Crises: From Ukraine to the University

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

We are recording on Thursday, January 27th, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I'm the author of Civil Thoughts.

You'll find that at civilthoughts.com, but much more importantly, is the namesake and star of this podcast.

That's Victor Davis Hansen.

He is the Martin and Ely Anderson Sr.

Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Busky, a distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College.

I think that history aspect is going to come into our program today because we're going to talk about what's happening in Ukraine.

We're going to talk about Vladimir Putin's intentions and the ability of the United States to deter him.

And we're going to do that right after this important message.

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Hey, we're back with the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Again, we're recording on January 27th.

And Victor, as you know, by the, you know,

when the podcasts actually appear on justthenews.com, that's John Solomon's website.

That's our podcast, Happy Home.

It may be a few days.

So the dynamics of what's happening in Eastern Europe may have changed.

But as of today, there's a tremendous amount of attention ratcheting up.

Appropriate is that you have just written.

a piece for American Greatness.

Folks encourage you to go to American Greatness to read this.

It's titled, Why Putin Has Not Been Deterred.

This, of course, is regarding Ukraine.

Victor, I wish you will explain to us right after I finish this little piece, why he has not been deterred.

You wrote in this piece, I'm quoting here now, some Ukrainian expatriates and current government members worked with the American left to ensure the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

Now, Ukrainians are exasperated that their prior intrusions into domestic American politics have backfired with the disastrous Biden presidency and his apparent de facto acceptance of an inevitable Russian annexation.

Where does this entire mess leave America?

In trouble.

So, Victor, two things.

Would you talk about this piece and why Putin has not been deterred?

And if you could elaborate on this a little bit, I think it's related.

What will 2022 look like globally for American foreign policy because of what Joe Biden's presidency has been and what it has done starting with the Afghanistan pullout.

So talk about, please, about Putin, Ukraine, and then take it more broadly, if you would.

So everybody agrees, Jack, that borders, to have a global order, so to speak, that a border has to be sovereign.

Everybody except Joe Biden, who doesn't care about our own border and is flying, as we talked about earlier, illegal aliens all over the country at night.

But other than Joe Biden, most countries believe you cannot have nation states where their borders are invaded by their neighbors.

Okay, most Americans also believe they don't want to go over there and fight nuclear, Russia's 7,000 nuclear weapons in the back door, backyard of Europe, and 30 NATO members who have an aggregate population of 1 billion people and eight times the economy of Russia.

So if they really worried about national borders, you would think that Germany would not be prohibiting aid flights going using its airspace, or the Turks would have the largest army in NATO would be standing up.

But that's not happening.

And so now we're all fighting because if you say it's not happening and we can't deter him, then you are labeled an apologist for Putin.

Or if you say you've got to do something, you're reviled as a neocon interventionist globalist.

But what's the truth?

Why has he got 100 to 150,000 there and he can attack at will and the only decision that matters is his own warped sense of cost to benefit analysis if he thinks he can go in there and take out that government without a guerrilla war and get all of ukraine he will do it if he thinks there's going to be a messy war in the streets or there's going to be huge sanctions he may or may not we don't know and if he does pull it out he may or may not but could go into the baltic states and maybe even China could call him up and say, how do you do that?

We're looking at Taiwan.

Okay, that's the framework.

So why is he there?

Let's look at NATO very quickly.

There's 30 members.

They have, as I said, more wealth and population than Putin even had when Russia was the Soviet Union, but they're not united.

They're socialist.

They don't spend the promised 2%.

They keep thinking we're going to maybe someday kind of sort of maybe pay it, but we're not.

Six nations, I think, of the 30 actually met their contribution requirements.

And we have two nations with over 80 million people, one of which is Germany.

Germany, according to the most recent Pew Poll, when asked, would you want better or worse relations with the Soviet Union?

60-something percent said better.

And in America, it's almost the opposite.

When asked, particularly, are relations with the United States good or bad?

About 70% say it's bad.

And over 50% have a negative impression of the United States.

If you ask the Turks with the largest army and the largest population in NATO, I think it's 84 million, what do you think about these issues?

They pull the same, if even more, anti-American.

Germany does this in part because about 50% of their energy needs, because of their disastrous new Green Deal policies, will be met by Russian natural gas along the Nordstrom II pipeline.

And Turkey does it because they've got a series of joint military-industrial projects.

Okay,

so NATO is not going to react.

And if Ukraine was in NATO, as we've said in the past, that would have been a disaster.

They would have opened Article 5.

Nobody would have showed up,

literally nobody with power, and NATO would be through.

So NATO is not going to show up.

If you think they would,

then look at Afghanistan when the United States pulled out and didn't tell its NATO partners.

So then we look back to the United States.

Is the United States can it handle it by itself?

Well, how did that work out in Libya and Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan?

And when we pulled out of Afghanistan, did that send the message, hmm, those Americans are even bragging on their logistical retreat.

They called it a great success.

What country in the world can pull out 3,500 troops so quickly?

My God, that was wonderful.

And they gave $80 billion

in magnanimity to the Taliban and military equipment.

And they were even nicer.

And they turned over a $1 billion embassy.

And if that wasn't enough, they gave the biggest air base in Central Asia with 300 million in refits.

And they gave it to the Taliban.

We want to join those guys.

That's not happening.

If you look at Joe Biden, the person,

he says, remember that clip where he says, Putin's a boy.

That was in 2019.

Trump's a boy.

And they're afraid of me.

When I get in there,

okay.

He got in there and he had a little mini summit at Anchorage and the Chinese completely dressed us down and humiliated us.

And then Putin unleashed some hackers,

as is his want.

And Biden went over and said to him, or called him and said, please, if you're going to hack us, and destroy commerce and industry, don't do it with vital services.

Please, here's 16 agencies, institutions, companies.

Please don't hack.

And then there was Afghanistan.

Is that going to deter him?

And then we get into the U.S.

military.

Biden is not raising defense spending.

Obama cut it.

Trump did.

He raised it.

Biden knows that his chairman of the Joint Chiefs has said that his primary mission, according to his testimony in Congress, as well as climate change, was rooting out what he called white privilege and white rage.

And he was just mimicking what Secretary Austin had said.

And now there's a big fight at at the same time where we're going to discharge potentially thousands of service people who are not vaccinated, even though we know that the vaccination will not stop infectiousness or infection.

It may, it will prevent you from going to the ICU probably, but

People who have prior immunity, as we've talked about, from a natural infection, are probably better off or as good off as the vaccination.

But nevertheless, they're going to be kicked out.

So we're going to tell that military, as I said said earlier on another broadcast you're going to go over there to central europe or maybe eastern europe or maybe to ukraine but you know we really don't want you if you're not vaxed and that tattoo with that snake or don't tread on me you're a white supremacist and you know what you guys die at twice the rate of most other ethnic groups and combat so i don't know just go there and die for it that's not going to happen so they have ruined the morale and there's a lot of opposition that's why the american people say only 45% have confidence in their military.

So you add that up from NATO to Joe Biden to his administration to the recent behavior of the U.S.

military.

They have all in a perfect storm fashion colluded to make it very hard so that a president can face the nation in a coherent.

spiritual manner say this is an existential problem.

We cannot have a world without sovereign borders.

Just as our border is secure, walled, and we are not going to allow it to be invaded, so Ukraine has that right.

And we and 30, 29 other NATO countries are going to help.

If we can do it with weapons or sanctions, we'll try it.

If it doesn't work, we may have to insert it.

That's not going to happen.

Sorry, not going to happen for the reasons I listed.

So, yeah, it's Putin's, it's almost Putin's call on, as you said earlier, cost-benefit analysis.

And I don't know that you can answer this, but I wonder what he would assess in that analysis to say, you know, this isn't worth it right now.

He's got worth it.

Yeah, he's got about

three or four considerations.

Why is he doing this?

Because he wants to show NATO, Europe, the world.

aside from that he's tough and he can deter people, even though he doesn't have the resources of a major power, superpower.

He's got an economy much smaller than California.

So what he's trying to say is that there are certain former Soviet republics that historically, culturally, linguistically are tied into Russia.

And they were not going to let them, we may let them be independent dependencies if they're non-aligned, like Finland, for example, but we're not going to allow them to integrate their economies and their politics and their military alliances within the West.

We're not going to do that.

And that would be, you know, that's what he's arguing.

He's also said, you know, we don't go in the Caribbean.

We don't go into Northern Latin America, et cetera, et cetera.

We know those parallels.

He's also saying,

if I can bully Ukraine, then all of these other countries insidiously, whether they know it or not, are going to elect governments whose sine qua non will be you have to get along with Vladimir Putin.

You cannot be openly hostile to Russia.

And so that's what he wants.

And then the question is: what's the cost of getting that?

I don't think he really believes that there's not going to be any troops in the former Warsaw Pact or any of that crap.

But what's the cost?

As I said earlier, at the worst cost, which he will pull out or he won't go in if he's sure that there's 400,000 Ukrainians with javelin anti-tech weapons and Sam

shoulder anti-missile batteries, so to speak, and sophisticated weapons and IEDs around every block in Kiev.

He's not going to go in.

Or if he doesn't go in, he's going to go out very quickly.

But he doesn't know that's going to happen because he looks at Ukraine and he says, hmm, 9 million of these people have left the country.

It's got the largest outflight of any major Central European country.

And the people who stay have one of the lowest birth rates in Europe.

And it's got one of the worst economies.

And it's one of the most corrupt nations.

and life ain't too good in there.

So, if I can go in there, and even my poor standard of living in Russia is preferable to Ukraine's, and it's not the bastion of democracy that the West says it will be.

If I can do all that

and get away without a major war, then it's a plus-plus.

And he's getting a lot of encouragement from China, who wants him to see this.

And then China will say, well, look what they did.

And ukraine is not as close to russia as taiwan is there's nobody in taiwan that doesn't speak chinese there were people in ukrainian that don't speak russian and so that's what's at stake there's a lot at stake but you know you've got the bill crystals and the uh max boots and all of the neoconservatives whom you and i used to know and like are basically calling anybody who voices these considerations a sellout or an appeaser or a Putin puppet.

But the point is that record is so broken because these are the same people who said that Steele Dossi was accurate or John Brennan had

undeniable evidence or Adam Schiff demolished Devin Noon.

All these lies they've told us about Russian collusion.

And then when they were exposed as lies, no apologies for ruining the country and Jack

and

basically empowering Putin.

And because Russian collusion hoax really hurt us.

It caused internal divisions.

It alienated the Russians.

And I should say the elephant in the room about all this is we used to use Russia as a strategic foil to China.

That was Nixon and Kissinger's signature foreign policy achievement.

Neither of those powers will be closer to each other than each is to us.

So we should have been telling Putin: look, you're a thug, you don't like us, you think we're decadent.

Okay, but you've got radical Islamists' problems, so do we.

You've got China on your border, and we don't get along with china so on key issues we have to find some common ground and instead what did the obama administration under reset start off it was a basically

uh we're going to like you vladimir because you're not george bush as uh george bush was mean to you over the georgia invasion and he put sanctions but we're liberal enlightened people and we pushed the the reset button in geneva and so they did and they appeased him and he looked at them and said these are i've in hitlerian terms these are worms i saw them at munich and he just took advantage of them even when they begged him not to because obama had to be re-elected in the hot mic exchange and would willing to and did dismantle missile defense they had contempt for him and then they did the second stupid thing

They went from abject appeasement to demonization, not of Putin, but of all Russians.

You couldn't watch a movie, Jack, 10 years ago where the villain didn't have some Orthodox cross on his back tattooed or a Russian accent with a leather coat and a bald head and big muscles, and he was beating up some person of color or American heroine or something.

And so we demonize Russians in general.

And that's what they brought us with Russian collusion.

And we lost that foil.

Well, Victor, I'm so glad that Joe Biden is a foreign policy president.

He He will figure this out.

So, this piece was Why Putin Has Not Been Deterred.

It's an American Greatness.

And let's talk next about another piece you've written for American Greatness, your weekly major essay.

We'll switch from foreign policy to our culture.

And this is titled Wokeism is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult.

Please, folks, go to Americangreatness.com and you can read this.

Actually, it's also, Victor, you have it on your website, VictorHanson.com.

terrific piece you talk about wokeism as something that is a

cruel creed and in this essay you you have a number of sections woke's victims always in search of targets woke equals wealthy careerists uh power not equity is the creed i just want to read one little passage here victor that you wrote and then if you talk about this essay broadly you wrote the woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as or more than race.

By doing so, they do millions of poor white and Asian students who manage in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores from being admitted to top-tier schools.

Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little.

Once a morally bankrupt society, for naive, utopian, or ignoble reasons, begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to.

And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans.

That's a pretty

scary end of connecting the dots, Victor.

But hell, I can see it.

Would you talk about this essay?

Wokeism is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult.

I'm getting really tired of people, you know, they don't really talk about the essence of wokeism.

Wokeism is the primacy of ideology over rational thought and humanity.

It's taking an individual who has unique characteristics and reducing him to a cog and a Maoist wheel.

He's just part of a collective.

White supremacy.

What does that mean?

Does that mean that Mark Zuckerberg is a white supremacist?

He's left-wing, but he's got more power in his little fingernail than 700 forklift drivers in Dayton who happen to be white.

So it means nothing.

But we don't ever talk about how wokeism ends up.

Here's how woke ends up in the real world.

Wokeism means that you're an African-American mom,

40 years old, and you're living in an inner city apartment, and there's a guy shooting drugs, and another guy shooting the guy who's shooting drugs.

And you call the police because the bullets are whizzing around your window and they say, sorry, we're underfunded.

We were defunded.

Nuh-uh.

Or you've got a white policeman and his black partner and the white policeman says to the black partner, I think you should go because you know you're a quote unquote community and I will be, and the black policeman says to him, is that very fair?

That just because you're white, you don't have to go into the high crime areas and you get to go to the nicer areas of Chicago?

That's what wokeism is.

Wokeism is right now as we speak, there's some

poor person sitting in their home waiting for their PCR test from COVID that they mailed in and it's sitting on those railroad tracks in the dirt.

Or it's some, as I said, mechanic, it has a weird brake caliper part and they've ordered it and it's sitting in the dirt or and it's been abandoned or it's some supplement or medicine that somebody needs.

It's sitting in the dirt.

And that's what Mr.

Gascon has done when he allows that to happen by decriminalizing it.

Wokeism is when some obese person with one comorbidity who's 70 years old goes down to get a treatment.

one of these new Pfizer pills or Merck pills for that seems to have a pretty good rate of stopping even Omicron.

And they're saying, you know, I'm sorry, but

Mr.

Diazia, who's a

financier, is Hispanic.

And according to our rating, he's higher priority.

And you say, well, he's younger.

He has no coronavidities.

I'll die if I don't have it.

Doesn't matter.

We're going to make you pay for the sins of your ancestors.

He said, well, I have no ancestors.

I came from Poland, you know, 10 years ago.

Doesn't matter.

That's what wokeism is.

Wokeism is telling a five-year-old that has no idea of race or has no idea of history, you owe people, you are a racist, you are, this is what woke is, and we don't talk about it.

Wokeism is a very cruel and unkind and mean creed.

And we have to look at it that way, just like the Soviet Commissars were mean, evil people,

just like the Maoists were, just like the Bolsheviks were, just like the Nazis were.

I'm not comparing them to Nazis, but just like the Jacobins were.

But any ideology that suppresses human difference, human individuality, human uniqueness, and applies without any refinement a Stalinist lockstep ideology that destroys people's lives.

And I feel really bad for the Southeast Asian student.

And I had a lot of them at Cal State Fresno who came in their last 1975 to 76 boat person wave into, and there were three or four cities and about 80,000 of them were just dumped in Fresno County.

And eight or nine years later, I had children in my class from mostly Hmong, the poorest of the four Southeast Asia.

When I saw a Hmong student, they didn't have an alphabet in the mountains of Cambodia.

And when I would see somebody study and study and study and

I visited their homes and many of them didn't have money and they had no opportunity and they faced discrimination discrimination and they got straight A's and they got high test scores.

And when I see a Harvard or Yale or Stanford and I see some wealthy white grandee in his little admissions office and say, hmm, how do we get rid of these guys?

Because if we let in 41% Asians, then we can't let in as many.

Latinos and blacks.

And then the guy says, well, go after the white male.

He said, well, they're already below the 33%.

They're down to 20 or 15.

we'll go after the white women well we've all we we're down to 55 percent of women and then they said well we got to go after the asians then well how do we get all go after the asians well let's do some research how do we go after the jews we got rid of them they were you know they were getting in at 20 or 30 percent in the 40s and 50s remember in the 30s remember how we did that Well, no, I don't remember how we did that.

Well, we came up with a third criterion.

It was called personality.

And we just stereotyped them as workaholic Jews without personality, nerdy little people.

We didn't want them in, you know, our fraternities and our, you know, blue blood little white group.

And so they said, well, we can update that.

So we'll have test scores, grades, you know, extracurricular activities.

That'll help a little bit.

But to get...

to get that ratio down to down down down we've got to have personalities we'll just say they're regimentate they're unimaginative They have no personality.

They work too hard.

Now, we won't say that, but that's what we'll do.

And that's what they're doing.

That's what woke is.

That's what woke is.

And remember, the person who's doing that and the people who allow it to be doing it, when

junior doesn't get in and they have a lot of money and they give five, 10 million, or they have a phony lacrosse expertise, they call up the university and say, listen, I graduated from Yale.

My dad did.

What's this about my kid not getting in?

And the Southeast Asian kid can't do that.

Well, Victor, we're going to talk.

This will be a nice blend into the next subject, which is education.

And let's get to that, but right after this important message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

I think he used to be called the classicist.

I don't know.

I'm confused.

I know our sponsors thought they were confused too.

So we're bowing to expediency.

It doesn't matter.

We're still classicist

and traditionalist and culturalist in spirit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

True, true dad, my friend.

Well, first of all, I do want to recommend to our listeners to visit Victorhanson.com.

Consider subscribing, $5 a month.

Victor writes an incredible amount of original material, only readable on that website.

So victorhanson.com, five bucks a month, 50 bucks for the year.

Victor, I had, as we were planning for the show, there were a couple of pieces that are in this education basket.

First is that you may have heard that Bard College has hired three students to spend a year going through their library and decanonizing the stacks.

It sounds very Catholic, and that's, I guess, what happens when St.

Christopher is not a saint anymore.

He's decanonized.

But these three students with their equity, and hired by the equity department, there are going to go through and deselect, I guess, Mark Twain.

Probably if they find some Victor Davis Hansen books, they're going in the junk.

They already do.

I walked by not too long ago at the Chicano Law Library on Stanford's campus, and they had a list of pictures of books covers that were toxic, and Mexifornia was one of them.

That was a few years ago.

Congratulations, my friend.

You've made it.

So that's one thing.

And aside from that, there are two pieces that I'd like us to talk about.

Well, you talk about City Journal Zaya Gilani has a piece today, and it's about how Democrat lawmakers, mostly Democrat lawmakers, I assume all fact, leftists, are attacking Republican lawmakers, particularly governors, who are promoting legislation to make curricula more transparent.

Here's what we are teaching the children today.

And to find the

forces of progressivism and leftism fighting transparency, I think is really worth hearing from you about.

Also,

is that there's a piece today by Jim Pearson and Naomi Schaefer-Riley, my old pal, on National Review's website.

It's titled, Will COVID Collapse the College Cartel?

And I think it's a really worthwhile piece.

I encourage our listeners to read it because many colleges are approaching a brink.

Let me just read this one paragraph quickly and then Victor, comment on any of this.

They write, and this is Naomi and Jim.

Now it appears that at last students and parents are getting wise to the financial games that colleges have been playing.

In a Gallup survey in 2019, only 51% of Americans said that getting a college education was very important.

That is down substantially from 70% in 2013.

The federal government will continue to subsidize higher education, despite all evidence that doing so has only made college more expensive and unaffordable for students.

It's heartening that even with Democrats in control of Washington, student loan forgiveness seems to be going nowhere.

But even with the free-flowing federal coffers, colleges are closing or even lowering their prices.

Drew University, Sweet Briar College, Benedict College, all lowered their tuition this fall.

Others will be forced to take similar steps and soon.

Victor, there is a pushback.

I've gone to college.

It took longer than I thought.

I got a lousy degree and I'm a barista.

We've talked about

she was an economics major who had never heard of Milton Friedman.

Interesting.

Anyway, Victor, important pieces about the state of American education, your thoughts?

You know, it's kind of the general rule that we discussed that applies to immigration, that is, anything that the government does that's not transparent is usually unlawful.

So the idea that you're going to go through books and Trotskyize them, maybe they could get little scissors and every time they saw a picture of the wrong type of person, they could cut it out like they did with Trotsky in the Soviet Union after he was considered an enemy of the people.

Maybe they can do that.

But I think they were finally embarrassed and they stopped.

But the point is, when you expose things like this, the universities either deny it or they don't want it to go on.

So we know what they're doing, and it depends on a lack of transparency because it's contrary, if not illegal, often to it's either contrary to the Bill of Rights or it's illegal.

But universities do it because they feel they can.

They feel,

as someone who spent 40 years of my life connected to a university, I can tell you the attitude on the campus is that we're separate, we're special, we're custodians of youth, we're philosophers, we're Socratics, and we have certain conventions and protocols that you and the general public don't understand.

One of them is tenure.

You can't fire us.

We can fire Amazon drivers.

We can fire.

you know, dock workers, we can fire anybody out.

You cannot fire one of us.

We are so important.

We're much more important than the farmer, the miner, the timber, the lumberjock.

So don't fire us.

There's other protocols like that.

So when we hear stories that they're fascistic, I don't know if Orwell really said that.

He's often attributing if they're paid better, they'd be fascist.

But if that's what they are, and they're going through and selecting material, that's pretty clear.

The fact that people are making the decision not to go to college is a result of two things.

The first is the value of it and the second in a cost of benefit.

I mean what it gives you and then the second is at what cost does it give you something.

If you look at the college curriculum and you're empirical today

and you look at the admissions policies and you look at the grading, equity grading, you will see that it's not based on merit, it's not based on excellence, it's not based on requiring students to do meet meet a certain standard it's to be inclusive and to be diverse and to provide equity equity defined as everybody's going to be at the same level which human nature being what it is it's going to have to lower the standard and so that's what it is so if you go there it's particularly if you merit major or minor in things that have a dash followed by studies

gender, Black studies, Asian studies, peace studies, leisure studies, environmental studies,

you name it, you're not going to be educated much better, if at all better, than an autodidact in the general world or somebody who has real knowledge, but you deprecate it, that is a master electrician, a master sheetrock hanger, a master mechanic.

They have expertise.

The BA in sociology does not, Jack.

And so.

In the old days, the BA in sociology said, I took a general education core, so I know the basics of my constitution.

I know what civics is about.

I know where the Western tradition came from, and that enriches my next 50 years.

It doesn't anymore.

Sorry, you didn't learn that.

You learned that a bunch of evil white heterosexual atheists were oppressing people that are romanticized.

That's what you learned, and it's worthless.

So there's no value there.

And you know, there's no value because

They could prove there's value.

They can say, you know what, we're getting really sick and tired of you attacking this bastion of education, this bastion of humanity, the university.

And yes, we require an SAT because we do not trust high schools, given the thousands of them, to have a standard that's uniform.

So when a guy gets from Salma High School and he has a straight A, we don't think he's doing as well as minimal school straight A.

So we're going to have him take the SAT.

And so therefore, we want our students to take the SAT when they graduate so that we can say a Stanford BA was much better than a Cal State Fresno BA.

And that's how we're going to evaluate people.

And we're all going to agree that you've got to get 550 on the verbal or 550 in the math to get a BA.

They never do that because they know what they're doing.

So then the second part of that equation is,

well, sometimes ignorance is cheap.

You just waste four years.

Well, what if it's expensive?

What if you have $1.7 trillion in aggregate debt and the average person owes $70,000 and they're parts of the, they're in the middle class.

I pointed this out in the dying citizen.

And this debt, it plays a role in society at large.

It has delayed the age of marriage.

It's delayed the age of first child rear.

It's delayed the first home purchase.

And it hangs like a sword of Damocles over every young person.

Who's going to forgive that debt?

If they forgive that debt, should I even keep paying that debt?

Why should I pay off my 70?

And then this guy didn't pay any and he's going to get amnesty in five years.

But if I wait five years, I feel like I can't take it any longer.

So it's a horrible situation brought about by this transference of moral hazards.

So the university, and why are they lowering tuition?

It's because they raised tuition higher than the rate of inflation.

And why did they do that?

Because the student who defaulted was backed up by the federal government, and the universities knew that.

So they raised their room and board and tuition higher than the rate of inflation.

And they gave a 25-minute second rah-rah speech rather than a 10-minute heart-to-heart talk with you know a used car salesman check the box if you come to my university if you take a federal loan this is the interest this is the real approximated money you're going to spend each year to service the debt this is your major this is the likely salary you're going to get when you graduate given that salary this is how much dollars of your you're going that kind of stuff truth in lending they don't do that and they don't do it because it goes back to my initial point.

They think they're exalted and they're they're so up in the clouds that no one would ever question if they're grifters.

And they are.

And so they've destroyed almost a whole generation of encumbered youth.

And so all of these stories reflect that.

And so a lot of people are saying, you know what?

This COVID stuff and the Zoom reaction was the scab.

And it tore off that little veneer.

And underneath there, my God, it's a rotten place.

So these kids were being charged full tuition, room and board, and then suddenly the university says, no, no, you go home, COVID.

So they started zooming and they thought, wow, I'm paying $70,000 a year to Zoom.

I just went on the PragerU, I went on YouTube, and I found a lecture that's 10 times better, 10 times better than what I was paying all this money for.

And I kind of like natural inquiry and I'm going to just pick and choose on the internet.

It's free and the quality is usually better than what I get at university.

And then somebody said, the university says, but you don't have a cattle brand, you don't have a Stanford BA, you don't have a,

and you think, well, except in some cases, if you want to go to pressure, I don't see your BA worth that much anymore.

I'm sorry, because I might want to be a master,

I don't know, carpenter.

I might make a plumber, and I can see that they are very valuable and they're short people, and I can do that.

And so you show me which majors in a cost to benefit analysis pay off.

And so then they say, oh, how dare you talk about money?

We're not here in the university about money.

And then you look at their budgets and you see what is the actual ratio of tax-free income from their endowments.

or from their tuition that is devoted to classroom instruction rather than esoteric pie in the sky silly research or diversity equity equity inclusion czars or in local parentis counselors.

It's very small, getting smaller every year.

So that's the problem of higher education.

And it's tragic because all of us that are above the age of 60 were told in the 50s and 60s that that was the

trajectory for upward mobility.

Go to college, major in something, get hired by the government or get hired by a corporation, learn about it, read the great books.

I think I mentioned another podcast.

You know, we lived out in the country in this farm, and we with these salesmen.

Remember them?

Hello, Mr.

Hansen.

I'm here to sell you the World Book Encyclopedia.

pedia.

If you but buy this, your children will be enlightened and self-improved and they'll know things.

Okay, how much is it?

Well, it's nine dollars a month for the next eight years.

Okay, the next guy, but the Encyclopedia Botanica is much more rigorous as

they evolve beyond the world book.

You need this research.

Okay, fine.

And then the next person, well, the University of Chicago has the great books, and these are

the jewel in the crown of this.

And then I remember my parents going to something to great book societies, Jack, at night.

continuing education.

You may have degrees from Stanford or whatever, but you have to read the great books every Sunday night with other interested parties.

And these were working people.

And they did that.

That was all the dream of what the university is going going to do.

And it did.

It did.

The GI Bill, all of that was great.

And that's what's tragic about it.

They took that wonderful legacy and that confidence in the university.

They started in the late 60s and they politicized it and weaponized it.

They destroyed standards.

They told professors: you've got tenure for life if you don't show up for an office hour, if you skip a class, if you go off topic and rant about your unappreciated genius in your novel that should have been a bestseller to a bunch of captive audiences.

That's okay.

And that's where we are.

Victor, it sort of

addresses the very end of the piece on mochism that we were just discussing.

And that was.

You said it was created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.

It is.

I would go.

I would come home after teaching, you know, I taught eight classes a year for a semester.

And I'd say to my wife and kids, I got to take a shower.

I'm filthy dirty.

And they'd say, why?

You were not out out in the tractor.

I said, yeah, but this is what I did today.

This guy called me from the athletic department and said, don't give Charles Brown a D or he's going to be off the football team.

And you're on a list already of people who shouldn't take your class.

Or I was told, you know, when you have this search, you're not represented proportionally or foreign language and classical language departments.

So these are the people on this list that you're going to hire.

You're going to hire somebody by race.

I said, okay.

And then I would go in and somebody would say to me, I want you to serve on a committee because Professor X said something in class and we're investigating them.

What did he say?

Something that, and I always would say, did he say something about abortion or did he say something about religion?

Because it was usually that.

If he said some four-letter word, that was okay, no problem.

And then I was told, well, this student right here has accused that professor off campus of having a sexual relationship.

And I say, what do you want?

Well, would you serve on the sexual harassment committee?

And as I was looking around my department or

the faculty senate, I'd go, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 20, 20, 50.

All of the professors who were married to former graduate students.

You know what I mean?

And they're going to work if you can get it.

Yeah.

And they were going to sit on judgment of all these other people.

And then I would have the philosophy department come over and say, I'm outraged.

We're really white, Victor.

So if you're going to be on this ancient philosophy search, we're looking for a person of color.

I say, okay, fine, but Why don't you just step down?

You've been here 35 years.

You were hired without a PhD.

You were mediocre.

You never published a damn article.

You were a terrible teacher.

Just step down right now.

Well, I can't step down.

I'm working on that patio behind my home.

I'm putting in a pool.

That kind of, I mean, I'm literally talking about what happened.

Yeah.

So I lost respect for the institution.

Well, Victor, we've got just two minutes left and I've got to say a thing or two.

And actually, you weren't ranting, were you?

I was ranting.

I got it.

Somebody wrote me, I mean, I read all of our comments, Jack.

I'm going to read this one, right?

But

I have to have historical data and credibility.

So I do that.

And then I get, my mind is transferred back to those days and listening to those conversations and all the terrible things they did to people.

And it gets me angry and I start ranting like a nut.

Well, according to Kamachka 62, who left this

comment on iTunes, and we thank all that do, as Victor just said, we read them all and we thank everyone who leaves a rating.

The ratings are off the charts.

It's titled, Don't Stop Ranting with five exclamation points.

Victor always apologizes for going off on tangents.

No need to apologize.

Five exclamation points.

It's terrific to hear the passion and genuineness of his opinions.

Three exclamation points.

Neither Sammy nor Jack can rein in that Bronco.

Five exclamation points.

On another note.

Sammy can.

She's a little crueler than you are.

Well, okay.

She says, can I ask, can I ask you a question?

Okay, that means I'm going to ask you a question.

Yeah, well, at least she's being polite.

Finally, I'm kidding.

I I know.

Finally, Kamachka writes, on another note, I just finished the Hillsdale College course lecture series on the dying citizen, really enjoyed it, and even got a 94 on the final exam.

Kamachka, 62, thank you.

That's higher than I would have got.

You great heart, harshly.

To all folks who've listened, thank you.

Visit civilthoughts.com.

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Subscribe.

As I've said before, always a tremendous amount of original content written by Victor that you can only read there.

Victor, I hope by the time this is playing, maybe things magical have happened in the world and the world will have settled down like Lauramus.

Thank you, Victor, for your sharing your wisdom.

Thanks, folks, for listening.

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

Bye-bye.

Thank you, everybody.