teach you Latin, we're going to teach you Greek, we're going to

give you a strong minor or an individual major in ancient history.

We're going to offer composition in Latin or Greek by special tutorials.

We're going to read literature, mythology, and translation.

We're going to have humanities from Homer all the way through the Renaissance, and then from the Renaissance to the modern period.

We're going to do all this.

And if you want to go on, we don't suggest you do, but if you want to go on and be a professor, or you think you want to go to law school, or you want to go to business school or medical school, we're going to design a master's program in the history department for a year or two that will make up any remedial work necessary that you lacked in K through 12, even though we've had you four years, but we maybe with an extra year or two,

you're GRE, SAT, LSAT, MCAT, whatever the test, and we're going to help you.

And we made, I mean, we had, I think it was 45 people over that 20-year period went to the Ivy League.

Not that that's a rubric of success necessarily, but we had people that were.

Gosh, they went into business, they went to law school, they were very successful.

And, you know, we had some support for the administration originally.

We had a wonderful dean,

Luis Costa, who's now deceased.

Joe Satton, a now deceased dean, helped us.

We had a president, Judith Kuypers, that was a big supporter.

But

finally,

there grew a lot of resistance.

And the resistance did not come from, of course, white supremacists.

It came from the ethnic lobby of faculty and students who felt that these students were superior,

they were educated in a superior fashion, and therefore they were not beholden to the therapeutic community because they had now, after four years, five years, developed such confidence in their communications, their written English prose, their knowledge of history, knowledge of languages.

Many of them took three or four languages that they didn't need anybody to tell them that they were victims.

And that was a threatening idea.

And it was also 24-7, because if you're going to do that project, and we should have done it nationwide, and I wasn't the original, I just emulated what I saw with other groups.

It's a 24-7.

Yeah.

Because you have students whose parents will come into you and say, you know,

My son thinks he's too good now.

He thinks he wants to go to the Ivy League.

Or my daughter's got to be a waitress for 40 hours a week.

And how's she going to study?

How many hours does it take to learn Latin?

You say, 2,000 hours a year, perhaps.

Well, those are 2,000 years you could be working on the farm.

So

you have to tell the parents, if somebody comes to you and says, Professor Hansen, I'm moving and I don't have a truck, you say, take my pickup, here's the keys.

Or if somebody said, I got in trouble with

something and I'm on probation, you go to my office eight to nine when I'm not there every morning.

You sit there and I will monitor you where you are.

That's the kind of stuff you do.

Or somebody comes in and says, I don't have enough money for shoes.

And I, okay, here's a check.

That's what everybody, that's what teachers do.

But it gets exhausting, and especially when you're attacked for doing it.

And so it makes you kind of jaded.

And after 20 years, I was exhausted.

But that was something that worked.

And there's still, that program is still there under different auspices, but it's still there.

And if we did things, and again i was emulative not creative but there it's everywhere and we know what works we know what works if you have wealthy white coastal elites and they say i want to make sure that if stanford university has african americans demographically proportional that that rubric will not only have superior test scores and GPAs,

but it'll be superior to people in the general Stanford community.

And you can do that if you're willing to invest your time and labor and to take criticism.

But when you don't do that and you promote on the basis of race or gender or tribal or ethnic affiliation, and you haven't had a merocratic component to that, then you're going to be in an endless cycle of excuses and rationalizations and contextualization.

Well, this person

didn't do as well because

this, that, and that.

And therefore, we're going to overlook the results because of this and that and those and these.

And that's where we are.

Victor,

there's a very worthwhile story we'll talk about after

the break about

what's happened in San Francisco

on the election,

the folks that run the election system there, and all about, as you just brought up, meritocracy and race-based criteria.

But

before we do that, which and then we'll have to have a little commercial, I am interested, I can't help but ask, when you first had this idea to create this program, what were the initial did you have a eureka moment?

And did when you first contacted someone at the college,

was there

initial interest, or was there who the hell are you?

What are you crazy?

No, no, no.

I came back with a PhD from Stanford in 1980 I'd finished my thesis but I had a Whiting Fellowship so I didn't file for the degree because I spent a year preparing it for publication and working coming home on weekends and farming and then I came home.

There were no jobs for a white male in 1980, believe me, it was in a recessionary climate anyway.

And I came home and farmed full-time with my siblings.

And

I went up immediately, I looked at the university and I thought, wow, there's a CSU, I've known it, Cal State Fresno.

It's big, 12 at that time, I think it's over 20, it was 12.

There's a community college in Readley, there's a community college in, and I went to all of them.

And it was no, no, no, no, no, no.

And usually it was who in the world would want to take Latin or Greek?

And then I went to Cal State and there was a professor who taught German in one class of Latin.

And he said, no,

I don't want anybody else here.

And then I went to the chairman.

He said, no.

And in their defense, I didn't wear a tie and suit.

I was farming.

So I drove up in a pickup truck and walked in with, you know, t-shirt and work boots.

But they thought I was insane.

And I went 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983.

And finally, the person who taught one Latin class got got ill and I jumped at it.

They called me and said, Hey, they didn't give me much warning.

This person is ill and would you like to do it?

And I came up there for a class and then I started doing these things and it started to expand.

And then I gave a lecture, a public lecture

about classics.

And one of the senior members of the McClatchy, very liberal family, heard it and said, this is wonderful.

What would it take?

I said, I'd have to be full-time.

And so she gave a donation.

I think it was $22,000.

And that paid my salary for one year with the proviso that if it worked and I had to teach five classes, if it worked, then the university had to give me a chance.

And so I taught five classes and I thought I was in heaven making $22,000 with benefits.

And the next thing I knew, they said, okay,

we'll give you a lectureship for another year.

I didn't know job security,

but we're going to see if it works.

So I did it a second year, third year, actually.

And then they said, okay, we're going to have a tenure track appointment, but we're going to search nationwide.

And they did.

They had 160 applicants for the job that I created.

And I was a white male applying for my own job on a permanent basis.

And I can remember, I won't mention names.

chairman said to me, you know, there's some really good candidates that are people of color and with a different,

and would you be too offended after you created this position that we hired one of them instead of you?

I said, if they're better qualified, go ahead.

But they had no teaching.

They're right out of graduate school.

And so that was kind of stressful.

And then I got it.

And then I decided, you know, I need more and more help because the thing just took off.

And then I started hiring people.

And, you know, it was very hard to hire in those days because you had what we called an affirmative action officer.

And classics did not have a lot of people of color.

And they said, you're going to hire, you're not going to hire a white male.

We had a white male in the English department part-time who was brilliant, Bruce Thornton.

And I could not hire him for five years.

It took.

But there was a lot of institutional opposition.

And from my department, there was opposition.

And then I decided that

they wanted what they call full-time equivalent funding.

And that means for each student, you get credit and budgetary terms so i began to offer huge classes in greek history roman history mythology

things like that and when i did that i'd get 60 70 80 people and you if you teach five classes you're supposed to have 125 if you teach four 100 and i could i could get 70 in one class right which meant you know 70 term papers 70 midterm 70 finals you had to correct no no teaching support

and then I could offer, I don't know, Petronius or Libya or Tacitus with nine in advanced Latin, and maybe Aeschylus, not Aeschylus.

Well, I did teach the Prometheus bound once, but I could teach Euripides or Aristophanes or Herodotus with, you know, seven or eight.

Then I'd have, you know, three sections of Latin with 30, but I could get my 125 per faculty.

And once I did that, they said, you know, and finally we were getting plus, we were getting like 150 students per faculty position.

And that meant there would be no longer any opposition.

And you could offer courses that were necessary for classics.

And believe me, I can tell you without any hubris that if you look at the Princeton Classics Department, they just

said that Greek and Latin were not necessary to major.

And what a classics major, an individual major at Cal State Fresno, it was much more rigorous than what is offered now at Princeton.

You are, and I know you are, a persistent man, Victor Davis-Hanson.

So anyway, we're going to talk next about

San Francisco, and we'll do that right after these important messages.

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Victor,

speaking earlier about meritocracy, race-based criteria, et cetera, there's kind of a startling and,

to me, blatantly racist story

that's out of San Francisco.

And I know you and Sammy did a great episode a couple of weeks ago about things about San Francisco, but this came out the other day.

Headline of a story: San Francisco elections official released from contract because he is white male.

His name is John Arns.

The commission that

he has overseen San Francisco's elections for the last 20 years.

He operates in five-year cycles.

He's a contractor, and he has received sterling acclaim from the commission that oversees this.

But that same commission, in a 4-2 vote

in a closed session in late November, voted to decline to renew a fifth five-year contract for Arnz, John Arnz, so that the city could, quote, take action, end quote, on its quote, racial.

equity plan.

He was commended, by the way, for the head of the commission for his impeccable service over the years.

Wow.

This is not the America that Martin Luther King was talking about, Victor, was it?

No, and I think they'll be subject to litigation because they're not even subtle about it.

Usually, when people do this, they use race as the only criteria for hiring.

They talk about intangibles.

Well, maybe, say, on admission, the test scores are not there, or the GPA is not there, but there's community service that can't be calibrated, or there's experience for a candidate, or there's fee days among particular marginal.

But they didn't even try this.

They just said, you know, a senior physician is quite a plum, and this guy is a white male, and he's just occupying a space that takes it away from a person of color.

And

I don't know when we're going to get to the point where we call it racism.

And I mean that sincerely, because the institutionalized critical race theory, ethnic studies of the university has brainwashed America into thinking that if you're a person of color, you can't be racist when anybody knows that all humans can be racist.

And there is no rainbow coalition.

There's no

diversity monolithic.

We can see that in elections increasingly.

But this idea that you just simply discriminate against somebody on the color of their skin is racist.

And I guess it's predicated on there are so many liberal judges that came in during the Clinton and Obama years that you're bound to get a federal judge that will not hear your case.

And there's not enough conservatives.

I don't know why they deliberately violate the Civil Rights Act and they feel they can get away with it.

And it tells you that the deterrence is on the left.

They are more afraid of left-wing mobs, protesters, activists, political officials than they are the law, because they don't think the law is going to be enforced that prohibits that discrimination.

And it won't change until not just once or twice, but systematically people sue and they win.

And then it will change because it will cost them too much.

But think about, there was no criticism that he was partisan.

I think even the mayor said that he was completely politically independent.

London Breed said that.

Right, the mayor actually opposed the commission's.

Yeah, so the point was, it's kind of resonant with

Alexis de Tocqueville's stunning admissions in one of the most famous passages in democracy in America.

And he said,

America's engaged on this constitutional democratic experience, and we worship well.

And I think it will work because of free

holding agrarianism.

That's going to help it.

There's not going to be a peasant class, but it has to be very careful because most people

would rather be equal and collectively poor than to be collectively better off, but have some people more better off.

And I think they're saying we would rather this commission is saying we would rather be proportionally representative, even if we run a risk of having somebody biased or prejudicial holding elections because we have somebody that we know didn't do that, but he's white.

And it's the same principle.

And

I don't know at what point America just collectively says we're not going to do that anymore.

You look at polls and people say, do you believe in using race as the primary criteria of race?

It doesn't poll more than 40%.

So the public is against it, but the elites are for it.

And it's not just the Al Sharptons of the world or the obamas of the world that have been direct beneficiaries of it it's wealthy the same old same old crowd it's wealthy mostly white bicoastal elites and they are

adamant in defending this system which they never abide by if they have a white male son who went to prep school and he wants to go to mit or harvard or yale or stanford or berkeley by god they're going to find a way to get him in.

And that means either a donation or calling up a friendly dean or talking to somebody they know.

But for everybody else, for Joe Smith, that, you know,

I don't know, he works as a telephone installer in Dayton, Ohio, who's a white male, working-class kid with a perfect GPA and top test.

He's not going to get in.

No way.

No way.

Unless he identifies as a woman.

Maybe then he might.

Hey, Victor, another troubling story, and this is really troubling to me.

I would assume it might be also for our listeners.

Is

the results of a survey that came out the other day by Resume Builder?

So ResumeBuilder.com

polled

1,131 hiring managers and recruiters across a broad series of industries from agriculture to high-tech.

And the questions are about

perceptions on Jews.

And

would you hire a Jew?

Would you try to prevent a Jew from being hired, etc.?

I think it was precipitated in part by some of the news that's been out recently.

Kanye West, who we talked about on our most recent podcast,

Kyrie Irving with the Nets, Dave Chappelle had some comments

related to Kanye West.

So, whatever precipitated this poll, the findings are really disturbing.

Here are some of them.

26% of hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants.

The top reason for the negative bias is a belief that Jews have too much power and control.

26% make assumptions about whether a candidate is Jewish based on their appearance.

23%

say they want fewer Jews in their industry.

17%

say their corporate leadership has told them not to hire Jews.

And a third say anti-Semitism is common in the workplace.

29% say anti-Semitism is acceptable

in their company.

Victor,

this is really, at least to me, alarming, even surprising.

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised.

Maybe I thought

all the other cultural yammerings about

Jews and hostility to Jews, say from AOC and

whatever they're called.

I forget the group of those

congresswomen and such.

The squad excuse me maybe i thought it was just reflective of of uh cranks but this is this is uh disturbing um anyway well i think what we have to realize behind this is that there's always anti-semitism

and say 80 years ago 70 years ago

the left was the

protector of Jews in the in the workplace, in the public arena.

And they were always going after, I think, justifiably so, small contingents of right-wingers, you know, the Klan, really hard, hard right, fascist, American Nazi party, all those groups.

And that's changed.

And so it has been mainstream.

So when you talk about anti-Semitism, it's coming from the left, and it's coming from a variety of different ways.

It's coming from the Kanye West, African-American

complaint that

they don't control,

They talk about NBA players as being slaves working for Mr.

Silver, who's the NBA commissioner.

They talk about

LeBron James is not control of his destiny.

Kenya West is talking about all the Hollywood producers and

financiers and directors who are Jewish.

And then you add in the squad who comes at it from a different, you know, it's about the Benjamin's baby, Ilyan Omar,

or,

you know, AOC doesn't even, I think, doesn't even know where Israel is on the map, apparently.

And you had Talib, and she's always blessed.

So you have the anti-Israel and that popular

narrative that the Palestinians are like people of color in the United States, and they're being oppressed by white

overlords, which are the Jews of Israel.

That line.

And then there are people who look at primary

people in the news, a Jeffrey Epstein, a Harvey Weinstein, a Sam Bankman.

And then if you can read literature, well, they'll very subtly suggest that this is not because they're left-wingers or not because they come out of a bicostal bankrupt moral culture, but because they're Jews.

And so all of those feed into this narrative and it's becoming acceptable because the left doesn't say anything against it.

And when you add in the knockout game

and you see these

traditional attacks on very Orthodox Jews,

no one seems to call that a hate crime.

Or when you look at what's going on, you know, I mean, I'll be frank, if you look at the last year that we had statistics, I think it was right before COVID, 2019, I think it's increased since.

My own popular impression is that the African-American community is 12% of the population, but it accounts for 25%

of the hate crimes.

And that's largely not the African-American community.

That's the African-American community of males between

the ages of 14 and 40 that have a criminal record.

And they are inordinately and asymmetrically attacking Asians and Jews.

And there's not a lot of

popular outrage about it.

You see, the Asian community has even had young spokespeople say, this isn't, we're not going to talk about who's doing this.

And the same thing with the Jewish community.

But I'm getting at there's all these currents and they join together in a kind of a tidal wave of acceptability.

So if you're a popular person and you denigrate Jewishness,

you're probably going to get away with it.

And Kenya West doubled down.

And I think there was a demonstration

the other day of the Black Hebrew movement in Brooklyn where all of these people said, you know, we're tired of attacking black athletes who have criticized Jews.

We're the only Jews.

They're not Jews.

We're the real Israeliites.

It's a crazy idea, but it's acceptable now.

And the left, let's face it, Jack, the left

has become the source of anti-free speech, racialization, segregation, separation, tribalism, ethnic chauvinism.

It is intolerance.

It really is now.

People should wake up to that.

Yeah.

You know, one thing, Victor,

last thought on this for me is I mentioned this piece once before in a podcast.

A few years ago, it was probably about three years ago.

Chris Caldwell did

a significant essay in the Claremont Review of Books about

how human resources departments, how they kind of rule America and rule America culturally, because

this is where

you're not going to get hired, right?

Or you will get,

did I, you know, I look at someone the wrong way, and there's so much tumult, cultural tumult in America has

generated from

HR,

right?

HR runs the show.

And

it kind of makes sense that the recruiters and the hires of the world are it's a lefty it's a lefty profession.

HR is a lefty profession.

And it kind of makes sense here that

put it this way, the impression, whether it's accurate or not, but it is accurate to say the impression, say, at most workplaces or universities is that if you're a white male

and you go to HR and say that you're an object of racial slurs or discrimination, or if you're Jewish and you go there and say that people are anti-Semitic in your workplace or your class or the professor, you're going to go nowhere.

That's not the purpose of an HR.

The purpose of an HR is to protect the university or the corporation or the institution

from so-called Al-Sharpton-like pressure groups that will call you racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic.

And so they understand that.

And so that's what they're worried about.

They are not worried about the principles of discrimination and non-discrimination.

They just don't.

It's not, it's a particular type that they feel

can cost them money or social prestige or they'll be able to virtue signal or performance art about.

But that's what they are.

They're highly weaponized.

I can tell you that

I won't mention names or institutions, but I've had colleagues that have gone to the HR and said, you know, that this person pushed me, or this person

called me this name, and they didn't do anything.

And I know that same HR will have fired the perpetrator had it been in a different context.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more topic, and it will be about forgiveness.

And we'll get to that right after these important messages.

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

Victor, I appreciate your

letting me

wander onto a topic or two

every once in a while.

And one of them is forgiveness.

And

we had talked a couple of weeks ago on a podcast.

I had mentioned this picture I had seen of it was the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg.

And you had

these old veterans in gray and blue shaking hands with each other.

And to me,

obviously, this was a sign of, yeah,

50 years ago here,

we tried to kill each other, but we have to get beyond that.

We have to have forgiveness and move ahead because without that, you're.

But then in 2022, on the left,

where presentism is so damn important,

the concept of forgiveness,

whether it's of Christian-based or whether it's

based in the classics, which I this is the goal to get your thoughts on that, on that,

is an enemy.

Forgiveness is an enemy of leftist ideology.

That may be pretty basic.

People listening might say, duh, we know that, but I don't know.

It seems to me so

central to

leftism to have hostility towards forgiving our sins of our neighbors and whatever sins of our of our past.

Victor, I am interested in your view on forgiveness and

from the classics and however else you wanted to discuss it.

What were the great, what was Socrates and Plato and others, or maybe through Greek tragedy theater, What were the concepts of forgiveness in ancient times?

And anything you'd like to say about this?

Well, I'm a philologist, so when we want to know what present vocabulary means and where it derives from, we go back to Latin and Greek in the West.

And so there's a Latin word remissio, remitto, to...

to remit, to give up or to let go of or descend off.

And it comes from the the concept in Greek of apohiemi or aphiemi in the compounded form, which means to release from, send out.

And what I'm getting at is that

if you want to offer clemency, that's the Latin word, clementia,

or you want to, you know, you're going to forgive, forgive somebody, it's not a moral,

it's not a moral,

it doesn't come morally from your soul or from even your intellect.

It's more of a practical matter.

So Clementia Caesaris is the idea that Caesar is going to forgive all of his enemies and that's going to unify the Roman Republic around him and that he's going to take a chance.

that his enemies won't interpret that magnanimity, which is a, it's in Aristotle's ethics, especially the great soulness,

that they're not going to take advantage and interpret magnuminity as weakness to be exploited rather than magnuminity to be reciprocated.

Say practical idea, and that's what it is in Greek originally.

Then, when you get

the fusion of classical culture with Christianity, and you look at the New Testament, and you look at the early church fathers, then you start to see that clementia starts to change and it becomes a moral, not a practical idea, that it's going to reflect the way the world must work on the basis of Sermon on the Mount principles.

And in Greek, they have a word that is an old word, but it starts to get new currency, charizomai.

We get charity from it, cheris.

And it means that there is a forgiveness of sin.

It's the New Testament doctrine, that no matter what you've done, you have an avenue to regain your soul and regain

your morality, and we will formally forgive you in that process for the sins.

And that's a very different idea than the early Greek notion and maybe even the early Greek notion that predominated all the way down to the advent of Christianity that

you help your friends and you punish your enemies.

And if you don't punish your enemies, then they they take advantage of you and you hurt your friends.

And if you don't help your friends only,

then you create a non-deterrent or a weak personality.

So I think you could argue that the vocabulary starts to reflect the advent of Christianity and a very new idea that it's not just practical in some cases to forgive enemies or to forgive people,

but it's also a pathway into salvation, and it's in accordance with the principles of Jesus Christ as articulated.

And I just mentioned the sermon of turn the other cheek or do unto others as others would,

blessed are in the meek, that kind of idea.

Well, thank you, Victor.

I appreciate that.

And it's nice to, every once in a while, we

talk about something that's not necessarily in the headlines.

Although lack of forgiveness is always in the headlines when you're reading about Black Lives Matter and other such organizations.

No, there's no such thing as either

there's no such thing as forgiveness in modern America in left-wing political terms, that you're always an enemy or always guilty or always sinful.

I saw Michelle Obama the other day said that she couldn't wear cornrows or braids in her hair because America was not ready for that yet.

on November.

And think of the implications of that, that even though I'm First Lady, and even though I'm probably the most successful memorist of any author alive, I've made more money.

And even though we have four beautiful homes, even though we're worth over $100 million,

this racist country would not let me express myself with braids in my hair.

Now, Derek did it, right?

She did it, and she seemed to thrive very well.

She was a Republican, too.

Exactly.

So if she can do it, I think an African-American, and we see women all through the workplace, it's the top levels and then Hollywood celebrities that have all sorts of hairstyles, and nobody cares.

And

if we don't care that Joe Biden is shaking somebody's hand who doesn't exist, or he believes that his late son died in Iraq, or the Iraq war was the,

I don't know what it was.

It was the Ukraine war at one point and at one point it was the Afghanistan war if we're tolerant of that we're tolerant of fashion and grooming

on orthodoxies

well you can have four houses and millions of dollars and be the former first lady but you still on the left have to be a victim you have to be a victim because if you're not a victim then the question goes back to who are you if you're not if you're just juicy smollett and you're not a victim then maybe you're not a very good actor that is going to lose a job in a series that's coming to an end.

And your career is going to be, I don't know, people are not impressed with your acting skills, apparently.

So then you have to become a famous victim,

even if that requires suspending the laws of chemistry.

So somebody throws bleach at you that doesn't freeze at

20 degrees or 18 degrees, but you can accomplish that.

And so, again, there's a principle to all of these discussions we're having is once you get away from reality and truth and meritocracy, and you get into all of these efforts at repertory language, repertory admissions, repertory hiring, original sins that go back, and we judge the past by the, when you get into all of that,

then you get into a tangled web of lies.

And you just have to keep lying and lying and lying and accusing and accusing.

You have less and less credibility.

And that's going to be one of the great questions of the next decade because I think what's happening, it doesn't have anything to do with Trump,

but I do believe that a lot of people, not just the white majority, but also African Americans and Latinos and Asians are saying, you know what?

I don't see systematic racism and I look at per capita income because America is a plutocracy and I look at what Asians are doing or Arab Americans or other groups, and many of them, Cubans, they have parity with the so-called white majority, or they have greater income.

I think 17 ethnic groups have a higher

per capita or family income than so-called white people, but they don't see it.

And at that point, they're going to say, this is...

I'm getting tired of this.

Just don't do it anymore.

If you have a problem and you feel

that,

you know, that you're a victim of some type of bias or prejudice, then overcome it and do it through accomplishment.

And you can do that in the United States.

And the thing that left hates the most is anybody who brings up Asians, because the Asian community systematically has higher incomes.

better

admission rates to so-called Tony universities than does the white majority.

And even though they can point to egregious examples examples of collective prejudice in our past whether it's the japanese internment or the yellow peril laws

etc etc and yet they overcame and so when you mention that even young asians will say oh we're not the good minority don't stigmatize us But the point is that they are sort of the canary in the mind.

And then when you add Punjabis from India or you add Arab Americans and you start to see all of these different groups that are not Western European, are not of Western European ancestry or Southern European, whatever term we use for European ancestry, and they're very successful.

Then, particular groups get very angry at that.

And they said, Don't do that.

We're special that that group.

And even though we know that Asian Americans

in the last 20 years

predictably vote left-wing, so it's not like the right is pointing to some right-wing group.

And I think Jesse Jackson once said,

If you want to get ahead, if you're an ethnic group, you just take a picture of what an Asian person is doing all day long and emulate it.

That was kind of a racist thing.

And that's, and he got a lot of criticism.

But then he got a lot of criticism in that earlier incarnation.

Remember when he said, I hear steps behind me?

And I do indeed remember that.

Yep.

I hope that it's not an African-American young male.

Right.

Right.

So, yeah.

Well, Victor,

you've been great today, as you are every day.

I appreciate uh your the wisdom you shared.

And so do our listeners who go to

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You will never find another man as wise, insightful, and enlightening as VDH.

Funny and entertaining, too.

He is the father, grandfather everybody needs.

I am 30 now, and I've been listening to VDH since the days with Troy, 2018, 2019.

He doesn't mean the city of Troy, he means Troy Senec

when Victor had a podcast with Troy on

Ricochet.

Sir, you have opened my eyes and shielded me from the modern societal decay.

I work in corporate, but I live on a farm growing sugar cane and raising cattle.

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Your experiences and insight has helped me navigate this life.

Sincere love and respect from a South African youth living in thick of what now sounds like California today.

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So, thank you for your kind words and all else who

write and leave comments here and on Victor's website.

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And we'll be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Have a good day.

Thank you, Jack, and thank everybody for listening again.