Non-compos Mentis or How Joe Biden Gaffed His Way Around the Middle East

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording on Saturday, July 16th.

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

Victor is a farmer, classicist, military historian, and author of many bestsellers, an essayist.

He just writes a lot.

And you'll find what he writes at victorhanson.com about which we will talk later.

Victor, there's been a lot happening the last few days.

And I think right after these important messages, we are going to discuss fist bump diplomacy.

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

So Victor, our esteemed great president, remember, he was put on the ticket with Obama because of his foreign policy chops.

So now he's bringing those chops and maybe some soft serve ice cream to

a meeting.

with the leaders of Saudi Arabia.

Before the meeting, there was this, oh, this controversy.

Was he going to shake hands with the leader?

He fist-bumped.

This set off any number of critiques.

But Victor, I think that's worthy of your commentary.

So the overall way Joe Biden conducts foreign policy, I think our listeners would like to hear that.

Also, Victor, today we hear that the Saudis are saying, Abhavangul, that's Italian,

as to producing more oil.

So here he is, hat in hand over there, asking for more oil, the oil that, of course, that could be produced in the United States, and the Saudis are blipping him the birds.

So, Victor, your thoughts on that?

And then after that, we'll sideways crab walk into the Iran deal, which is also part and parcel of American relations with Saudi Arabia.

Well, I guess the best way to summarize what we've seen so far of Biden in Saudi Arabia, it's a blank, blank, utter disaster.

Biden lied about, remember he said he'd been, I think, 41 times to Afghanistan and not Saudi Arabia.

That was a lie.

He'd only been there a little over 20.

More than he's been to the border, but go ahead.

Yes, same thing.

He lied there.

And then he lied and said that he was never going to meet with

Mr.

Mohammed bin MBS, bin Salaam.

Never going to meet with him.

He did.

And I didn't get upset about the fist bump because I thought he had the the alternate explanation of COVID.

So they're just going to bump fists rather than show a sign of greater intimacy that a handshake would convey.

But a lot of people on his side got angry because they really do believe Biden for some weird reason when he lied that he was going to be tough on the crown prince because of the Khashoggi killing, and he wasn't.

But the fact of the matter is, is this.

Whatever this guy you think about him,

MBS is trying to rid Saudi Arabia of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorists.

Everybody agrees with that.

And he's an autocratic dictator.

And he's got, you know, he's got all these crazy ideas.

He's building a $500 billion city on the Red Sea desert, Naomi, I think they call it.

So he's trying to be kind of an Elon Musk character.

So in some ways, he's a cut above the Saudi royal family.

And more importantly, he's got all of this oil at a time of the shortages.

Under normal times, 20 years ago, a U.S.

president would go there and he would make a realist calculation.

He'd say, these are the drawbacks of this theocracy.

These are the alternatives in the region.

And because of their security concerns and because of our need for oil, they would cut the Cheney,

Bush, that type of deal.

And then Biden was part of that.

And now Biden's come along with this moralistic idea, we don't have anything to do with him.

And then he finds himself in this Orwellian position that he wants Americans to burn more dirty fuel because if you lower the price, they will drive more.

This is exactly what he wanted, the situation we're in, this high gas price recessionary climate, because this is better on the environment.

He told numerous times, as you know, Jack, we've talked about on the campaign trail, I'm going to eliminate all fossil fuels.

And he did cancel Keystone and anwhar and fracking on new federal leasing and offshore so he got what he wanted and then he has the midterms because people are angry they're paying six to seven dollars a gallon

depending on where you live so he goes over there and he and then this is a regime that he said he would never deal then he shows this sign of intimacy and then he begs them to pump oil and they've got this cheshire cat grin on their face.

Oh, yes, oil.

Yes, yes.

Oh, by the way, do you have some of the dirty thing that you want us to get dirty and pump and

he's then the head of saudi intelligence tells people that he's clearly diminished from when he was in office and he has brain freezes he slurs words he gets mixed up and the left

which would have said this was lincoln-esque it was you know six months ago they want him gone so they're now they're focusing on how dare you bump the fist of this person who ordered khashogi's murder?

Even Adam Schiff is attacked.

Yeah, Adam Schiff doesn't attack anybody unless it's politically useful for him.

So he understands that Biden is on the way out and he wants to be one of the heroes that did him in.

And so it's a disaster.

And the Israeli thing was worse when he said that he used the word honor in association with the Holocaust.

And he turned this way and that way.

He did that, what was that, that imaginary shake where he shakes the, you know, like Harvey the rabbit or something he just shakes there's nobody there and then he turns around and he has that cough and then he says we have headache and

yeah it's sad it really is he has no business there but the main point is he is in a position that no president ever wanted to be in and the whole thrust of the trump presidency was to ensure that a u.s president never never went to the middle east again and compromised compromised principles, became a hypocrite, talked about human rights, and then begged the Saudi royal family to give us oil.

And so we had solved that problem for the next decade.

We had a decade or two of transitionary affordable fuels.

Trump was all ready to green light nuclear plants and electric and hydrogen and all that stuff, but we were not going to kill the middle class in that process.

He came along and killed the middle class and destroyed our energy industry's trajectory,

projected trajectory.

Now he's over there and it's going to go downhill.

Israel was a disaster.

He's supposed to be creating a new coalition,

the Abraham Ham McCord coalition.

And it's very interesting.

The subtext, this was Netanyahu, who's going to be prime minister in November.

He's already talking about, you know, I flew to Saudi Arabia and

Saudi world family I have no problem with.

They're modernists, they understand that I'm a reliable ally.

So it was entirely in contrast to Biden, right?

That Israel is reliable, that the Saudis don't have to be good to be okay.

And you deal with a hand that's dealt you all those dimensions of supply.

And that's what we are.

And

the reason I sound kind of tired and slow is that

I don't see anything out.

I don't see any way out of this dilemma that we're in.

We have a constitution

and

we have mechanisms to remove it.

The left established a precedent.

The 11th day Trump was in office.

Rosa Brooks and Foreign Policy said, you know, you've got to consider a coup or the 25th Amendment.

If you can't impeach him quick, then we have.

Articles of impeachment were filed within the first days of Congress.

And 60 voted for them.

And then Rod Rosenstein and Andrew McCabe said, you know, the guy is crazy.

And then they said that Trump had a funny gait.

Remember that?

When he walked down?

Or

he didn't look quite like Trump.

And then somebody said he repeats his vocabulary.

True.

So

Ronnie Jackson, the doctor, gave him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which he aced, which I don't think I could do with this long COVID.

I plunk.

And Biden wouldn't get one right.

And then we had Bandi Lee, the psychiatrist who went to Congress and said, you know, you should be straightjacketed and the prog march, I just carried out.

So we had all of that.

And then they went silent when we did really have a legitimate case of non-compos mentes that really requires a guy to be removed.

And so, trust me, Jack, if we had

a legitimate vice president and we had not precluded that possibility by

demanding a race and gender criteria before the selection was made, they wouldn't be in this situation.

Right.

Although I don't know who they would have picked, but they would have, anybody would have been better except Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris.

Yeah, along those lines, not with the plan B, but on the cognitive stuff, I just saw a headline.

I did not see Tucker Carlson's show, but something about information he has about Biden on the campaign trail in 2020, fortified by

Jill Biden and others with kind of pep you up.

I had, I can disclose this.

I had a member of the administration call about before the, I think it was the first debate, and they were boasting how Trump was going to mop up the floor with him.

And they just wanted a take.

They were calling anybody, you know, just to see if their premonitions were correct.

And I said, no.

And he said, why?

And I said, you know, I've had personal experience with people who have had cognitive problems in my family.

And I had a grandmother that I took care of till she was 93 in our house.

And I can tell you that if somebody is at the status that Biden was,

you can put that person for a week and you can have him get up at noon and then, you know, go to bed at nine and adjust his day.

And you can give him Adderall, like, I guess that was her euphemisms for amphetamines.

You can give him all sorts of neutral cells.

There are things, there really are.

I mean, physetin and quercetin and other things that even though the medical establishment looks askants, they do over time have some ability for clarity for older people.

But there are some medications they give, and they're short term.

And so when that debate came, I said he's going to be rested.

His time clock is going to be readjusted.

He's going to be pumped full of medications.

And for a brief two hours, he will be Joe Biden, which is a total train wreck, but he'll be the Joe Biden of 2012 or something like that.

I didn't get a very warm reception, but that's what's happened, that every once in a while, you can do that for a debate or a state of the nation address.

But you can't do it all the time because the person, you know, it's an upper and a person.

that's cognitively challenged just can't sustain that.

That's what they did.

And we all know they do that.

And when Tucker said that, I kind of yawned.

I thought, yeah, that's what they do.

But the presidency requires you to be that way every day.

And so I know that at noon he goes home to Delaware and he has familiar surroundings and his pool and his luxury estate.

And then he doesn't come back probably till Monday morning and they don't wake him.

But still, those four days are as demanding.

as any job in the world or more demanding.

And he's not up to it.

And he's saying things now abroad and he's doing things

that are dangerous when he says he wants Putin removed, for example.

Or he says things in Israel and he compares.

I know that being.

Yeah, let me read that just so you can comment on it.

Yeah, here's what he said.

And this is, my background and the background of my family is Irish-American.

And we have a long history of not fundamentally unlike the Palestinian people, long history with Great Britain and their attitude over the years for 400 years.

My old colleague at National Review, Phil Klein,

has commented on this and it calls it rightly, I think, a disgraceful smear of Israel.

I'm Irish, you know, as we've talked here.

Yeah, half Italian, half Irish.

My great-grandfather was the grand Marshal of the St.

Patrick's Day Parade in New York.

So I'm even Irish royalty.

Wow.

We don't, this is crap.

This is an insane.

Yeah, I mean, it's the first thing I heard that I thought, okay,

the Irish, even the non-violent Irish movement for autonomy was

gained at declaring.

They did attacks against the royal family inside England, but no one in the Irish liberation movement said that Great Britain was an illegitimate occupational power and they wanted to remove it off the face of the earth.

And so.

That's what the Palestinians want to do.

They just don't want to get back all of the West Bank or parts of Israel.

They want to destroy the entire notion of Great Britain.

And the Jews have been in that area longer than the modern-day Norman, Anglo-Saxon, whatever the mixture of what we call the British have been in Britain.

And so that was just absolutely crazy.

And

Israel is not only a fundamental ally,

it's an essential ally.

It might be even in some ways our best ally.

And to denigrate it is just remarkable.

and then victor you 100 million dollars he's restoring to the palestinians he says to hospitals it won't stay in hospital yeah right

it'll go everywhere it'll go the same place ppp you know payments went to the pockets of uh

shovel ready jobs there'll be there'll be missiles in the basements of all those hospitals well you mentioned before Israel and Saudi Arabia, and one of the things that unites them is their hatred of Iran.

And Joe Joe Lieberman, the former senator, was talking the other day about attacking Biden for his quote-unquote religious fervor, almost religious fervor about this deal.

So

wooing the Saudis,

trying to nuclearize

Iran, denigrating Israel.

It's what the hell.

I don't know.

No.

Well, I mean, and there's a common denominator.

There's a common denominator to all of it.

To go over to Israel

and

basically insult them, and that is coming off a need to restore relations with Israel because Biden has attacked them in the past.

And then to go beg the Saudis for oil that we won't pump.

And then to talk as if you can deal with this Iranian theocracy, which, by the way, has enriched the vast majority of its uranium that it now has enough for one bomb at least while Joe Biden was president.

And you can really see the frustration of the left and the never Trump right.

Max Boot, who wrote all of his Washington Post and earlier articles damning the Iran deal, just damning it during the Obama regnum.

And then when Trump, of course, got out, he got mad at Trump.

because it was Trump that he got out of the deal.

Now he's writing that it's Trump's fault that Iran will get the the bomb, but poor Biden will be blamed because it was during his tenure that he enriched it, which is just insane.

And meanwhile, Bibi is sort of like a bumblebee buzzing around the entire Middle East, landing in these Arab countries and saying, this is why you've had a real politique détente with me, because you know me.

And I'm not Joe Biden and I'm reliable.

And when I'm going to be prime minister in November, I'm going to ensure they will not get a bomb that threatens you and us.

And that's the message he's doing.

And whether we like it or not, at some critical point, someone is going to take that facility out.

And it's not going to be us.

It's going to be Israel.

And the Arabs know that.

And they're going to use Israel to do that.

And that's a good word, use.

And then we're going to attack Israel and condemn it.

And then we're going to say privately, gosh, I'm so glad they did that.

We've done that every time.

We've done that when they took out the Assad reactor.

We did that earlier during the Iran-Iraq war when they took out Saddam's reactor.

Even the right, you know, people

and the Republican Party, how dare they do that?

They're a rogue nation.

Then, you know, you let it die down and Cheney puts a picture on his wall of the destroyed reactor.

And that's how we operate.

But Israel is going to take the heat because no one else is going to do it.

Or the people who might do it don't have the capability.

And that's just a fact.

And Biden, if he really wanted to prevent that, then he would put on tough sanctions on Iran.

But he will not put on tough sanctions on Iran of the kind that would cripple them because he wants their oil on the international market.

He wants as much oil as he can before

the midterm election.

So it's very strange, Jack.

If you look at that Strategic Petroleum Reserve, it's going down fast.

It only has about 800 million barrels.

He's got up over a million a day.

And he's pumping that.

And he's begging the Saudis.

I don't think they're going to add any, but they might.

And then he doesn't seem too upset that Russia is sending all of this oil to China and pumping it at an increased rate to India because they're part of the fungible market.

So he's trying to think in his mind, how can I,

I shouldn't say he doesn't have a mind.

So Jill Biden and Ron Klain and the Obamas and their, you know, Susan Rice type hangers on are saying to themselves, how do we get more oil in the world market and crash the price before the midterm, but not have to participate in that process ourselves, even though we're the largest, second largest consumer of oil in the world.

We got to figure that out.

And that's where we came up with this lunacy that apparently has no rationale, but it does have a logic to it.

that is get the price of gasoline down by 50 cents before the midterms.

Do not pump any more oil.

If you pump it out of the reserve, it does not count as pumping fresh oil.

Beg the Saudis, the Iranians, the Venezuelans,

the Russians to pump more oil.

And that's what we're doing.

How the American people tolerate this, I don't know.

But it explains maybe why some polls, he's right at 30%.

This is insane is what I'm trying to get at.

I can't even think of words that you have this valuable resource and you have it in abundance and you have the capability to extract it much more environmentally soundly than you would if the Saudis did the commiserate increases and yet you're begging them to do it and yet you want that commodity from them and you're begging them begging them because you have no problem using it you just don't want to produce yeah and it's not it's not like any other commodity either.

I mean, it is kind of the pinnacle of commodities, if only because where energy is produced and energy is consumed, the more energy there is, the less poverty there is.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like you have a Mercedes in your car, in your garage, and you have a Lexus.

And then you...

say, I don't believe in driving, but I got to drive.

So you go over to your neighbor who, you know, has a Ford and you say, can you please give me that Ford?

I need to drive.

I need it.

It doesn't make any sense.

It's almost as lunatic as Gavin Newsom, going around the country and telling everybody that Florida is a failure and the freedom, liberty, successful alternative is California when everybody's fleeing to Florida.

I think I used a column where I said, it's like you have a service station.

that had a once golden trademark and it was very popular, but it's run down.

It's overpriced.

The thing doesn't work.

Your customers have fled across the street to this gleaming new, super efficient service station that's cheaper with a better quality of gas.

And then you get out in the rope and scream and yell and say, this is horrible.

This guy is terrible.

You don't want to go there.

You know, it doesn't make any sense.

This is his, the title of that column is Gavin Newsom's.

weird idea of freedom which folks can find it on your website and also it's published by american greatness so um yeah that's another, he's another enigma.

But, Victor, let's, you know, as much as we just talked about Joe Biden smearing people, in this case, the Israelis, it seems to be all in the family.

You know, Joe has a long history of that with blacks and with Indians, you know, and the 7-Eleven owners, et cetera.

But wow, Joe Biden seems to, you know, have picked up the bug.

And let's talk about Jill Biden's taco stand right after these important messages.

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

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So that's VictorHanson.com.

Victor Jill Biden was out on the hustings of a sort, and she really upset Hispanics, Latinos, with her comparison of Latinos to tacos.

Everybody kind of laughed a little bit, but even the even the Hispanic Journalism Association went on the attack against her.

I found that

a little

heartening, actually.

Any thoughts, Victor?

Well, you remember she was si se puede.

She said, si se, because we're doing a podcast, we have to mention this.

She said, si se padway.

Padway.

C-se puadway.

Padway.

Puadway.

So I guess she was trying to say, yes, the podcast works.

But there's certain rules of nomenclature when you get into the thorny.

shrubbery of identity politics.

You never use the word watermelon under any context whatsoever with African-Americans.

You never use the word taco under any context with Hispanics, Mexican-Americans in particular.

I don't need to get in why, but that's just a rule that every politician knows.

And so when she calls people, you're as beautiful as the tacos, the morning tacos, then she's just doubling down on that stereotype.

And Dr.

Jill, we're starting to learn, Jack, that the more that she's out in public,

the less it's valuable for the Democratic Party.

She is a walking gaffe machine.

She's just about like he is.

She's an airhead.

She's pretentious.

She clings to that title like it's a life raft.

Which is one of the least deserved doctorates in America,

what she received.

The EDD.

I spent much of my life in the California system dealing with EDDs.

It's a degree where you don't have to have any foreign language facility or even in some cases, write a thesis.

But it's the people who have it tend to identify themselves as doctor more than anybody that has a PhD,

even an MD.

So my point is that she is a liability and she's going to be more of a liability because in direct proportion to his descendants, she's going to ascend, which is why she wanted him to run in the first place.

Her idea the whole time

during the 2020 campaign, but it even started earlier when he was grooming himself after Hillary failed.

She went toward the country in 17, 18, 19, 20, they were prepping him.

And her whole point was, no matter how bad this guy is, I'm at his side.

I can pop him a pill, but I can speak.

And at some point, I'm going to be Edith Wilson.

I'm going to be a prominent.

voice, if not the voice in the administration.

I might even be president of the United States de facto.

So her ego was enormous.

She's in a position that doesn't bother her.

She wanted to be in this position.

And any wife who loved her husband and had

some sense of they were a partnership would have said to him, you know what, we've had a good run.

And I'm not going to allow you to go out there because people are going to tear you apart.

And you had a career in the Senate and you're going to be remembered as a president.

who could not fulfill his duties.

And I can help you, but I couldn't help you enough to overcome that fact.

And we can have three to five, eight good years in retirement.

Let's just do it.

But that's not who she is.

And the result is that was a cruel joke that was played on the American people.

And now we've got a president who's touring the United States, touring the world.

And anything he says, anything that comes out of his mouth, I used to say, if it's not teleprompted, even if it's teleprompted, I repeat, he will speak and enunciate and talk out loud the prompts that are printed on the teleprompter screen.

And anything that goes off topic is a disaster.

And you know what?

When people lose their cognitive breaks or their cognitive veneer, then you see the raw essence.

And

Joe Biden raised Hunter Biden.

And the inside of Joe Biden is not pretty.

It's not.

He has a history of lying, of plagiarism, of racism, of meanness, of sexual assault, of sexual harassment.

And when that veneer comes off, we're going to see more and more of it.

And I don't know what they're going to do.

He is one, put it this way, Jack, he is one incident away from losing his office.

If he should

decline geometrically rather than arithmetically, which he's doing at the same rate, next time there's a young girl, overseas, a member of a dignitary's family, he could grab her shoulders, blow in her hair.

What would you do?

What would the American people do?

They'd say that was enough.

Yeah, this is getting really strange.

Or if he,

you know, he can pass out.

I don't know.

I don't think he's, there's no way in the world he's going to be able to finish his term.

I think people need to talk about that seriously.

Yeah.

I guess you could pull it off in 1919 when you're Mrs.

Woodrow Wilson, not living in the communications age we do now.

But for Jill Biden to aspire essentially to be Mrs.

Woodrow Wilson is, that's kind kind of twisted, Victor, but so she did.

Speaking of Dr.

Jill Biden, let's switch to something domestic and Florida.

And the state of Florida has passed a bill and Governor DeSantis has signed it that reforms tenure, which is a thing you have, I may be wrong.

No, I do.

I've reforming or actually removing tenure, but

this legislation would create a five-year review of tenure.

Every five years, you'd have to go for a review.

And I think it's not unimportant.

It says before the board of trustees.

My feeling about board of trustees of colleges is they're mostly a bunch of, for private colleges, anyway, a bunch of, they're looking for that on the prestige of being a trustee of a university and actually fighting the fights that are needed at universities.

I don't think they emanate from the boards of trustees.

Nevertheless, it's better to have them adjudicate such a thing rather than an administrator.

And hey, if you don't pass the test, you can be fired.

So this is kind of heartening.

What are your thoughts about it, Victor?

Well, I mean, he's in a position of power, isn't he?

Because we're in a climate now where there's over 1 million students, fewer, that are going to enroll in the fall nationwide.

And we've talked about that.

That translates into about 10,000.

faculty positions that are unneeded.

We're in a period where we have spent five or six billion dollars in investing scarce university dollars on diversity, equity, and inclusion commissars.

So that is going to hurt the budgets of these schools.

And we're in a period where almost every day on TikTok or YouTube or something, there is a professor, often in a selfie type of landscape, where they're bragging about some crazy thing.

The latest one was the gender studies professor that tried to attack Josh Hawley.

She was from UC Berkeley and to try to tell her there are not two genders, there's three.

And then she was abrasive and rude.

And so anytime you put a professor on these social issues in front of Congress or in the media, they don't do well.

And they just reaffirm this view that they're pampered.

So DeSantis comes along and in his strength is that he's young.

He's 42 or 43 and unlike Biden or Trump.

And he has adopted the MAGA agenda almost to the letter.

And now he's trying to prove to people that he has the fire in the belly Trump combattiveness, but without the gratuitous tweets or personal slurs or this person's the worst person in the world.

And this is part of that effort because I do think he's going to run in the primary.

And so he's saying, you know what?

I can do this.

I think the governor, usually in a state in Florida, is probably no different.

It's about 80% of the Board of Regents or Board of Governors, whatever term they use, are appointed by the governor.

I don't know how many he's been, usually they have limited tenures, but he probably has the votes.

And what he's saying is that he's really putting the onus on the faculty.

He's saying, okay,

tenure was established to permit academic freedom and diversity of thought, but about 95% of professors vote hard left Democratic.

And it seems like all the professors who are being fired

for no cause at all, they're all right-wing.

Are there conservatives?

Ilya Shapiro, Joshua Kotz at Princeton.

There's a lot of them, and they have tenure, but it doesn't apply to conservatives.

So if it's not going to apply to conservatives, why have it?

And then he's saying to them, can you please tell me another professional group that has tenure, lifetime guaranteed security?

I can't.

Maybe civil service people are difficult to fire, but not impossible almost.

And so what he's saying is that tenure didn't do what it was supposed to.

It didn't protect academic freedom.

The only thing he should be careful is that when he does abolish tenure, the first people who will have be actionable, and they won't be fired for their political views, although that will be the real cause.

They will be ostensibly falled because of budget cuts.

And I saw that at Cal State in 1993 when people said,

there's no more money.

We have to lay off tenured faculty.

And they went after people who were either controversial or conservative and that'll happen yeah but i think as a bridge to no tenure he can have something like five-year contracts that you have in the private sector in other words if you're a professor of classics you say you meet with a faculty board and the dean and he says okay we're going to renew you for five years in this five-year period you are going to teach the following number of classes this is amount of time you're going to have off you're going to take one sabbatical perhaps.

We expect to referee scholarly articles, and maybe on your next five-year a book.

And we would like your teaching evaluations, whether peer or student, to reflect department norms.

I was the chairman of hundreds of those committees, unfortunately, and that would be easy to do.

I can see, Victor, the case for tenure in a philosophical way.

The point of being educated is to be educated by someone who can impart this great knowledge.

I think the quality of the actual professors matters and to protect great professors or to make sure they hang in there is not unimportant to an institution.

Of course, it's been terribly abused.

The problem is that there's two types of professors.

There's the minority that

really like ideas and they like to inculcate knowledge and pass on what they've learned and they like to do original research and they like to enrich their environment and they're not very common.

And when they are at a university, they incite jealousy, envy, otherworldly.

I've seen them before.

And they're kind of giants on campus.

Sometimes it goes to their head, they get a little hubristic, but they are the types of people who need to be protected because they don't fit well.

They come late to faculty meetings or they skip them or, you know, they say things that are crazy sometimes, but they're brilliant people and they need to be protected.

Okay, you can do that with a five-year contract.

But unfortunately, the majority of people are either so socially inept and they've been in graduate school in this little corner of expertise, they don't know how to operate in the real world, or they feel that all those years, undergraduate and graduate, you know, eight, nine, ten years, and they're the experts on weaving weaving and the gender weaving in medieval England.

And they come out in the real world and they've got this title and they've got this professorship and they nobody cares.

And so they're always insecure.

They feel that they're not given enough money, they're not giving enough attention, they're not giving enough prestige, they're not given enough respect.

They've never been eager to associate with students.

They're not interested in teaching.

And that's a lot of them.

And then, so tenure protects them.

Right.

And they tend to find ways to go after the other people that have tenure right and so and they're a nasty bunch i mean if you read about the joshua katz case at princeton right it was right out of john in the new testament he without sin i mean they had found that he had had a consensual consensual relationship with a student who was over the age of consent obviously in her 20s And they decided long ago to punish him for that.

He was kind of outspoken then, and they did.

They didn't have him teaching for a year.

And then later, when he spoke out about a black, what he called terrorist group, which it was in a way, they went back and violated due process and went back over that and reopened that case and tried to get people to say things.

And the whole subtext was, does anybody really believe if you lined up every professor in the School of Humanities or Arts and Sciences in Princeton and you put them under a lie detector test and you said to them, have you ever had consensual sexual relations with a student?

Yes or no.

If it's yes, you're going to be fired.

They don't want to do that.

And so that's how the university works.

They find ways to go after people in the way that the commissariat and the Soviet system did.

All in all, Jack, I think it's better to, DeSantis is right, get rid of it, and then offer some kind of multi-year contract that has guarantees of performance.

Okay, thanks, Victor, for that.

One more question about tenure, though, if you don't mind.

And then we've got to get on to one more subject before we end today's program.

As a rule, somebody receives tenure, is now tenured.

I'm going to make an assumption.

Their work productivity changes.

Does it change like almost immediately?

Does it take a few years before the coasting starts?

I made a lot of assumptions there.

I'm not knocking everyone who's got tenure, but does tenure affect the work productivity of the person receiving tenure?

And how quickly does that happen?

Well, without mentioning any names, I can tell you that as somebody who chaired the retention tenure promotion, or actually retention to RTP process for a number of years at the school level and the department level, it works like this.

When a assistant professor is hired, they have six years, two, three-year contracts, and then they're home-free.

So the young person that is hired is obsequious.

So they try to meet all the senior people.

They try to figure out who's on the tenure committee.

They're very kind.

They're nice.

They come at eight.

They leave at five.

They come in five days a week.

They put little posters on their bulletin board about what they're doing.

They're very careful not to publish too much and incite the envy of the drones that are tenured.

But they're very productive.

And they're usually in their late 20s or 30s so it's easy to be and then tenure happens and I mentioned this minority of group that love learning and they keep doing it no matter what tenure is just irrelevant to them they'll write books or they'll they'll write articles no matter what or they will engage students but these most people won't so then after they get tenure then they

they start thinking in different ways.

Now, what are those different ways?

It's things like the following.

Well, where am I going to teach?

I want this particular classroom.

And I want this particular time.

And I want all my classes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or I want them all on Tuesday, Thursday.

Or, you know, I'm doing a lot of underappreciated counseling and I want course relief for that.

I want course credit time off.

Or I don't think it's very fair.

that I have to be on this committee.

I've already been on committees.

Or, and this is my favorite, because I was the head of the sabbatical committee for a couple couple of terms.

Yes, I need a sabbatical, and I have a very, very important project.

And could we see some preliminary publication?

Well,

I don't want to preview my conclusions, but it's in my office.

It's bound.

Can you please bring it in?

And the point is that they don't do anything.

And usually, if you're there for 35 years, you get a sabbatical every seven.

So you get four, either full years at half pay or four semesters at full pay.

And usually it's, there's no autopsy or post tenure review.

There was supposed to be a post-tenure review, but it's a joke.

So when I was the head of the tenure committee and also I was the head of the sabbatical committee, I'd always say, well, can I please, this is your third sabbatical request.

I want to see what happened the last 14 years.

Well, how dare you do that?

These are very important findings and I'm going to culminate them in this one.

They act very differently when they get tenure and you know you can really see that jack there was a very brief moment when during the financial shakedown and before the california faculty association that represents the largest university in the world at the csu system had a complete monopoly that is on faculty participation.

It used to be if you were a faculty member, you paid your thousand bucks a year and you were a member of the faculty governance of the whole university chain, and then they set your salary and they negotiated for you.

It was a closed union shop, but there were only about 25%

joined the union.

And they said, well, everybody's freeloading.

They get union contracts, but they don't.

So they made it mandatory.

that everybody, whether you were a union member or not, had to pay the dues.

And then they got out of control.

But my point is this: before that happened,

the legislature and the governor decided that they were going to have merit pay.

Can you believe that?

At a public university, merit pay meant that there would not be, Joe Blow gets tenure, he's in year seven, year eight, and you can look at a trajectory on a graph and you can tell exactly when he, what he'll be making in his 35th year, okay?

So they changed the whole pay scale.

They said, if you, the dean determines that you've written a lot of books or articles or you're a superb teacher, he's going to up you.

And if you haven't, he's going to freeze you.

And when that happened, I could not believe it.

It literally the first day of the term that started under that new system, I walked down this hallway, and all of a sudden, every bulletin board outside a faculty member's office did not have no blood for oil rally going on, LBGQ Rights Center, none.

It was all gone.

It was

a picture of this person at a conference or an article that he had written was on there.

And then when you would go into the meeting, it was, hey, everybody, did I tell you I've got a new piece coming out in the Clinical Journal of Mathematical Expository Thought, or I've got a new one in the literature review.

And it was all about this.

And everybody was, you know, competing.

And it was all of a sudden.

the Democratic legislature caved and the union took over and it had all this flush cast with all these these members' dues that were not members, but they had to give.

And suddenly they canceled it.

And then they had kind of an equity thing where anybody who'd crawled ahead like a little tortoise too much, they grabbed him and they held him still for a few years while the other little tortoise crawled up equal.

And then it was all over.

And then all of a sudden, there was all the political sloganeering and posters on all the faculty bulletin boards.

You go into the hallway at eight o'clock in the morning.

No one was there.

No doors were open.

Come on in.

Office hour.

I remember one guy said official office hours.

And then he had them listed.

And then he said, but for anybody who wants to come in and chat, just walk on in.

So that ended very quickly.

And so that's how they operate, is what I'm trying to tell you.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for that, Victor.

We've got one more subject to talk about, and that's fact-checking.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show recording on Saturday, July 16th.

I'm Jack Fowler.

I'd like to encourage our listeners to check out not only Victorhansen.com, but what I do, I write Civil Thoughts.

That's a weekly email newsletter with a dozen or more recommended readings.

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So, Victor, last week when we recorded some podcasts, we talked about the incident, Joe Biden, you brought up earlier, reading the teleprompter, repeat the line, et cetera, and have the White House spokeswoman,

deputy spokeswoman, Emily Simons,

put out a statement.

It was on Twitter.

No, no, he didn't say, he said, let me me repeat that line.

No, he said, repeat the line reading the teleprompter.

So what, Jack?

So what?

Well, this is from the Federalist.

And here's here.

Let me just read this quickly.

So they show the tweet by Emily Simons twisting what Biden said, didn't say.

Despite the clear video evidence that Biden never said, let me, Simons claimed Biden wanted to emphasize that American women should let their voices be heard in order to reclaim our rights.

This was all about abortion.

And that the president often uses similar phrases about repetition for emphasis.

Now, factcheck.org took her word for it and said, quote, this is just another example of Biden being falsely accused of having issues while using a teleprompter, end quote.

The fact check, quote unquote, fact check, ends with an editor's note.

that clearly states the article was designed to help big tech censor and deplatform critics of the Democrat regime.

FactCheck is one of the several organizations working with Facebook to debunk misinformation shared on social media, et cetera, et cetera.

Victor, it's a story worth reading.

It's at the Federalists, but this is kind of the core of the culture war, of the chaos we have when the truth is back to Orwell.

You know, war is peace.

If you cannot say that two plus two is four,

how can we have a civil society?

Well, I mean, the subtext is Ms.

Simons, as I remember, was Adam Schiff's director of PR.

She was her public relations.

And then when they wanted a black gay woman to be the voice of Joe Biden, they needed a Jin Saki-like character who knew all of the nooks and crannies and how to lie more effectively.

So they brought in Adam Schiff.

And she, remember Adam Schiff, he was the one that engineered the first impeachment and set up the whole strange Venman whistleblower shift lied about it he had the minority report on the Russia collusion hoax lied about it he read in material into the transcript that was not true kind of ad-libbed what happened on the phone call etc etc etc well she was his pr I think she came in in the spring and so this was supposed to bring in a pro and she is a pro that is a pro pro-Orwellian.

You've got to remember, Jack, all of these leftists feel that their exalted ends justify any means.

So if you're Mr.

Klein Smith for the FBI law and you just got to get a scalp and you got to go after Carter Page, and you have a moral right to alter a document for a Pfizer court, even though that's a felony.

If you're Ms.

Simons and you know what Joe Biden said, you have a right to say that he did not say that and alter a transcript and make sure that that's not in it the way that Joe Biden actually said it.

And if you look at all those transcripts of what he says, they're all cleaned up.

They do not reflect what people hear.

And that's just the way the left operates.

And that is Orwellian.

But again, the thinking behind it is that we are so morally superior and we're so intellectually towering that no one, no one has a right to question our methods because our means and methodologies are absolutely necessary for us to craft the right, correct, perfect policy for you unthinking, stupid people in the middle class that doesn't know what's good for you.

That's how they think.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, thanks for that and for all the wisdom you've shared today.

I want to thank our listeners who keep growing.

The numbers just keep growing and growing.

Thank you for.

Thank everybody for listening.

And I'm doing this from Stanford today.

So I don't know if my microphone is of the same quality or my brain is because every time i seem to get to the campus here i lose some brain cells

let me read one comment victor for the folks that visit apple podcast

you can rate the show one to five stars thanks to the many the overwhelming number who rated five stars greatly appreciate it we read the comments and here's one

from 1 Peter 13.

Sounds kind of biblical.

Everyone needs VDH.

VDH has become my favorite commentator.

There's no hysteria or showmanship here like on most political podcasts.

I've learned more listening to VDH

than all the others combined.

We all need more historical perspective so we understand that there is truly nothing new under the sun.

Thank you, 1 Peter 13.

Hey, Victor, I'm just curious.

When did...

Were you like 10 when people started calling you VDH?

Or is that more?

No,

it was a very strange thing i came home from graduate school and

i

showed my mom that i you know i never used my middle name and i showed my mom my thesis and she said

well it says victor hansen i said yeah mom she goes well i'm tired of the hansen the scandinavians we live in this house and this was the davis so i want you to use your middle name so it's kind of it's kind of uh formalistic she goes no no so i just did it and thought it would disappear and then i started writing books and i didn't want i turned in my next book actually next two with victor hansen and they said no no you're going to get confused so if you're going to use be an author stay with the same name and then it was kind of weird because i'd say 50 of the people always say victor david hansen yeah i did that to you once yeah and when i check in when i check in

i just have a thing now when i check into a hotel i know that it won't be under hansen because they think it's davis Hansen, like I'm British or something.

So it'll be under D.

So it's a hassle and it sounds pretentious, people tell me, but I did it for my mother and I live in the Davis house, so I have no problem with it.

But I have a brother who has this Alfred Davis Hansen.

He's never used the middle name.

I never did until I was 26.

And then people just said, keep it.

And so I did.

Mom rules, as well as she should.

God rest her soul.

Well, thanks, Victor.

Thanks, everyone, for listening.

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

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

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