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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show that we are recording on Friday, January 21st, 2022.

I'm Jack Fowler.

The host, the namesake, is Victor Davis Hanson, and he's the Martin N.

Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He's also the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor's a best-selling author.

Many books.

His latest is The Dying Citizen.

We'll talk more about that, about his website, victorhanson.com.

We've got a lot to talk about today.

I guess the first issue of Victor will be things educational.

We'll talk about Jordan Peterson and the ways you think universities in America should be treated.

And we'll get to that right after this important message.

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

Again, I'm Jack Fowler.

I'm the director of the Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic.

Visit it, centerforcivilsociety.com.

Victor, some interesting stuff happening this week, academic related.

One is a piece you've written called Treat the University as it is now, not as it once was.

And I'd like to get to that after we talk about the news that broke this week, broken by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic, who announced and wrote a significant piece in the National Post, Canada's kind of not lefty paper, that he had quit the University of Toronto, where he's been teaching for years, where he was a tenured professor, and he left because of the ideology of DAI, D-I-E, diversity, inclusion, equity, and for a number of reasons.

Among them, that if you were a student studying under Jordan Peterson, there was no way in hell that you were going to get a job.

If you wanted to become an academic yourself or in, let's say, an elite non-academic institution, you had the cooties on you.

victor i think this is an important and telling thing that happened uh i'm assuming i don't know this that that you may know jordan peterson a little bit anyway what thoughts do you have about this move that he took and anything about jordan peterson himself well you know it's it's typical of the the current university so you take a guy like jordan peterson and he

he fills in all the boxes he was a Canadian, he was educated at, you know, the top universities, McGill, he taught at Harvard.

He's now a professor or was of psychology at the flagship university in Toronto.

And

then you look at, was he productive?

Did he fulfill the university's requirement for publication?

And he didn't publish a lot of scholarly books, but he's written a couple of them and he wrote a lot of peer-reviewed articles about substances.

I think his specialty, actually, if I remember right, was alcohol and its effect on psychological impairment and the psychology of interacting with people that have been intoxicated.

But it was a legitimate research.

What I'm telling you is that by any measure, he was a tenured full professor with graduate responsibilities.

And then he, what did he do wrong?

When this pronoun mania came in and this Orwellian linguistic, he just politely said, I'm going to continue to follow the rules of English, grammar, and syntax and normative references that have been here forever.

They were never challenged before.

They're not sexist, racist, the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion gamut stuff.

And they went berserk.

But that wouldn't have just doomed him, Jack, because a lot of people do that and they're ostracized.

But then he did another mortal CERN when he had these 12 rules.

And so he used his psychological training and his experience with the university.

And he said, this is a blueprint of how to be successful.

And it was things like, you know, make your bed and respect tradition.

And it was an international bestseller.

And then he compounded that felony by being widely admired and almost an icon of a counter-youth movement.

And he was more famous than anybody at the University of Toronto.

And that's a mortal sin.

And so a lot of this was their typical academic envy of him.

But the other was that he was too powerful, too wealthy, too

controversial.

They just didn't want him there.

So they had to cook up reasons to make his life unbearable.

And they did.

And one of the ways you do that in academia is that when you have a graduate course, it's happened to me before, nobody shows up because the other faculty tell people not to take that course.

Or if you're training graduate students, you're telling somebody 21, we want to sacrifice five years of your life minimum to get a PhD,

and then i'm your i'm your guardian and mentor i will help you using a network get a job they're not going to get a job so he was in the unenviable position of telling somebody study psychology

but when you graduate i'm toxic anybody who studies under me in this close-knit field is dead so he just didn't want to do it and he was probably in a period of, you know, I mean, he's not a multi-multi-millionaire, but he's well off and he can afford to do it.

So he did it.

And, you know, this all makes me very sad.

I know that that sounds kind of corny, but I grew up on a farm where I'm speaking today, and everybody loved the university.

My grandfather used to have a bookshelf.

I still have them.

They're called University of California Agricultural Reports.

And they were the UC Davis early campus would

They would tell you how much water a Thompson seedless vine needed.

My grandfather never went to college, but he was very scholarly.

And, you know, they had Latin in high school, and he would take them very seriously.

And he would say, these are principles of viticulture.

And when I would help him, he'd say, Victor, now, you know, this is the red spider mite.

And the people up there at the UC campus, they know what they're doing.

And then he inculcated his three daughters.

I mean, they went to Stanford and they got graduate undergrad.

And that was just the promise that this was a disinterested, rational place.

And it offered, and my father was very different.

He played football at the University of Pacific, but it was an upward mobility to get out of impoverished.

He was very impoverished, and he got out of that.

So I grew up with the idea that the university is the enlightenment and it's great.

And they're kind of cookie and oddballs, and they don't appreciate people that farm.

But nevertheless, it's a promise of America.

And we had the great books.

Remember those, the University of Chicago series of great books?

And we had the Harvard Classics.

Yes, Harvard Classics.

We had the great books, and we had the World Book, and they were all there.

And every year, the World Book would send us things in the mail, little paste updates, and we would paste them in the entries.

But the point was, America, Middle America was

in love with the idea of continuing education and self-improvement.

And that was what they looked toward the university.

And then in the 60s,

you know, it became, it expanded because of the population, baby boom, and they started adding things into the curriculum that had not been there, mostly in the social sciences, but also to be fair in the vocational.

And they became corporate life, and they created a professional EDD.

And the whole thing was politicized with the Vietnam War and the draft.

And ever since.

it was on a trajectory where we are to end where we are now.

And where we are now is they're dishonest, they're sources of propaganda.

Every bad idea, Jack, starts in the university.

In the inflationary idea, you print money, modern monetary theory, the idea that you can have good racist ideas to stop or to counteract the bad racism of the past, university.

The idea that you're a DA in LA or San Francisco and the law is a construct that favors wealthy people, therefore, you should not critical legal theory.

I could go on, but they start in the faculty lounge and the life span from

this awful theoretical worm into its chrysalis stage to its mainstream society butterfly that infects it is about three years,

four years.

So they're indoctrinating a whole group of students.

The students are $1.7 trillion in debt.

The university transfers the moral hazard of being in debt to the federal government.

They don't guarantee the student will have any job upon graduation commiserate with the amount of money they owe.

And

they're anti-enlightenment, they're racist,

they're anti-free speech, they're anti-Christian, just name it.

And they get away with it.

So he's just saying, I don't want it anymore.

And it's kind of like the walk away attitude, just walk away.

And I think a lot of people, this Zoom thing has been the worst thing in the world for these universities because they had to keep, they were broke, a lot of them, and they had to keep charging for services.

But the students never got the room and board.

They never got the full college experience.

And then people, they kept issuing degrees.

And somebody, you know, I talked to a couple of students at Stanford and it was like, well,

they told us that the Zoom alternate was just as good.

And

we,

you know, we paid the same amount of tuition and it's not as good, but it doesn't really matter because we didn't learn anything in class anyway.

And all we wanted was the Stanford certificate, the cattle brand.

And most countries, most universities, except for the Ivy League, can't sell that cattle brand entree into the professional classes.

So I think

they've really reached a point where a lot of people are going to say, you can be a very well-compensated electrician or engineer.

You don't really have to go to that university or go to one that's not corrupt.

And so he, I think it was a smart idea he did.

I think anybody who's been to the university feels severely disappointed.

Gosh, I grew up on a farm.

I had to do farm work all year and I would lived in a little town.

I thought, man, if I can get away to a university, I'll have a class with somebody whose dad isn't the teacher.

Or I'll be able to have, go to the principal's office and the guy won't be mad at my parents because they bought a car from him or something.

You know what I mean?

mean and

it was just that small town pressure and insularity and then i got to the university and all the values i've been brought up with were antithetical to these new values that they were espousing but they weren't values they were anarchy drugs in the dorm just sex on demand by anybody at any time no bathing no deodorant uc santa cruz you know 1971 and then i got to graduate school and it was like every trait that i my parents had raised me that were important, be outspoken for a principal, be courageous, think about being a tragic hero rather than an opportunist.

All that stuff was antithetical to succeeding in academia where people were, you know, kiss asses, they were operators, they were networkers, they're mediocre, excel.

By everyone, you mean.

Not only the administration, you mean your fellow faculty.

Yeah, a faculty.

And then there was all this little petty corruption, you know, that some

guy would take a test and you do well, but they didn't like him.

They hypergraded.

I mean, that's intrinsic in every discipline, but it was especially hard for academics because they pose as the inheritors of Socrates,

or they were, you know, they were students of Burke and Locke or et cetera, et cetera.

And they weren't.

They were just careerists.

Well, let me can I ask based back on don't ask that.

Don't say, can I ask?

You say it.

Damn it.

I'm I'm asking you a question well don't say you're starting to treat me like you treat Sammy Wink

I'm gonna get another letter yeah well Victor again let me just give the name of this piece for folks who want it Jordan Peterson why I am no longer a tenured professor at the University of Toronto and that was published on January 19th in the National Post now Victor he talks about his craven colleague so I'm just you know I know we've talked at length about your experience as a teacher and it's been a while I know you teach at Hillsdale, but it's been a while since you had a full course load.

You were teaching at UCal.

But if you can quantify it, and then we'll go on to the piece you've written about universities yourself.

How much time towards the end were you spending, your psychological capital, dedicated to dealing, not dealing with teaching the students, which was your job, but having to deal with the jackasses down the hall that had offices who were conspiring to bust your chops in some way shape?

I started started off as an idealistic populace at Cal State Fresno in 1984, and my idea was to build a classical language program

and correlate it with ancient history, art, archaeology, classical literature, and bring in the best people that would come to Cal State Fresno.

Bruce Thornton was one of them.

We had other really good people, and then offer a classical education to mostly the children of the Oklahoma arrival from Tulare, Bakersfield, or mostly Mexican-American or Southeast Asian.

And we had to teach four to five classes because the administration didn't support it at first.

And I mean, you know, 40 students times five, 200 students, no TAs, no graders.

So I would just, I have pictures of my daughter, you know, just you know, playing checkers with me while I have a stack of blue books about eight feet tall.

That was what I did.

And I didn't mind that.

But then the more I got into the university and I was, you know, finally after being part-time, I was full-time, then tenured, and then, you know, full professor.

And then I started to notice that I was on all these faculty committees.

And it got, you know, I was on the honors program.

A private donor gave all the money he could and said, I'm going to, I'm going to stop the brain drain from the valley.

You're all going to have a classical education, Western Civ, tough core classes.

Victor, you'll be one of the first faculty members.

And so I was.

And then all of a sudden it was, well, why does he get to be in there when my poetics of gender identity has been neglected?

And I'd like to have a course

in the gender identity of the West.

And then you would listen to him.

And then he'd say, and you're racist and sexist because I did.

And then that stuff just started to overwhelm everybody.

So then they would, the dean would say, you know, in one case, you know, I was talking to a colleague our in my office about what

why i was not going to vote for tenure for someone and someone walked by and saw that faculty member in my office and claimed that she could hear through two doors that i had already said that she wasn't she couldn't and then that that went out to he said insensitive things about me i bet i bet So I had to go through the dean.

He said, did you say insensitive things about a non-identified person in your privacy of your own office?

No.

Could I ask you what I was supposed to say?

Did you prejudge your tenure decision?

And this is from a dean who would call me up and say, hey, Victor, damn it, I need one more vote.

I want you to fire that SOB,

you know, without any evidence.

So I'd say, and I was always,

and it just got to be overwhelming finally, or I'd get a call from the athletic advisor, hey, Victor.

Joe Blow is in your class.

Now, he's the first person to go to college.

And I don't know why he took your class.

We have a list of people they're not supposed to take.

And they're not supposed to take your class, but the guy screwed up and he didn't drop it in time.

And he can't go to class.

And he's getting an F.

And if you give him an F, it's his third F and he's disqualified from the football team.

So here's what you're going to do.

And I'd say no.

And then, you know, if you say no, we're going to put you in a book.

I said, good, that's what I want.

I want to be in the blacklist.

And so it was that way.

Finally, it got to be all the time.

And then it was politicized.

The Iraq war came and a guy down the hall, you know, he would come in in this huge Land Rover, you know, like five miles the gallon.

It looked like it could go anywhere.

It looked like it could drive on the surface of the moon.

But the guy never went anywhere but his little suburban two-mile commute.

But then on his,

you know, then on his wall, it would say, no blood for oil.

I thought.

So I just said to him once, we're fighting that whole damn Iraq war to fill up your gas tank.

It's so big.

And they had no sense of humor.

Once

C-SPAN wanted to do one of those in-depths, so they said they would come to my office.

And they came and they set up everything.

They had like one wire outside the door plugged in because they needed a lot of circuits.

So it was plugged into the corridor door where all the offices.

And then the next thing I knew.

The next thing I knew,

two professors across the hallway came in and they told me that I was disrupting things, and they had officially complained and they wanted C-SPAN out.

And then they called security, and then C-SPAN started to go out.

As they walked out, the guy went up and goes, I think if you're going to be here, you could really talk to me about my English class about gender and race.

I'm willing to enter it.

And that was just constant all the time.

So, then what I'm getting at is that all those childhood dreams of all these, the Western experience in the university is just shattered.

And I didn't come across this check suddenly.

It was 21 years at Cal State.

It was being a visiting professor at four different institutions.

It was being in the history department for a year as a visitor at the Naval Academy, which is the most left-wing history department I ever participated in.

It was being a visiting professor at Stanford University for a year in the classics department.

It was all the same.

The only differences I could see is that Hillsdale College was different.

Right.

Well, you know, Victor, it's interesting because we still have this idea, I think, in 2021 of how the fumes carry on for decades.

It's beyond me, but that the university is something like it was in, I don't know, 1947 or 48.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And you've written this.

terrific piece on victorhanson.com and it's called treat the university as it is now

not as it once was.

My one little spiel, which I've made before, is like how many conservatives send humongous checks to these colleges

because of this mindset of what it was, not what it is.

And of course, this money will be used to turn their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren into communists.

But anyway, Victor, I think it's a point that bears repeating frequently, and you've written about it wonderfully.

So, what is the essence of how should we treat a university as it is now?

You should treat it as it deserves to be treated.

You just say to the university, you have nothing to do with minor exception.

I mean, I didn't go to Hillsdale for the last 17 years for a month with the idea that I was going to prejudge it.

My perceptions are being there and having absolute free speech and seeing people who disagreed with the Hillsdale who were liberal, and there were some that were treated with respect and dignity.

That's what it was.

And then the people were wonderful teachers and they cared about students.

I mean, there's a guy there in the history department, Tom Connor.

That guy, if you needed him to go to a football rally, if you needed him to be an advisor for a student group, if you needed to come drive in at night to chaperone something, if you wanted his grades on time, he did everything by the book.

And that's what I had remembered.

So when I got there, I thought, wow, these guys are the people that my parents said that saved their lives in colleges in the 1940s.

And so

what we could do, Jack, is there's just some things we could do.

We should tell alumni, we could have, I really do think that our billionaire class, if they're conservative, could at least say, we're going to rate a university on to what degree donor intent.

is followed and then that could guide alumni not to give money to these places.

It's like giving heroin to an addict.

We could also have an exit exam.

Just tell people: when you graduate, it's not going to be tough, but everybody's going to have to take a little standard SAT-like test.

We, until this year, we used to always require them.

If you can require them to get in, why not require them to get a BA?

And I think you would see the scores probably would go down after having that education.

We could say to people, you don't need this EDD, let's eliminate the school of education.

If you want to go teach in high school, you've got a choice.

You can either get in a master's degree or you can get a credential, but you don't have to.

You can get a master's and that one year will be so much more valuable.

And we would get such, we'd get a whole different type of person that loved learning to teach.

And we should really divorce from the federal government on student loans and just say, you know what, we're not going to subsidize your tuition rate hikes higher than the rate of inflation.

And if you want to, if somebody's poor and they need a loan, then you back it.

And if you back it, then you might tell Professor X that misses every Friday that he's that class cost 250 bucks per student that they're paying for.

You know, I used to buy used cars a lot and I had no money.

And you should see what I had to read.

They would say, Mr.

Hansen, do you realize now we have to tell you that this is the interest rate?

This is how much an interest you're going to pay.

These are your assets you put up.

Why don't they do that for 18-year-olds?

This is what you're going to pay.

This is what the interest.

This is what the accumulative cost is.

This is what the breakdown per class will be, these are the various majors and the average salaries you will get if you major in this and you stay in this field.

And this is what each class costs.

And we'll say, no, no,

we're utopian Socratic philosophers in the sky.

No, you're not.

No, you're not.

You've got a system that's rigged that puts $1.7 trillion on debt on teenagers.

I lost all that idealism and I wish I could get it back because it was a wonderful feeling.

And one last thing, Jack, one of the most, I almost would cry sometimes.

I get so sad because Cal State Fresno had about a hundred mile circumference.

It was the only major university between Bakersfield and Sacramento and the Nevada border and the coast

before UC Merced, and it's better than UC Mercedes.

Had a wonderful library, over a million volumes.

But my point is, you would get all these people, you know, the Navy pilot from Lemour Naval Air Base that wanted to take a course.

You'd get the housewife, you'd get the secretary, you'd get the corporate guy who's retired, and they would all come and they all worship faculty, the idea of education.

So they'd all use very fossilized.

Hello, Dr.

Smith.

Could I make an appointment at your office hours?

My name is.

you know, Elizabeth Jones.

And for many years, I ran a real estate agency and I sold it and I did pretty well.

And I have some time and I would like to read read Shakespeare.

So is there a way I could just come in on the returning student?

And they did and they were treated so often so rudely.

Yeah, well, you know, I'll be there.

And then they knock on your door and say, Professor X next to you hasn't come for his office hours.

And I've been waiting here for an hour.

I said, he's never going to come.

He's home.

Or I would be, they would skip classes.

They had no code of professionalism.

And I'm using that as a stereotype, but it was true.

It was true.

This is something from 20, 25 years ago, right?

Yeah.

Well, it started.

And then every once in a while, some naive administrator would say, we're going to shape up.

You know, he called me up and he said, you have a colleague that has never made a syllabus.

He won't return it.

He likes you.

Would you go down the hallway and tell him?

So I went down to the student who was in my Latin class.

He's a professor, but he was taking Latin from me.

We were reading Catullus.

And I said, you've never had a syllabus.

How can you do that?

Well, I just come in and talk, you know, I leave.

And then I just give them the grade they want.

I said, what if you took your car to a mechanic?

And he just said,

I just put on any wheel, any carburetor, any fuel injection I want, and I just let them go out.

So you have no sense of honor or duty.

And so that's what got me about it.

Now that has been force multiplied by the race, class, gender, equity.

all that stuff.

And it really, everybody should remember, I think you in the audience know that, when you superimpose a totalitarian systematic ideology and you destroy merit, and that can be Jacobinism in the French Revolution or Bolshevism in Russia, or it can be, you know, it can be puritanical

sort sex in parts of colonial America.

Whatever it is, Once that's superimposed, you've destroyed all initiative, all merit, all elements of fair and unbiased calibration.

And it just, it perverts, it pollutes, it destroys.

So with this diversity, equity, inclusion, I mean, I don't know if our listeners know it, but we have this idea of equity grading now.

And so it means that you can be a racist for marking off a paper that's turned in late.

If you choose to take role, and community colleges and state colleges usually do,

and

you're taking role and somebody's late, then you cannot take off for tardiness.

Or

if you are grading papers and you find great ideas, but they're so poorly formed or expressed, you can't take off for grammar or syntax or composition defects.

So it's

attacks on culture.

It's like to be in the Soviet Union.

And everybody knows, everybody, I keep saying that, but everybody knows.

That's what's really scary about the university.

It's kind of like Eastern Europe in the last ends the penult stages of communism when everybody knew you had to mouth these slogans and no one

no one believed them anymore they believed they were just a bunch of apparats that were on the black sea hanging out with the russian

overseers even the russians didn't believe it and that's what the university is there's so much cynicism now right and they know that if you are going to get a roads scholarship if you're at harvard they know if you're going to be a national

endowment for the humanities or Guggenheim Fellow.

They know that if you're going to be the star or something of this, you're going to have to take, it's not going to be a loyalty oath like the McCarthy period, but it's going to be worse.

It's going to be a diversity, equity, and inclusion statement.

And that's

required for applicants in many places.

Right.

Plus proof that they created a nonprofit to do some other kind of extraneous BS.

But anyway, Victor, this piece was called treat the university as it is now not as it once was

only way listeners can read this is by subscribing to victorhanson.com little plug here five bucks a month fifty dollars a year and there are many pieces a week and many in a month of the kind of exclusive content so it's well well worth the very minimal price victor one last education thing and and quick and we're going to move on to one of your favorite favorite people in American politics.

I saw some ads.

I haven't seen the actual show, but I've seen some ads of Fox that you sat with Pete Hegseth for this Fox Nation special report about education.

Is there anything you want to say about that?

I was really startled that Pete was going to run a special Fox Nation.

It was so needed.

and yet it would be so rare for somebody to see that need and to act on it about the value of classical education and traditional education and parochial education and charter school education.

So he flew out with his team out to the farm here and he stayed a whole day.

It was kind of cold.

We were outside and he interviewed me.

We have airplanes and spray rigs and tractors, kind of noisy, but he's a wonderful host.

And he's a strong advocate for the idea that a young person, very young in their K through 12 experience, if they take English grammar and syntax, they get the elements of history, philosophy, foreign languages, they learn how to diagram sentences, they work on expanding their vocabulary, then that is the,

that's almost like your tool chest.

That gives you the tools then to read Dickens or Shakespeare or Homer or Virgil.

And then as you progress through that, that curses, then you learn about what does it mean and the content and how to express your ideas.

And it was a wonderful two hours that he's, we did for two hours.

And I, you know, the way it goes, it'll probably be five or six minutes condensed, but it was an old-fashioned defense of liberal arts, classical education, and kind of a lamentation that we have so many people, not just that haven't gone to college, or maybe more that have gone to college, that cannot write, can't spell, don't know what a verb is, don't know what Pearl Harbor is,

don't know any of that.

And,

you know, I just lay awake at some nights and I keep racking my brain because I have an emphasis, maybe an overemphasis in the period 500 BC to 1000 AD and say, what was it like in 475 in Rome, say in North Africa, or if you were Augustine and Hippio Regius?

Or what was it like in the 15th century, early 15th century, 30 years before before the fall of Constantinople, if you lived in Thrace and the Byzantine system was falling apart before your eyes?

Or what was it like, you know, if

you remember in France or Germany during the Hundred Years' War or something like that, or a 30 years' war, except all of that stuff, that period of turmoil and crisis when your institutions can no longer continue.

And

you can just feel it, the crime or inflation but especially education it's just it's just deteriorating before your eyes and then just when you get the most depressed you you'll be surprised somebody will write you or call you or you'll see it on a campus or at the store and they'll ask you a question

that's just stunning i was on the campus the other day and somebody came by me and said Can you tell me what the difference between Xenophon's Hellenica and Anabasis is?

And I started to tell him, which I thought was a basic question.

And he said, no, no, no.

I mean, the outlook of him.

How did it change?

And I said, well, he was a member of the Anabasis.

And he was an older anti-Athenian, but especially not anti-Theban, pro-Spartan, neutral on his own city of Athens.

So that, and we were talking, I thought, where did this guy come from?

What planet did he land from?

Where is he?

Who produced him?

And he grew up on a farm in the central valley?

No, I don't know, but he was, it was,

and then just the other minute right before i came on i had a installer who works on solar panels he's never went to college he's an expert gunsmith so he came out to look at a problem in the solar system that provides you know electricity for our house and everything it's been on the blink and he was explaining this and then he got into guns and how dangerous it is and then i couldn't believe it he gave me a professorial exegesis on ballistics and feet per second and different brands.

And I mean, I thought, wow, I should tape this lecture.

So you find these nuggets of real wisdom, and they're outside the university a lot.

And you really honor that because you feel that they're historically, they're one with all these people that were in fortified little compounds out in North Africa as the vandals were lapping up at their gates.

And that's the way I feel.

I just don't, I think we lost something.

I'll say a final thing because I'm getting kind of windy, but when I was 10, Jack, in the 1963, they had this idea.

It was called the tripartite master plan of California education.

It was brilliant.

I think the guy's name was Glenn Dumpke that really formalized it in the late 60s.

Clark Kerr at UC.

It was the idea that everybody could get free education at community schools.

They're going to build a community college, 100 of them, two years.

And if you went there, then you could transfer.

If you wanted to have a little bit more vocational training, you could go to what became 23 California state universities, and they would have great GE programs, but they would be a little bit more applicable to farming or nursing or engineering.

And then, if you wanted to get a classical liberal education or get a PhD or an MD, then you went to the nine UC campuses.

And it was just, it was just,

from 1960 to 1975, it worked so wonderfully.

And we had, that was the time of California's greatest prosperity.

We had wonderful highways.

We had the California Water Project.

We had sensible people.

And then it just blew up.

Self-inflicted, right?

Yeah, it just blew up.

It was called elitist.

And we have over 11 million people came into the state over 30 years.

And it was like, this doesn't serve the needs of this community.

And this community is marginalized.

And no, they're not marginalized.

We have a system waiting for them to acculturate them, integrate them, assimilate them, and make them wonderful U.S.

citizens.

Just let us go to it.

No, no, no.

You're endangering their cultural traditions.

You're imposing an artificial set of values.

Who are you to say that, you know, reading Shakespeare is any better than a comic book?

So that was what happened.

Well, Victor, we're going to...

combine two subjects, two of your favorite people in America.

One is named Pete Budigesh and the other is named Gavin Newsome and we'll get to them right after this message.

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

So Victor, you've talked about automobiles already in this podcast.

Now let's talk about planes and trains.

So on the train front, you and I actually talked about this issue of the madness of the Los Angeles trains getting ransacked regularly.

This was going on for quite a while.

For whatever reason, the issue has percolated up again.

And now,

all of a sudden, Gavin Newsom, there was a Daily Mail piece today.

He's down on the tracks helping clean up the mess.

But this isn't about litter.

He always does that.

No, yeah.

I think he was kind of dressed appropriately for what he was doing.

But this isn't about litter.

This is about, as you were talking, I think it was on this podcast or a previous podcast, essentially racketeering that's going on.

That's a question of law enforcement.

is occurring in a vacuum of our government prosecuting these thieves who are probably creating not only thievery in Los Angeles, but the material that was supposed to go, the medicine that you were waiting for in Iowa, the important device you were waiting for in Montana that was being shipped there that was stolen.

And this was allowed to happen recklessly.

So we have a train situation permitted by California leadership, political leadership.

That's the train.

So on the plane side, Pete Boudigez, Secretary of Transportation and advocate of chest feeding, has allowed this 5G issue that's percolated in the last week.

5G near airports is going to interfere with plane travel.

Well, this was, look, this was not on my radar screen.

I didn't know about it, but sure as hell, the Secretary of Transportation should have known about it.

And our government was not doing anything.

So you, a man who has been tormented by air travel, and I think even prior to there being COVID issues, here we have another way of our government failing a responsibility that is going to complicate the lives of American and American businesses.

And plane travel is central to many people's lives.

So, Victor, Pete Boudigej, asleep at the switch, Gavin Newsome, day late and a dollar short on trains.

Any thoughts?

Yeah, I'm trying to put this all together, and I think there is some common strains to these questions.

And one of them is that our elites make these decisions, and they have absolutely no worries about the effects on people that have to live out their consequences of their ideologies.

So when Gavin Newsom says he's going to spend this, all this money on illegal alien health care or make a more progressive capitalism or let people out of prison, what he's basically saying is, I'm not going to spend very much time on old-fashioned stuff like making sure the aqueduct doesn't leak or getting another reservoir or making sure you don't get killed near Tulare on a two-lane section of the 99, etc.

In that context, I don't really care about the train.

There's a lot of trash.

So what I'm going to do is, I think these guys go to somewhere like Wilkes-Bashford in San Francisco, their clothing, their clothier, and they say, can you get me a photo op He-Man outdoor outfit?

So he usually gets some kind of sleeveless thing and big boots with pockets.

And he goes out.

Like, remember the fires?

He was always out there picking up things that were discarded, or when there's homeless, he kind of gets into the outfit and he does this.

Well, he thought, well, this is, I'm just going to go down there and show that I care.

He doesn't care.

As I said, those packages are not just trash.

There's somebody waiting by the window and saying, you know, I had $32, so I bought this toy for my kid, and where is it?

Or somebody else, I took a COVID test, I sent it in.

Where is it?

And it's out there on the ground.

Because if he cared, he would call in that SOB district attorney, Gascon,

and he said, listen, you have created a disgust for the law and disrespect and loss of deterrence for legal authority.

Your sheriff's department, your police department is in revolt.

And one of the symptoms is these brilliant criminals in a cost of benefit analysis are stealing these trains blind as they come through Los Angeles to the point where they're not going to come through anymore.

And damn it, you're going to do the following or you're going to be in big trouble from the state.

He will never do that.

So he would get on this outfit and he'd do that.

Pete Buttigig, he, as I understand it, when he was a candidate, he could not make a statement, a speech, provide an answer that everybody in the audience didn't think was self-righteous, sanctimonious, preachy.

It was almost like he was a 19th century preacher on the stump.

It was always, well, you know, I did this and we have to do this and you.

And it was always, you know, the unwashed.

But then the other theme to it was always about his gender identity, being gay, or that he rode a bike and he wasn't going to contribute to climate change.

And then I thought, wow.

And then he would refer to, what has the guy ever done?

He was a failed mayor of South Bend, Indiana, which is basically the mayor of Notre Dame University.

That's all he's ever done.

And people didn't like him.

So now he's transportation.

I think he got a bicycle rack put in somewhere.

Somewhere.

Remember, he disappeared.

He disappeared right during the supply chain crisis.

So we, you know, I haven't been paid for, what, a year and a half, really, because there's no almond income.

And where are the almonds?

The almonds are sitting down there in Long Beach with everything else.

They can't be shipped or they're out to sea somewhere.

And he doesn't care about that.

I just talked to another almond farmer.

He said, I said, how did your crop go?

And he said, well,

it couldn't get out and it started to rot.

So the buyers came from India and said, we'll take it off your hands.

Because, you know, they have people who are spies.

I don't mean spies, but they just call up their purchasing agent, go down there to Long Beach, walk around, talk to some people, show more that.

And he said, I had, I unloaded them before they all rotted after a year and a half.

So my point is there were existential problems.

And he went home and then he bragged about that he and his gay partner had you know they were worried about their two children and all that and i'm thinking well what the blank do you think that millions of people who had to lose their jobs and go home while their kids were on zoom alone when they you know what i mean because of zoom they couldn't they couldn't be in school so they they had to quit their jobs and watch them or what do you think single moms do all the time but this self-importance is just and so when he said you know, I thought about the air traffic problem, I thought, you've got a lot of problems, Pete.

You've got a shortage of fuels.

You've got passengers that I don't know if it's been cooped up because of COVID, but when they get on that plane, they are angry about the mask.

You've got Karens in every row that says this guy's.

10% of his right nostril was showing and I'm going to get infected.

And they start arguing.

I've seen it happen.

And then you've got so many people returning to the airlines that the connections are so tenuous and people are treated.

They're just overburdened.

And then you've got COVID and you've got mandates.

So you've got sick people, you've got people who are afraid of being sick, they're locked up in their house in paranoia, and you've got people that didn't want to get vaxxed, many of whom, because they have high antibodies, because they acquired COVID and they don't want to get more antibodies because they're afraid of another Moderna reaction.

Okay, so they're short staff.

And I've been on planes where I'm just ready to board 30, 20 minutes, and they'll say, the flight's been canceled.

We can't get one of our attendants.

She didn't show up, or he didn't come.

Or I've been, as I said so many times, board the audience.

Sorry, Mr.

Hansen, we're landing in Denver.

Sorry, we're going to San Francisco.

Sorry, we're going to have to turn around because we don't have enough fuel.

And with all that chaos, what is Pete Budicik doing?

He's adding to it.

It wasn't like 5G was invented yesterday, right?

It wasn't like there were studies that showed that there might be some disruptions in communications with 5G, and then that would require leadership to make a risk assessment.

He doesn't do anything because he's doing everything but that.

I remember when he ran for president, you remember it leaked out that he had spent most of his time hiring focus groups.

I think it was South Carolina because he was afraid that Black Americans had a negative view of openly gay white men and maybe openly gay men.

And so he ran all these focus groups and then he found out that they did.

And that in these small, and then he had a guy that there were articles that said he either didn't do that or that the results.

But the point I'm making was that that was his constituency.

And rather than address it honestly and say, look, I've got a problem or they've got a problem or we both have a problem, he was secretly trying trying to do that.

And then when he got to that state, apparently he was trying to play down his gayness in a way that he wouldn't.

And so, you know, when we heard about all of his heroic activity in Afghanistan, his heroic education,

I don't know how many weird languages he speaks, but we heard everything about any sign, but we never got a sign that he was competent or he'd been in the real world and he empathized with people who had to get on an airplane or had to couldn't take maternity leave or would have been fired if they just told their boss, I'm taking a month off.

And Gavin Newsom, there's two types of people I think the listeners, maybe they agree with me,

are really turned off by.

And one is a sanctimonious, self-righteous snob who's full of himself, Pete Buttigig.

And the other is an entitled, spoiled brat that never grew up.

and expects that he can get everything.

And he's never been around people either.

And so he play acts.

So that's Gavin Newsom.

Gavin Newsom's never done anything on his own other than was handed to him by a network of family and friends, whether it's business, financial, political.

And right when COVID came, the first question they asked him during the lockdown was, do you see any advantages that politically from the lockdown?

He said, yes, we can leverage a more progressive form of capitalism.

What does a more progressive form of capitalism mean?

Does that mean that when I inherit a bunch of millions of dollars, I'll be willing to pay 12%

because it's no skin off my teeth?

So anyway, those two people are sort of iconic or emblematic.

This country was known for just the opposite.

You know what I mean?

It was like the truck driver in New Jersey that got elected.

Or

everybody likes that type of stuff.

And they like the working class.

They like people who are down to earth.

They like people who don't prejudge.

They like people who don't predicate their behavior on somebody's degree or who their parents or how much money or whether they're a celebrity.

But those guys just represent the antithesis to that: artificial, fake, snobby,

who you know, what degree you have.

You know, I'm sounding like my dad, but you know, my dad was

my dad was this big Swedish guy, about 6'4, 210.

He flew 40 times over Tokyo or Yokohama or Cobe in a B-29 Central Fire Control.

He was on Alonzo Stagg's football team, and I think the guy must have got in 50 fights.

He was kicked out of the Marine Corps for fighting, went into the Army Air Corps, and they, to punish him, they put him on an experimental B-29 program, which almost killed him with crashes.

So anyway, his whole idea was that he had grown up in a sweet poor Swedish, and it was, he wasn't going to take crap off anybody.

And

he met somebody with pretensions.

It was really something.

And when I had students that wanted to be friends or they wanted to come home, we lived in about a 1,200-foot little farmhouse.

And they would come there and they would say something.

If he thought they were the least bit pretentious, I just shuddered what he would do.

My whole life was shuddering what he would do, but I loved him.

And that was what was great about him.

I thought, oh,

there's a professor, a professor, you know, who stopped by once and i had been up for a job went out of graduate school and this professor who was one of my former teachers had hired me for the job but then they pressured him to hire somebody else so he didn't even write me that he'd fired me before i hired me

and so my dad said well you got your phd didn't you you just go get a phd job and i said no you don't

and i said he said well you said they were going to hire you and i said yeah but they didn't so i forgot all about it.

So one day, this same professor that I didn't like very much, so I'm going through the Central Valley.

He felt bad.

I understood that.

So he dropped by

and my dad was out working.

I said, Dad, this guy's,

well, who are you?

Oh, and he shook his hands.

He goes, you're not the guy that fired my son before you hired him, did you?

Why in the hell did you do that?

He did that all the time.

And

it was like, I knew what you were getting.

My mom would just say, if we were in, if we were trying to park a car, we were in the car, and some guy cut in front of him and took our parking place and flipped the bird.

My mom would turn to me and go, Uh-oh,

the nuclear bomb.

And he would rush out.

And she said, I just hope the poor man is not armed.

I have to ask it was that every time.

Did you ever meet Amos Alonzo Stagg?

My dad played for him.

So, yeah, but I didn't know.

No,

I think I went to the

my dad graduated with his first cousin, who was really his brother, Victor Hansen, who I was named after, was killer.

And they played tight and white, split in on University of Pacific's team.

I think it was 1941.

Okay.

Because he had a great career at the University of Chicago and he was old.

He was about in his 70s.

And he came out to this little private

school in Stockton, California.

And he got this enormous name for this famous football player.

And my dad was pretty big, and Victor Hansen was even bigger.

So they gave him complete scholarships.

They were playing at Kingsburg High School.

And that changed their lives because they got a free education.

They went to University Pacific.

And

my dad had met my mom for a year at a community college before she went to Stanford.

And then

she left Stanford to go to the University of Pacific so she could be with my dad and graduate with him.

And then she went back to Stanford and got another BA and graduated and then went to law school there.

But everybody worshipped him.

My dad worshipped him.

And, you know, my poor father, and they didn't have helmets or anything

like we did.

And I think he got all of his teeth knocked out.

He had three years on that bars.

He had knee operations, shoulder operations, just neck operations.

Well, old man Hansen sounds like he was a blank kicker.

Yeah, he was, but he was very, I don't want to say that he was highly educated.

That was what was so weird.

I'll leave everybody with an audience.

One day I came home from high school and my mom was almost crying and there was a family tragedy.

I thought somebody died.

And I said, mom, what happened?

She was a lawyer, a Stanford graduate, and she was going to soon be a judge.

So she knew the law very well.

And she always protected him.

And he was a big administrator finally at this community college and he said well this teacher professor was unduly treated by the president and they're going to fire this poor man because he found some financial irregularities in the physical you know physical education department he reported it to your father and your father reported to the president and the president that was before unions and you know all the bureaucratic you could do whatever you wanted in those days maybe it was better maybe it was worse but they fired that guy so my father came in and said you fired the wrong man.

You didn't understand.

I have all the records.

He was a whistleblower.

He was kind of obnoxious, but he was a whistleblower.

And these people are absconding and doing things that are unethical.

And the guy said, if you don't get out, I'll fire you.

It's kind of nerdy.

So apparently my father grabbed him by his lapel, picked him up, put him all the way against the wall and said, you've got one second to apologize to me and him.

And he, you know, I don't know where urinated or something, but he did something that was embarrassing, started crying, kind of.

And then the next thing I knew, my dad had lost his administrative place.

And he ended up teaching English 1A with athletes.

And my mom said, oh, my God, look at what happened to him.

They've robbed him of his entire administrative career.

And I said, well, did he assault somebody?

She said, he never assaults anybody, but he does make sure that people are held accountable for their speech.

And that they wet themselves.

And he always said that, man, I will not, you know, it was one time I was watching Lonesome Dove and I think the Tommy Lean Jones character, Captain Call, said, I will not be talked that way.

And that was all my dad did.

He'd always say, I will not be talked to that way.

And then the explosives were let off.

And so I was always kind of, you know, every once in a while, because I was the kind of had.

thick glasses.

I was left-handed.

I was a bookworm.

My other two kids, brothers were much more athletic.

And anyway, every once in a while, when I got older, he'd say, you go talk to him.

Victor, you go talk to him.

And so I would go up and say, look, my dad doesn't, you know, he doesn't mean that and stuff.

But I honor, I mean, as I got older, I saw that his code was superior to my own.

He was absolutely fearless.

And he was enormously talented, but he got in all sorts of things.

And I thought that.

The more I became a so-called professor, academic, intellectual, the more I found myself wanting because I was losing some of the things that he had taught me.

And he'd always say, you know, well, if you did the job and you turned in your paper and you treated people with respect and dignity and you didn't get full of yourself, and this guy is trying to grade you, you go in and look him in the eye and put your hand right on his breastbone and say, I'm not going to be treated that way, mister.

I'd say, Dad, this is the world's expert in the Latin subjunctive and juvenile.

I mean, the guy, you can't, he doesn't understand that.

He's everybody is human.

Everybody has a common.

So he was a very smart guy.

But anyway, that's a, I'm off on a tangent.

I want to.

No, it's a great, it's a great tangent.

At some level, Victor, I do think this just makes me think you would rather be called

something you just said, would you rather be called Farmer Hansen than Professor Hansen?

I have to admit, I was a good professor.

I think I was.

I was a good teacher.

I really put my heart in.

I had a professional code that I always supported my students.

I wrote their recommendations on time.

I was on class.

I never missed one class in 21 years except one for a spinal tap.

And I was always had office, but I was not a good farmer.

Well, I mean, I tried, but it was the hardest job I've ever done.

I did it.

for over 15 years and five, six years only farming.

And when I saw people who were successful, I said, man, that guy is smart.

He's tough.

He's got an arithmetic mind, arithmetic mind.

He's tough.

I don't know how he does it, but I saw guys that had the same amount of acreage as I did, or my brothers and I did, and they made it.

Maybe they were tougher, maybe they were smarter.

I don't know.

But anybody who's farming, you know, I would get up in the morning and my brain would go, $150 fertilizer, $200 depreciation, $700 per diem insurance.

And now let's go to the plus.

Oh, plum crop lost, grapes rotting, too much mildew in the South 40.

Uh-oh, well, maybe we can make it up with the Santa Rosa plum crop and the Alberta pee.

No, they're gone too.

And it was just overwhelming.

And these other guys,

I have the highest respect for independent truck drivers, managers of 7-Elevens,

independent.

farmers, anybody disconnected with the state or the corporate world that is an independent entrepreneur, small business person.

I don't know how they do it.

Everything is against them.

The government's against them.

The culture's against them.

How those guys do it, I don't know.

Yeah, my father-in-law was an independent trucker and just a great man.

And you're right.

You have to have to buy X amount of gas in every state.

And

oh my gosh, you know.

They're really, they're some of the brightest people.

How we ever got in this country of...

honoring the guy with a BA in sociology as, you know,

Einstein and deprecating an independent truck driver or a carpenter, electrician, or a small business person that was plumbing or a cleaning outfit,

or people who clean toilets day in and day out.

I don't know, but these are the people that you should admire.

You really should.

I do.

And when I see somebody in my university, other schizophrenic existence, and they have that pretense, I have zero respect for them.

I really do.

Well, to the sociology professors who are listening and fans of the show.

At this point, it doesn't matter anymore, Jacob.

I'm a fatalist at this point.

I think the people who are sick and tired of me in the academic world are already legion.

Well, Victor, we have spent a lot of time.

Quickly, I'll ask our listeners to subscribe to the thing I write every week.

It's called Civil Thoughts.

Great little newsletter, I think.

You'll find it at civilthoughts.com.

Visit the other thing I write.

I'm the director of Center for Civil Society at American Philanthropic, Center for Civil Society.com.

Victorhansen.com.

Subscribe to our listeners who leave ratings on iTunes.

Thank you very much.

Those who leave written messages, we read them.

And here's one I'd like to read.

It's from CA 1955 Ma, and it's titled Endearing.

I subscribe to VDH's Blade of Perseus, and I choose to listen to the triad of weekly podcasts on Apple Podcasts.

I listen enthralled while I execute my indoor-outdoor responsibilities.

It may seem a small thing, but I always leave the podcast satisfied and impressed with the content and with a smile on my face as Dr.

Hansen closes with a thank you to the listeners.

His thanks seem so sincere and genuine, not perfunctory.

I listen to a great man who talks to, not at me, and is humble enough to thank me for listening.

Wonderful.

That's CA 1955 Ma.

Isn't that nice, Victor?

Yeah, very nice.

You know, I read the comments and they're so nice and I appreciate them, but they're all so instructive for me,

especially and I'm going to beat a dead horse, especially my inconsiderate treatment of poor Sammy Wink.

I'm just teasing.

I like the idea that I shouldn't interrupt Sammy, but I do read them and I deeply appreciate it.

And I think about all the people who are listening and reading, and

I hope I can offer them some solace in a very troubled time.

Well, I think you do.

And on that note, my good friend, I wish you and I wish all our listeners the best.

We'll be back soon enough with another podcast.

We thank all of our listeners for listening to the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Thanks, and we'll see you again soon.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

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