Disappearing Names and Standards

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Hello, ladies, and hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host, the star, and the namesake.

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

Victor is a classicist, a historian, a military historian, a syndicated columnist, an essayist.

He hangs his hat officially on the World Wide Webs at Victorhanson.com, a thing to which you should be subscribing.

And I will try to get you to do that later in the show.

We have lots to talk about today.

And of the topics that we will broach, the first one I think should be the renaming of American forts.

Those with Confederate names have been renamed.

They've been canceled.

Not the forts, but the names.

And I think Victor might have some wisdom to share on that.

And we'll get his wisdom right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor, on the

past podcasts, you've talked about and even mocked some of these

generals,

such as McCrystal, who look up on their wall and say, oh, how did that painting of Robert E.

Lee

get there?

He said

he was in the landfill, remember?

Yeah, right.

Good he played dumb and ignorant 25 years

intervening.

But

this we knew was coming because of

our new military that's looking for white supremacists in its midst.

And

Milley is trying to educate himself on these matters.

We have a military that, of course, is going to pledge to rename

many of America's forts

of fame, of knowledge.

People have heard of Fort Benning and A.P.

Hill, etc.

Well, they have been renamed.

Those names came out this week.

And a few of them, for example,

well,

other than General Eisenhower,

one of the forts is now named,

most of them have, to me, checked off a box.

Okay, we, you know, we have no forts named after Hispanics, et cetera, et cetera.

And there's been

a lot of virtue signaling, et cetera, accomplished through this renaming process.

So,

for example, Fort Benning is now named Fort Moore, mostly because of

General Moore's wife, Julia.

I don't know exactly what she did.

Fort Lee is now Greg Adams.

Fort Hood is now Cavazos.

I'm not saying any, you know, Greg and Adam.

Cavazos didn't need to name,

deserve a fort named after him.

By the way, I'll stop babbling in a second.

There are many other things that are being renamed besides the actual forts, streets, I guess,

within forts, etc.

So there's a deconfederatization of American military history.

Victor, what are your thoughts about this?

Well,

a couple of things.

So we had all of these generals that you mentioned, General Petraeus and

others, I won't mention all of them, but they decided right after George Floyd that they had been associated, let's say, with the iconic Fort Bragg, take one example.

And suddenly, lo and behold, they discovered that after three decades of association with that fort, they realized it was named after a southerner.

And then

They

also discovered, Jack, that after spending a lifetime associated with West Point, that there were pictures and representations of Robert E.

Lee.

They didn't know that.

And all of a sudden, in 2020, this came to them.

And so that was kind of strange because if it was a concern to them, and they're very highly educated men, why didn't they say anything before?

And my point is that I'm always suspicious of people who come to Jesus moments when they feel that there is a majority opinion and it's in their interest to do so.

You know what I'm saying?

So if you really believe, and I do believe, and I'm on record because if you read The Soul of Battle or you read Savior Generals or any books that I've written that deal in part with the Civil War, I have made the argument that two of the most mediocre Confederate generals were Braxton Bragg,

who was an obstinate, dense, limited man, and John Bell Hood, who was sort of a

zealot, young, and you know, he's a tragic figure.

He lost an arm and leg,

but he was, he destroyed basically Confederate resistance to William Pecumptu Sherman in the Atlanta campaign by just suicidal head-on attack.

He was not a good general.

Later, he was,

you know, he had a tragic life and he had a lot of children.

His wife died and he was destitute.

Sherman, of all people, paid for him.

But my point is that anybody who feels that

they want to change names

of the past to alter the president to control the future, sort of to paraphrase Orwell, would have known that.

Anybody knows that.

So you can't tell me that all these generals didn't know the careers of Braxton Bragg.

And I'm just taking two examples and John Bell Hood were mediocre and undistinguished men, and they were Confederates, and they fought for the cause of slavery.

Okay, so why didn't they say it earlier, number one?

And number two, how did they get named that way?

And what were the history of these bases?

And if you go back and look at it, they usually

were

the result of a lock grip on the House Armed Services Committees by the Democratic Party that was controlled by Southern segregationists.

And, you know, and so basically the deal was: if you look at it in 19, the early 20s, if you want to, we need the, you know, the

government said we need bases because we were unprepared for World War I.

So we need to have

a Fort Bragg, a fort.

And the Southerners said, okay, if you're going to have all these bases, let's put them in the South and we'll name them.

And that was kind of the on the, and then I think Fort Hood was in, it was in the later 40s and same thing after World War II or during World War II.

So the idea was if you want to increase the defense budget and you need to have basis of training, there is an undeveloped, deindustrialized South that has never recovered from the Civil War.

And all federal projects should be TVA in nature.

So we want federal dollars relocated to places where there's plenty of room and they're rural, and the people are very, very conservative, and they support the military, and they need federal help.

And the Democratic Party controlled it.

And that was the compromise with Northern Republicans.

And they made these bases and they named them after

a group of Civil War heroes.

And there's not that many great Southern generals.

I'll be frank.

I know I'm going to offend people, but the Civil War was won by four people, and they weren't Southerners.

It was William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S.

Grant and

Philip Sheridan and General Thomas.

And they were all northerners and they were all brilliant commanders.

And

except for James Longstreet.

And by the way,

I think it's at Fort Bragg, when they were paranoid, they were going to change, this commission going to recommend, they changed Longstreet.

And that was very ironic, Jack, because A, he was a very good general, even though he fought for a bad cause.

But more importantly,

he was a reconciliationist.

After the war, Longstreet,

he became almost a Republican.

Yeah, he was.

And yet they're changing the name of his street.

I think they changed it to Long or something.

So my point is that there has to be some logic where you say this southerner was a tragic figure.

This southerner was a mediocrity and toxic figure.

But

why don't they name them General Sherman?

Why don't we cake camp, you know,

Fort Sherman, Fort Grant, Fort Thomas, Fort Sheridan?

We have a Fort Sheridan, but why not do that?

And the answer was because somebody will go apply the morality of the present to these people.

And they'll say, Sherman said unkind things about blacks.

And then we're going to get who were we going to get?

I don't know.

I saw some of the names, about half of them I didn't recognize.

And they're going to get some sort of obscure person that they will make the argument.

They were a person of color,

Latino or black, and they were unfairly discriminated.

And they were really.

had done enormous achievements that have been underappreciated.

That's what I think.

Yeah, one of them, I think.

Yeah, from my notes here, I just have, I mentioned Fort Lee is now Greg Adams, gets hyphenated.

And I think Adams is a black woman who of an officer in World War II who oversaw mail operations of some sort in the military.

Okay.

I mean,

why don't you name it after people who saved thousands of American lives?

And I would name it Fort Patton.

I would name it Fort

Ridgway because of of what he did in Korea.

He restored a lost war.

I would call it Fort Abrams because he almost saved the Vietnam War.

And I wouldn't worry about what color they were or what gender they were.

I would just say, base it on your military record and what the service to the United States was and how many American lives they saved.

And I have no problem.

I didn't, I'm not a big fan of Braxton Bragg or John Bell Hood.

And

I don't believe, though, that you, in a rush of time, just change things because the mood of the country changes.

They can be testaments to the mistaken cause of the Confederates.

But, you know, Victor, there was some this, I think you discussed it before, presentism, and the and now the left's ideology is one that has no capacity for forgiveness, but so much of a, and this isn't necessarily now about these forts naming or not naming, but look, our history is what it is.

And

there was a period of reconciliation, a long period, but efforts to

reconcile a divided nation.

And that meant

in various ways

forgiving.

Or even the guys that fought against each other at Gettysburg used to meet.

Hollywood did its part.

And we talked about that when when we were discussing films both you and with sammy we we said that almost every tragic heroic figure in 1950 cinema whether it was ethan edwards and the searchers or whether it was shane was a confederate ex-confederate right who were the the bad guys the bad guys were the northern cattle barons and shane that didn't like you remember when he said to wilson you're not you're no good yankee liar right wilson's the bad guy and then Ethan Edwards is sort of the rebel who has those skill sets based on the idea that he's sort of been on the losing side.

He's bitter.

And it's not necessarily.

And so Hollywood was trying to do the same.

You can go back and look at all of the liberal left-wing Hollywood efforts to resurrect the South, not because they agreed in...

with slavery or segregation, but they felt that after the Civil War, they were still in a period of alienation for a century and longer, and they wanted to do things that would ashuage the southern

separation from the Union.

And after all, I mean, when you kill 700,000 people over the question of slavery, there's a lot of bitterness.

And

so there has to be healing.

And that was what the idea was.

Well, the vilification of the healing is really

troubling.

And

it's a characteristic of the left.

They will not be able to do it.

And what's fascinating, and I've said this before, so I don't want to be repetitive, but there is a sense that the left is exempt from the consequences of their own ideology.

And so they feel they're going to rename things, but they have no clue that the mood of the country can always change.

And we can get to a point where I can envision with more sophisticated technology that tells us about when life life begins, that we know when it begins, but I'm talking about sophistication that proves to the left that an abortion is killing somebody very early on,

that your Planned Parenthood will not have a Margaret Sanger award anymore.

And we already, I don't think they've given it in the last couple of years, three years, because they're starting to be embarrassed given her eugenics.

And the left was forced to change the Woodrow Wilson School, given that no president in the 20th century did more to reverse reverse the natural evolution of integration than Woodrow Wilson.

He was a racist Virginian Southerner and a progressive.

Yes, progressive.

He believed in eugenics.

He was proud to show birth of the nation in the White House.

And he tried to re-segregate the federal workforce.

And Harry Truman could have...

He didn't have to integrate the troops in the 1950s.

They could have been done in, you know, 1916,

1917, right?

But Woodrow Wilson stopped it, he was a progressive left-winger.

That's so ironic, isn't it?

We're talking about a democratic, everybody on the right says that, but it's true.

We're talking about something about the Democratic Party

and

I just and left-wing people, but I don't

think that there may be a time when

people

decide that that

Joe Biden was a racist and

they won't want to put any of his name given all the things he said.

He said, I think no president,

I'm not exaggerating, because of the hysteria of the present, that Biden was a useful tool to regain a useful lever to pry up.

pry open the door to get the left back in power, they have excused everything, but history is not so forgiving.

At some point, people are going to say, now, wait a minute.

He said the inner city was a jungle at one time.

He called two distinguished

interviewers, one a junkie, one he said, you ain't black.

He said that to black professionals

put you all back in chain.

He said to Barack Obama that he was the first African-American that was articulate, could speak, as if Barbara Jordan or Shirley Chisholm couldn't.

Unlike the rest of them.

Yeah.

Unlike the rest.

Yeah.

And

he called, as I said earlier, he called an assistant boy.

Wow, he was a racist.

And maybe we don't want Biden's name.

Well, that it's no one's exempt once you are a conoclast that you tear down statues and you rename stuff.

But I can see it when the Germans, you know, after World War II, you take away multi-mass murdering monsters like Salton or Hebrew.

You should understand why mediocrities like Hood and Bragg were put up there.

They were put up by Democratic politicians to instill Southern pride, to get Yankee dollars to help the local economy.

And

the people who were in the Department of War dash, which would become the Defense Department, was pushing this because they did not want to be unprepared like they had been for World War I.

And we were going to get a big, big permanent after World War II, but also after World War I.

And that's where these bases came in in the South.

Well, Victor, you mentioned earlier in this conversation some great men who you thought possibly Forts should be named after Patton and others.

And that leads me into

asking you about

one of the pieces you've written, the exclusive pieces for your website, VictorHanson.com.

And it's the beginning of

a series, part one.

I don't know how many parts are in this, but what's what's up on the website right now is part one.

And it's called Remembering Great Men.

And you start this off by quoting some of the,

we mentioned this in the last podcast.

I think we're talking about, you know, from The Wild Bunch.

If I wish I just had a few good men, a line from your favorite movie, Das Boot, you have to have good men, which, by the way, I just have to mention this.

Our friend Shraga Kawiar, who used to sponsor the podcast on National Women, was back on Nash Review,

called me and asked me to raise this with you

because he loves that movie.

And say here, coincidentally, you're writing an essay, a series.

So anyway, Victor,

you begin this particular piece by saying, I am in a great man mood.

And tell us what put you in that mood and

what's forthcoming

in this series.

Well, I was up in my office.

and at the Hoover Institution, we have a very robust relation with the military.

We have something called Security Fellows, where when you're on a fast track for promotion to colonel, lieutenant colonels can take a year off for study and reflection and further training at Harvard or, you know, I think Duke or Stanford.

And we get four year.

and then we have retired generals and we have all sorts of visiting military.

And so I was just up in my office and out of the blue,

a former special forces officer called me and said, We have a group of special forces from Fort Bragg, and they're visiting Silicon Valley, they're visiting all over the United States.

And could they come up?

Because I have a view in my office in the Hoover Tower,

and

they kept coming and coming and coming.

I thought there were going to be five, there was like 20 of them.

And

believe me, when you talk to them and you you learn about them and you see them, you think these people are not like the people you see every day.

You just feel it.

You know what I mean?

And when you kind of kid around, so when you mention, have you been to this country and this country and that country

and you're deliberately trying to ask them about the most god-awful dangerous places in the world?

And they kind of smile and say, no comment.

So I was in that mood.

I thought, well,

given all of the attacks on enlisted personnel and given the humiliation in Afghanistan and given this sad cast of characters that are running the military, like Secretary Austin and Joint Chief Milley, and given this revolving door from defense contractor board to Pentagon and back, all of that stuff,

it was just refreshing.

And so I thought, wow.

You've been very lucky in your life because for all the organizations and

you've been affiliated with or the universities or your education, there has always been a few people that were so extraordinary and they were not liked.

We've talked about that John Ford motif before.

And you've been a beneficiary of knowing them.

And so I kind of laid it out and I mentioned, you know, Bill Holden.

and Frederick March in that great movie, Bridges at Tokyo Re,

when Bill Holden gets killed, and he says, where are we?

I think they made fun of Reagan for stealing out a line when

he talked about D-Day.

Oh, where's the rest of me?

No, no, no, no.

I'm sorry.

All right.

But anyway, when he said, where do we get such men?

I think Reagan said that about D-Day.

And it was from

Frederick March.

Yeah.

And

anyway.

People, what I was trying to say in the essay is that the great man theory that was sort of discredited when I was in graduate school that

everybody said you know there's centrifugal forces that are you know whether it's the birth control pill or the or marxist class interest or whatever it is that's the stuff of history and one person can't change it who are you to say that and

I have always, you know, I was trained that way at a very liberal Stanford.

And I wrote the other Greeks, as I say in the essay, that about the nameless, anonymous small farmers of ancient Greece that created the city state and it wasn't the elite.

But it's anyway, I was trying to say Thomas Carlyle in that famous essay, The Great Man Theory, and that he wrote in 1840, had something.

You take away Barack Obama, I'm not saying, I don't mean great necessarily always positive, but if you take Barack Obama away, I don't see the left coming back to power or the whole diversity movement.

If you put Al Sharpton or jesse jackson there or max it wouldn't have worked that he had certain teleprompted skill sets right and the country was ready and he had an exotic name and there was a lot of things that he brought to the left-wing table that allowed him to have such influence and without him i don't think that the movement that he championed the same is true of reagent

I don't see a Bob Dole running the Reagan Revolution.

Sorry.

I don't see it.

Certainly not.

You can say all you want about Newt Ginrich, but I don't see a Bob Michael, the old guy that was a nice guy, lived to be in his late 90s, I think.

I don't see him running the Ginrich Revolution contract.

I don't see Courtney Hodges

running the Third Army.

The First Army was good, but I mean, so what I'm getting at is there's individuals that can change history just by their

either good or bad, but whatever it is, they have it in excess.

And they make a big, and that's what I was trying to set up in that essay.

And I just remember,

you know, lines from the movies when Jurgen Procknow,

I think he was Captain Lehman in Das Boo, when they finally, they shouldn't, they should all be crushed at the bottom.

And he's insulted, or I mean, he had to discipline, excuse me, his engineer, but he gave him a second chance because he knew he was a great man, brilliant guy.

And then.

he figured out how to get them up there.

And then he breathes and says, you know, you have to have good men.

He didn't say you have to have a good cause.

He didn't say anti-Nazi because he made the movie so good about it.

And

I like, you know, Pike Bishop.

He wasn't a good man, Pike Bishop.

And, but boy, when he said you got to stick together just like it used to be.

And if you're finished, if you can't do that.

And then I mentioned Frederick Marsh.

There were a lot of other,

remember, I think you read in an earlier broadcast, you read a letter from Oakers where he quoted

Deke Thornton in The Wild Bunch, you know, God, I wish I was with those.

These are real men.

God, I wish I was with them.

Yeah, that's Robert Ryan's character.

Yeah, that was, that's such a great movie.

Yeah.

And then I think in the next essay that's coming out, I was mentioning how fortunate I was to have been.

I can just remember how awful I felt in graduate school.

I didn't like it.

It was just, it was just,

gosh, it was 15 hours a day of study of Greek language and Latin language.

And I wanted to, you know, I wanted to think about history.

And it was all about metrics and phonology,

philology, everything.

It was just manuscript tradition of Aeschylus.

You know, sophisticated Greek grammar.

When do you use the optative and

secondary sequence?

What is a long and short vowel in this particular word?

What was the derivative of this Greek?

It was that.

It was just pure.

And I was really frustrated.

And yet I met a guy and a graduate student who was Lawrence Woodlock.

And he was a Vietnam veteran.

And he was like 6'3, solid muscle.

He'd been wounded.

He'd been kind of a heroic in Vietnam.

And

he was an iconoclast.

He was just different.

And he had a photographic memory.

And he said what he wanted.

Nobody knew what to do with him because

he hadn't had Greek that long or Latin, but boy, you went into a class with him and he could read it like English.

And

I just remember I quoted something.

He and I used to go out for a drink once in a while.

And there was a rough scene once.

And we were in a bar, I think, and somebody had thrown a drink at me by accident, I guess.

I don't know.

And his eyes lit up.

And he had a big, he had a huge smile on his face.

Yeah.

He turned to me and said something to the effect, this is going to be interesting.

And then

he walked over to a table about five people.

And you could see that he wanted to not be proactive, but reactive.

So I met weirdos, and I think I finished a third essay with my father, who did so much for me.

Yeah, I was going to ask you about it because

you lived with a great man.

He was a genuine war hero.

He was highly decorated, the highest medal that you could offer in the Air Force, except for the

he saved an entire B-29 by going out in the catwalk, as I've said, and prying out a napalm bomb.

Yeah.

Wow.

Three missions.

And

I don't know.

He was always getting injured.

He almost died when he was on a farm.

He fell on a hay rake in Pale, and his father found him with a spike going through his liver and coming out his back.

And they had to pull him off.

Oh, God.

Yeah, he almost died.

But he was kind of reckless, big Swedish guy.

But my God,

when you were in a jam, and I mentioned there that I had a severed ureter from a staghorn calculus in Athens in 1978.

And I was in the hospital for six weeks.

And finally, the doctor threw up his hand and said, Your kidney's not working.

I can't, we don't have the facilities to do this sophisticated operation.

You better go reconnect, take out

the blockage, which was about, you know, 11 millimeters, a huge stone.

And we've got to connect your ureter, but you've got to get home immediately because your kidney's backed up.

It's been backed up for three weeks.

I can't help you.

And he was a very good doctor, by the way, but he didn't trust the support staff in 1978 and greeted.

So anyway, I called my dad.

I telegrammed.

There was no cell phone.

He just telegrammed back and said,

here's the flight number, be on it,

no problem, you'll be fine.

So, I flew all the way back.

I had a wonderful teacher, classics professor, Mary Kay Gammell, who happened to be coming back.

She watched me, and I had injections of morphine, they allowed me to take for the pain.

I landed

in San Francisco.

Here, all of a sudden, with this old Buick, he put down the seats, he had a little makeshift bed in like a 1964 Vista cruiser, and he said, We're off to the races, Victor.

And he drove like 90 miles an hour, literally all during the early morning hours and pulled up in Fresno.

It went right through the ambulance industry.

And then he picked me up.

I must have weighed about 130 pounds at that time.

And he picked me up and he walked me right into the emergency.

And there was a little guy named Dr.

Schiff, my mom had found.

And he said,

It's Saturday morning, and you are going to go in surgery, my son, in about two hours.

And I handed him all the x-rays from Greece, and he took one look, and he threw them in the trash and said, these are worthless.

Go, you go to x-ray, I go to PrEP, and we'll meet in an hour, and I'll take that SOB out.

And that was, my dad did all that.

And that guy did, saved my life.

And then my dad, on day two, I could hardly move.

I had a scar about a foot long.

And they had all kinds of problems, bleeding in the kidney.

And they had to take out little fragments of stone.

It was really a bad operation.

So anyway, my dad then says, well,

are you about ready to come home?

There's work to be done.

And the nurse said, no, he's got to be here at least a week.

And then my dad said, well, you weigh about 130, they tell me.

You're 6'1.

You should be weighing 180.

So I got a regimen.

And so I got home and I could hardly walk.

And he said, you take that shirt off.

You need sun and you're going to have a steak for breakfast, you're going to have a steak for lunch, and you're going to have a steak for dinner.

You need protein, and then you're going to be walking, and I'm going to walk with you.

And that's what we did.

And they told me I would have problems urinating, I'd have permanent adhesions, and I was ready to go with my dad to work in about three and a half weeks.

Damn, so he was a

can-do guy.

He was always looking for.

I used to say to my mother, why is he like this?

Why does he have everything a crusade?

Why does he want to help everybody?

Why does he get all excited?

You know, he didn't care about money.

He didn't investment, any of that stuff.

It was just, you know, can we save the raisin?

Let's go out and do this.

And we got to do this.

And she said, Victor, he's always on this four.

He had 40 missions.

Yeah.

Oh,

she'd always say the same.

Victor, he's on his 41st mission.

41st mission.

Wow.

It's always for him the 41st mission.

Yeah.

Ma'am, amazing.

Amazing.

I was really affected by that.

And I always, I kind of altered the formal training I had in graduate school, and I started writing more about people.

Right.

I wrote, and I was in that mood, and I wrote The Soul of Battle about Apaminondas,

the Theban, and I tried to kind of create a whole

re-emphasis on this great Theban general that changed history that few people.

had remarked.

And then I thought that William Decumpsha Sherman, as Lidel Hart and others, there's been a lot of good biography, had been underrated.

And I thought that Patton had been unfairly caricatured, even in the movie.

So I wanted to write something about

their idealistic and positive things they did.

And ever since then, I've been looking at people more than the way I was trained.

It's just, you know, anonymous forces in history that change events rather than individuals that can rise up out of nowhere and

disrupt things.

Yeah.

Well, Victor,

there's, I don't know that he's a great man.

A lot of people think he's a terrible man.

Maitland Jones Jr., he was a professor at NYU and one of the world's experts on organic chemistry.

And he's also been

kneecapped.

And we're going to get your thoughts on what's happened to him and

the ideological forces.

or cultural forces behind that right after these important messages

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show.

I want to encourage our listeners.

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Thanks very much.

So,

Victor,

about this professor Maitland Jones Jr., he was

like the guy.

He wrote the textbook on organic chemistry, which is uh pretty vital to

doctors, right?

Becoming a doctor.

You You want to be a doctor?

You got to know your organic chemistry.

So I'm told.

I mean, I don't know these things myself.

Gosh, I wouldn't get close to that.

But

Victor,

the story

behind this is

he's too hard.

First of all, he left Princeton where he was tenured and he was at New York University.

I'm not sure why.

There may be some story within there.

I haven't explored it.

but

so he's essentially an adjunct professor

teaching one of the most important courses for those looking to go into

medical field.

And he's a very rigorous teacher by all accounts.

Of the 350 students he had, 85 signed a petition.

he's too too hard he's too tough a grader his course expects too much etc And long story short, NYU fired him.

So, Victor,

boy,

you know the field better than anyone, not organic chemistry.

I was surprised at that because from my 40-year experience in academia, when they do fire people for things like that.

First of all, he was probably not, I don't know the exact thing.

I think he was in his 80s, though.

So that means tells me that

either he was vulnerable or he had had retired or he was on what we call faculty early retirement or whatever wouldn't be early in his case but the point is that i don't know the mechanics but usually when they fire somebody and they do do that they always find something else you know what i mean because they don't want to go on record that they took away faculty freedom And so they probably got a lot of faculty angry about that because faculty don't like to be told how to grade.

All of these things bring back so many memories.

I

was very close to a dean.

We had a professor who gave everybody an A

and he had no syllabus, even though that was in the faculty handbook that you require to have the syllabus.

And he was tenured.

In those days, tenure was a little bit more,

and they found every way, they thought and they tried to get rid of him, but

they couldn't.

And I had said to the dean, well, what if he gave everybody an F?

And he said, I could fire the SOB in a day.

I'd find a way.

But I said, but he gives everybody an A.

He said, that's hard to do.

And that's my point, that it wasn't really about whether or not the grades were fair or not.

It wasn't probably whether he was good or bad teacher.

It was the fact that people were not getting the grade they wanted.

But believe me, Jack, if that same professor,

taught the same class and he gave everybody an A, there would be nobody complaining that they they didn't, they were shocked that he had no standards, right?

So, there's always people who will defend no standards, there's nobody who will defend standards.

Maybe the person that's a good friend, and I've always liked him, Harvey Mansfield, an iconic professor at Harvard's political government department.

Right, remember a few years ago, I asked him about it a couple of times, but he came up with a good solution.

He gave the real grade

and the official grade, right?

yeah dan mahoney was just telling me about that yesterday yeah he gives yeah so you all get an a

yeah he just basically said i understand that you're very highly motivated highly ambitious high careers people and a b or c will be not interpreted as an accurate reflection but it will be interpreted that if you're at harvard you have to be an a student and it'll block your admission so i'll i'll play along with the game but i want you to know what you really are so there's the real grade and the real grade was not recorded, it was the official grade that was recorded.

And this professor apparently didn't do that.

And so he got in trouble.

Grades don't mean anything anymore at college.

And because we've gone to proportional and even repertory admissions, where

most of the schools are dropping the ACT or SCT for entrance, and grade inflation is such that the whole point now is to get into a branded school and to graduate with a brand but

uh it doesn't mean anything it doesn't mean you're educated you graduate with a ba from stanford it doesn't mean anything it really doesn't i've seen i've talked to students you graduate from ba to harvard or yale it doesn't mean anything and a lot of people know that and

all these i think there's 12 federal judges now circuit and appellate court judges that are not going to hire yale law students from the new clock because they understand that they're going to be biased right and they're unimpressive i had a really good friend who was a CEO of one of the largest companies in the food processing business.

And I used to know him really well.

And

he was talking, and every time he talked to me about hire this guy and hire this guy out of Stanford business, all these very prestigious plays.

I said, well, you're a cynic.

You know that these guys are just, it's just the name.

He said, exactly.

I'm not hiring them because of what they learn.

They don't learn anything because the grades are inflated.

And I don't know, I can't adjudicate anything from their record.

So I said, well, why do you hire them then?

He said, because for a while longer, they're merucratic.

And so they do have an LSAT score or an MSAT score or an SAT GRE.

And for some purposes, that has value for me.

And I can tell people who have innate skills.

And so when I hire these people, I know that to get into this particular program, they had to have aptitude.

I don't really care what they learn.

I can teach them how to, in my business, we have a unique corporate culture.

But

I just feel they've done my work for me.

They've scanned all my applicants.

I'm not allowed to ask what their test scores are.

And they've already vetted these people.

And

so he wouldn't be able to say that today.

I was going to say, yeah.

At the time, he told me that.

He said they're basically a recruiting service for me, and they have certain standards that can spot achievement and talent.

And I don't care what they do in those universities because we said that

the grading is all watered down.

And it is.

And, you know, you have so many,

there's so many angles against standards that the person will say, well, my son, you don't know how much we're paying.

We're paying $300,000 for this education.

We can't get a C student.

Come on.

Or, you know, are you racist?

Are you sexist?

Are you homophobic?

All of these social isms and ologies that you use.

So

there's no standards.

Yeah.

Everybody knows it.

By the way, Victor, race has been dumped into this little controversy.

I just wanted to, I was looking for this and I couldn't find it.

Just did.

There's an op-ed in the New York Times the other day from a Dr.

Kalarco, maybe I mispronounced it from Indiana University.

If you'll indulge me a minute here, she writes,

sociology professor at Indiana University.

The NYU students' willingness to challenge this kind of pedagogical gatekeeping

is a,

this reference to this, this course must be tough because, you know, the

people going on become doctors.

It's kind of a weeding process.

Challenge this kind of pedagogical gatekeeping is a sign of how power dynamics are shifting at colleges and universities.

To some degree, that shift reflects a rising sense of entitlement on the part of students and their parents, but that's not the only factor at play.

Another is the increasing diversity of student bodies, which casts many higher education traditions in a new light.

One of these those traditions is the weed out mentality.

Courses that are meant to distinguish between serious and unserious students, it has become clear, often do a better job distinguishing between students who have ample resources and those who don't.

The solution to conflicts like the one that arose at NYU is neither to dismiss the students' concerns as whining nor to punish faculty members for doing what the current system demands.

Instead,

universities should focus on the broader goal of teaching for equity and with empathy, which means ensuring that students get the support they need to learn and succeed without petitions and without even having to ask.

And Victor, you know, the obvious thing, any guy in a bar, and I'd be one of them, would say, like, yeah, but you know what?

This is freaking sociology.

These are people, you know, I want the guy who's going to become a doctor, the woman who's going to become a doctor to know to be the best, not to be somehow grade curved into a profession that puts a knife in their hand.

And that's applicable to any,

you know, rocket engineers, et cetera.

It is kind of,

I don't know, a crazy way to proceed.

And we'll have ramifications to important things in our life.

Healthcare, just one of many.

Any final thoughts on this one?

There was an old counter, canard, that

race-based quotas or discriminations would be the sole domain of the sociology or the English department.

And it was kind of a condescending attitude.

And so for the first five decades of all this, the idea was: who cares if the English department or the history department,

I care, but the attitude was, I think, among universities and the public and the media, okay, well, you guys are hiring by race and gender, but who cares?

So it's not like, you know, a complete professor is going to discover cancer.

However,

We don't do that with airline pilots.

We don't do that with nuclear plant operators.

We don't do that with generals.

We don't do that with physicists.

We don't do that in the corporate work where

it's results.

And the fact of the matter is we do do that now.

And

this is what you bump into it.

So after I got this long COVID, I was very fascinated by it, not just for me, but I was wondering why, I want to know how many people had it and what was the effect on the economy.

But so every night I budget 45 minutes, no matter what, Jack.

And I try to read, I don't read blogs and, oh, I'm depressed, or I have this, or I just read double-blind scientific, right?

And I noticed something that

about a third of the news articles and references are sociological.

So they're like, it's not like this.

New drug therapy found to be

helpful in long COVID patients.

There are those, but at least a third to a quarter of the stories that reach the media that refer you to studies are

long COVID disproportionately affects this community.

Long COVID reveals racism in this.

Long COVID turns out to impact this group.

And so, and then there are studies, right?

So what I'm getting at is there is a large percentage of the aggregate labor and capital devoted not to finding out the cause and curing the disease so everybody, black, white, Latino, man,

everybody can get over this plague.

Instead, we are diverting a lot of stuff to haggle over whether the manner in which we talk about it, the manner in which we is fair or not to particular groups.

Now, you can say that that's very legitimate and it rectifies historical discrimination.

We can say whatever you want, but I can tell you that you are diverting precious, limited resources from finding the problem.

So if you go into medicine and you say

we're going to discuss whether medicine is racist or not, or I just saw a notice as an alumnus of UC Santa Cruz that they just are now searching for a professor of

critical science theory.

I didn't know that existed.

I knew critical race theory did and critical legal theory, but there's something called critical science theory and critical technology theory that suggests that all Western science based on empiricism is racist and sexist and discriminatory and has to be overthrown.

And they want a professor to teach that.

So what I'm getting at is that You take all that scarce labor and capital and you divert it to all of these political agendas and you're right back to Stalin as the great engineer of the Soviet Union that can build aqueducts, or you're right to Hitler, the architect that has a bunch of toadies around him that get into architectural school or art school, or you have

Goebbels and,

I don't know.

Or Kim Jong-un, who's the world's greatest golfer.

That's what you are.

So what we're saying now is to a whole cadre of aspiring scientists and,

you know, engineers that if you are a woke engineer, your pathway shall be quicker, shorter to success.

And that means that you must think and take classes and show, take a diversity, equity, inclusion oath.

And that's, I'm not.

I'm not exaggerating.

That's true now.

And so I didn't think it would happen, but I see to, you know, United Airlines announced that this percentage of new pilots shall be from this particular group.

And once you start tampering with what makes the United States go, it's not English departments.

It's not complete departments.

It's physics and science and mechanics.

And once you take away merit and achievement disinterested, and it is disinterested.

And you start playing politics with it, then you're right back into the Soviet Orwellian world.

It's not not going to work.

It's going to be what, you know, as I keep saying to people, I was in Libya when I was got a ruptured appendix and I was asking one of the doctors,

not doctors, one of the people in the clinic who spoke English,

why does nothing work here?

You got all this oil.

And he said, we hire our first cousins, Mr.

Hansen.

We don't hire the best person.

We hire our first cousin, a person that we know in our tribe.

I said, tribe?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We only hire,

the jobs are only open for that particular person's extended family.

Same thing on the Soviet Union.

We only hire inner party members.

Same thing with Hitler.

We only hire people who belong to the National Socialist Party.

Same thing in Cuba.

We only hire people that are in the Castroite Communist Party.

And then you lose all that talent.

And that's what we're doing here.

We're not using merit.

And we're such a big, rich country, like, you know,

I guess Milton Friedman, quoting Adam Smith, said, there's a lot of rot in a wealthy democracy.

You can keep doing that.

But at some point, you're going to lose a lot of talent that you need at a critical point.

And that's what's already starting to happen.

Yeah, we all play by this game.

And you can already see it in Hollywood when they've already decided that particular awards will be proportional to representing the Oscars, Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys, a Super Bowl half show.

It's going to be as much adjudicated on race or gender than it is on record sales or demonstrable audience share or something like that.

And that's fine, but

we're right back to, and that's why

I'm not as worried about Communist China in the long run as a lot of people because they don't have a merit system.

They have a

when you go to the United States, you're not necessarily the best student in China.

I call a lot of Chinese students.

You're children of the party members,

provincial officials.

So what you're saying is

it's a perk.

It's a perk, and you're not getting the most talent.

And they're never going to be able in China to pick the best military officials or the best rocket scientists or the best virologists.

I have a feeling that the incompetent caste that was in charge of the Wuhan level four had some ties, familial or friendly, or something, with the Chinese military that oversaw it.

And you had to make that devil's bargain to get a job there and to advance.

We don't want to go down that route, and yet we're doing it in our own idiosyncratic way.

Yeah, gosh, everything that's wrong, not everything, but it's so self-inflicted, you know, so

what we've done to ourselves.

But

how do societies perish?

Why is Rome, did did Rome in 480, 470 all of a sudden forget what worked in 280 BC?

No.

They knew what worked.

They know you don't inflate the currency.

They know you have to defend the Danube and the Rhine.

They know you have to have people from all over the non-Italian world be civic education and momentity, but they didn't do it.

The same thing with the Byzantines.

What was different about 1200 AD and 1453?

And so you should, why did the Mycenaeans, they made the lion gate at Mycenae and yet they were, they collapsed suddenly.

And so all of that aggregate knowledge has to be refreshed.

And you put it among a tiny, tiny little elite that has particular non-meritocratic agendas or whatever it is, and you don't inculcate the middle class and these values of meritocracy and achievement.

And

the irony about it is, we know that

when we had Jim Crow in the South and we had discriminatory practices, that we lost a lot of talent.

We know that the NBA and the

Major League Baseball, they're a merocratic organization.

I don't care if they turn out to be all African American or all white or all Asian.

I just want the people who are meritocratic.

And

I don't understand our society that says, We believe in meritocracy.

That's why 75% of the NBA and 73% of the NFL are African American, but we don't believe in meritocracy

because

50% of UC, Berkeley, or Stanford would be Asians.

And so we're going to discriminate against this group because they dominate the enrollments at

most prestigious colleges, but we don't

discriminate against this group that dominates something that's very lucrative.

And I guess the argument you can say to the average American, a college education is more important than their national pastime or collective sports but i'm not sure that's true as far as people's own wishes and i could make the argument that it was more important if it was merucratic but

i i think that higher education is essentially not a good deal anymore for the money you pay and what you get in return yeah i met so many high school educated, autodidactic people who, given the internet and the resources available on podcast and self-learning, are so much better educated than the people that come out of these sociology or social programs out of universities, deep in debt and half educated.

Well, Victor, on that depressing note, we're going to have to wrap up today's podcast with

the

usual business here, which is to show, express our appreciation.

And it's not rote.

We do it every week, but it's sincere every week.

We thank our listeners for listening.

And if you're new to listening to this podcast, hope you enjoyed it and stick around.

We do, I have the great honor to do,

look, I don't know why.

I'm a very lucky man, but twice a week

do this with Victor.

Twice a week, the great Sammy Wink

records podcasts with Victor.

And

occasionally, and I believe it will become more regular,

Victor will be interviewing an important

person of prominence

weekly.

So at least four and often five podcasts a week.

So we hope in the collective they are, you're finding them inspiring, entertaining, informative.

And

at the least, what you're finding is a bounty of wisdom from Victor.

So thanks for listening.

And for the folks who listen on Apple podcasts or iTunes, they have the possibility of

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There's a five-star system there.

For those who rate it five stars, and that is practically everybody, I think it's about 99% of the folks who've left ratings.

Thank you very much for that.

And some leave comments.

We read them.

We read all of them.

And here's one titled VDH Groupy with an exclamation point.

I originally came across Victor through his appearances on Tucker Carlson and was always disappointed because they were so short.

I wanted more.

That's right.

Can't get enough of Victor.

A few years ago, I found his website and then his podcast, and my wish was granted.

His take on the world is thoughtful, concise, and moral.

What this planet needs is more original thinkers like VDH and his colleagues at the Hoover Institute or institution.

VDH 2024.

Exclamation point.

This is from Missing W.

So thanks very, very much.

Victor, you're going to get drafted into it one way or another.

So

I'd rather have long COVID forever.

Well, hey,

you may be having that.

So don't wish it.

Thanks, Victor, for all the great thoughts and analyses and wisdom you shared today.

And thanks again to those who are listening.

Thanks to Just the News.

By the way, that's justthenews.com, John Solomon's website.

That's what we, well, that's the mothership for this podcast.

Let me just throw out also, Victor, we have the friends at the Facebook, the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club, not affiliated, but good people who are great advocates

of Victor and share his stuff.

Thanks for that.

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Thanks very much.

We'll be back again soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Bye-bye.

Bye, everybody, and thanks for listening.