The Traditionalist: What's Wrong With the Cuomos and Other Political Puzzles

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, The Traditionalist.

We're recording on Friday, December 3rd, 2021.

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

He is also the best-selling author of The Dying Citizen and many more books, by the way.

You can find them and more things at victorhanson.com.

We'll talk about that later in the show.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

I'm the author of Civil Thoughts, the newsletter.

You can find that at civilthoughts.com.

A little more about me, also later in the show.

We're going to talk.

We got a number of things to talk about today, Victor.

We're going to begin this program talking about three choo-chas, and we're going to do that right after this message.

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Victor, hey, my friend, we're back with the show that happens to be named after you, the Victor Davis-Hansen show.

This is the traditionalist yeah victor in certain neighborhoods of the bronx every there was a chooch every neighborhood had a chooch and i want to talk about three chooches they all came from neighborhoods in new york city all pisons like myself you're talking a foreign language to me from a california farmer i have no idea what you're talking about

translate into american so this is kind of a bronx italian aspect to this a chooch is a chooch uh that's about the best i can describe it as but let's talk about three of them.

The first one is a guy named Anthony Fauci.

I think you're familiar with.

Go ahead.

So, Victor, I'm going to read here quickly and then get your thoughts about

Fauci.

There's a woman named Kat Rosenfield, who writes for Unheard UNHERD, great website.

And she wrote about this

incident from earlier in the week.

Here, I'll read this quickly.

Given that half the nation wants to canonize him as the patron saint of public health, it it was probably inevitable that Fauci would ultimately be unable to resist buying into his own hype, but it was still remarkable to witness.

In a recent interview with Face the Nation, Fauci explained why the criticism he's weathered from politicians like Senator Ted Cruz is not just distasteful, but dangerous.

Quote, they're really criticizing science because I represent science, he said.

That's dangerous.

To me, that's more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at at me.

I'm not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be around here forever.

End quote.

This is the last line here.

For some, this statement was nothing more or less than a terrifying profession of absolute power.

La science semoi.

Victor, would you reflect on this latest Fauci escapade?

And if you wouldn't mind,

since you are classical scholar, maybe give us a little perspective.

I wonder if what some of the Greek philosophers might think of the hubris of Dr.

Fauci.

Before I do, I would recommend that everybody buy Scott Atlas's book.

As it happened, as happened to me, of course, it's out of stock, but don't let that fool you.

I mean, it's just coming out and they put it out of stock as they did with mine.

But that's a whole other story.

But what I'm,

he details what Fauci was about in these meetings over the four and a half months that he was there.

And it's pretty damning.

But my own take on it is that he combined, when Bill Biden, you remember, inadvertently the other day, said that he was maybe president, and that Biden, you know, Biden said that, he's actually a monarch.

He has the power to stop rental agreements.

He has the power to deprive people of their First Amendment rights.

He is a legislator, an executive, and a judicial power all in one.

And, you know, the thing about it is, forget that he flipped on the mask and flipped on the herd immunity and flipped on the mandates and flipped on the vaccinations.

But that guy is just, as a scientist, he's just utterly incapable of giving us an honest scientific appraisal of the likelihood where this virus started in the Wuhan Virology Level 4 lab as a gain of function human engineered virus of which he had some role, maybe minor, in channeling $600,000 to.

He's incapable, Jack, of even saying that, even when he's testifying under oath, even when the science is there.

He's also incapable of just being disinterested.

He can't just say

Florida has a model and Texas have a model.

They take maybe a higher initial infection rate and then they open the economy up.

They guard the elderly, they push vaccinations, but they do not shut down the economy because they're worried that a lot of collateral damage will be greater than the virus itself.

California and New York have a different approach.

Maybe California has a slightly smaller death per

million ratio.

Maybe it has a higher infection rate, but we know New York is comparable or exceeds Florida.

And they incurred, as we know, a lot of economic damage.

I can attest from being in Menlo Park all day yesterday and seeing it shut down and everybody wearing a mask outside

and being at Stanford University where everybody wears a mask inside and even outside I saw people wearing them and

the whole area is looks like it's deserted still

but he's incapable of talking about the losses from that policy of his.

He's incapable

then of saying, A,

take your pick on the models.

I'm here to offer scientific pros and cons on either one.

B,

be careful about missed surgeries, missed surgical procedures, missed testing, spousal abuse, alcoholism.

We got to be very careful about that because that death toll and malaise and injury could be higher than the COVID variants.

He's just incapable of saying he's incapable of telling us the truth about that.

But when we get to the vaccinations,

this is where,

you know, he's really over there.

I guess I used that the other night on television.

Jump the shark is from that television show.

You remember when they had a shark, they ran out of ideas, so they jumped the shark.

Happy days.

Happy days.

Fonzi was surfing.

And then when you go to that extreme, So when he goes to the vaccinations, remember what he said about it?

He said, we're not going to have mandates because it's an individual decision and you don't really rely on other people.

If you've got the Moderna or Pfizer, you have 95 or 96% protection.

So don't worry about it if anybody else chooses not to.

They can't infect you.

And guess what?

You can't infect them.

So just go get it.

for your own peace of mind.

And now that has metamorphosized until you're almost disloyal if you don't get it, with some major exceptions.

If you're one of 2 million people scheduled to cross the southern border in this physical year, then for politically correct reasons,

we're not going to ask a foreign national who's breaking our laws on entering it and

sequentially breaking them by residing there.

We wouldn't dare ask them to

follow the law, the new mandate, or to get vaccinated to protect others, but we surely would four and a half million federal employees and U.S.

soldiers.

No, they're just citizens.

So what?

They have to.

You saw he was asked that.

I think it was by Peter Doocy, and he talked about some Title 42 or some nonsense, just totally evaded that question about

or whether it was a health, it wasn't yet a health crisis.

We're not talking about that.

We're just talking about treating citizens a little bit more considerately than foreign nationals that break the law as their first act in entering this country.

He's totally

unable

to say with a straight face that if you've had COVID and you have antibodies for three to five months, you probably have as good or superior immunity as people who have been vaccinated.

And we do have a lot of antibody tests.

It wouldn't be that hard for Dr.

Fauci to say,

I suggest that restrictions on people entering or leaving organizations, buildings, restaurants predicated on vaccinations would be, as is common in Europe, extended to those who have antibodies.

We don't care how you got the antibodies.

All we care is that you have them.

And if it's over a certain level, 500, it could be 400, they can find the level, then go.

But he feels that that's just impossible.

So he either deprecates the value of naturally acquired immunity, or he won't say that it can be as good as a vaccination.

And the result is that we have a lot of people

who

have been seriously ill, some of them with COVID, and they have high antibody titers.

And if they go out and get another

one-shot or a booster or whatever,

they're going to have a bigger reaction than they would have had before.

And then we have other people going to be deprived of their civil rights because they've not vaccinated when they may be walking around with superior immunity to those who are.

He's just incapable of doing that.

And

he's incapable.

This is, I think,

in addition to all of that, he's just incapable of saying

the vaccinations are now solely to stop you from dying.

They will probably not protect you from getting ill, but the illness will be minor, but it's still worth the cost-effective trade-off.

But I am worried.

He's incapable of saying, I am worried that those who are males under the age of 18 may have a higher propensity for side effects, cardio problems, et cetera, than they would if they got COVID.

So we have to investigate that.

And the same thing holds true to young kids below the age of 12 or even below the age of five, but he's incapable of that.

He just doesn't express any doubt.

And yet, again, he's been wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

And why we've talked about this before, why Donald Trump did not say,

Anthony Fauci is a wonderful 40-year veteran at the NIA

ID

and we appreciate his yeoman work and at 80 everybody deserves a rest and he's going to go rest tomorrow morning and fire him and we wouldn't have this problem he's lost confidence of 55 percent of the country right at least

victor is this hubris in a in a classical greek understanding of hubris or is this yeah it was he was a minor he he he had a in his 30s and early 40s he was somebody.

He was all over the news about the AIDS epidemic.

Let's not get into that, but he said some wild things.

I can remember my children coming home and

telling me they were telling them in schools that you could get it from colds or kissing.

And that came from Dr.

Fauci.

And

he was wrong on a lot of stuff.

He was holding back very valuable pharmaceuticals in the beginning.

But nevertheless, he had his moment and he hasn't been heard from since.

And then he reappears as an octogenarian and

it's gone to his head now.

If you look at when he's interviewed at his home, he's got pictures of himself.

He's got posters of him.

He's got little bobble toys of himself.

And so he's a legend in his own mind.

And

he knows what's going to happen.

Nemesis comes.

When you go on these far-left cable TVs and you say you're not political, or you start bringing up January 6th to attack Ted Cruz,

or you say, swear under oath that there was not gain of function research going on in China.

How does he know that, or that he didn't fund it?

How does he know that?

How does he have any idea what they were doing?

He has none.

And so he's just saying things now, and he's acting in such a manner that he's going to take a fall.

And so I think Joe Biden feels his base that sort of anal retentive Karens,

use that term, they love him and he doesn't want to fire him.

But

I think there'll be a lot of people in the Biden administration that at some point, as the midterms get closer, say, you know what, we're going to lose unless we get rid of this guy and open up the economy for him.

Make him ambassador to New Zealand or something.

By the way, Victor, the book you mentioned was Scott Atlas's book, which while you were talking, I checked out.

Yeah,

not available.

You can get it on Kindle, but it's called A Plague Upon

Our House.

And Victor, which we discussed at length on other shows, that this book and Atlas himself tried to take a comprehensive look at this pathogen and the reaction, how that affects societal-wide.

And I would trust Anthony Fauci to let me know what an Ebola virus can actually do and what it's made up of, but how he's essentially become the public health officer for the entire country is kind of staggering.

Yeah, he reminds me of the Latin word, you know, for cutting blade or sickle.

I only know it because, you know, I was a Latin professor, but I've also specialized in agricultural terminology, and it was falque, falcius.

And so it's

the root is false.

I mean, the nominative is false, but fauci is the root, fauci.

And then that's a certain case ending.

So he's a sickle, a cutting blade.

That's what he is.

It's a southern Italian.

Well, speaking of southern Italian, you know, the word is chuccio, and that means donkey in Italian.

So that's where chuch comes from.

And a donkey is also called an ass.

But let's talk about what I would consider two other chuches from New York City.

They're New York boys.

One is, let's lump them together, Victor.

One is Chris Cuomo, who has been suspended from CNN because the investigation by the New York Attorney General into his brother, former governor Andrew Cuomo's naughtiness with about a dozen women showed, and there's evidence here from texts, et cetera, that Chris Cuomo, CNN's Chris Cuomo, despite saying he was just praying for his brother or whatever, but he was actually, actively engaged in trying to assist his brother in a response strategy to these women, some of which included besmirching these women who made accusations against the former governor.

Now he's been suspended.

We'll see if his suspension is equivalent to the suspension of Jeffrey Toobin, who, well, we won't get into that.

He was quickly back on the air.

And then the second person,

also

of my people, is named Ray Dalio.

A little less publicly known, but he should be.

He is

the head and the founder of Ridgewater Associates.

It's the largest hedge fund in the world.

And he infamously this week, and he's got some book out.

So he's doing the financial network shows.

And he was on CNBC's Squawk Box.

And Andrew Sorkin, who's no conservative, pressed him about China.

And at first, I'll say Dalio gave very evasive, she-shucks, I really don't know.

I do business all around the world kind of answers.

And then Sorkin pressed him again.

He has China with its tremendous

free trade, oppression of the Uyghurs, It's a genocide, actually.

It's been called, it has been considered formerly a genocide.

And then all of a sudden, Dalio, he did two things.

He did many things, but two of them were: he won, he equated China, Red China, Communist China, with the United States.

You know, they do things wrong with human rights, so do we.

And then the other thing he did was all of a sudden he became this great sociologist who said, no, we got to understand China has a, you know, like a strong parental,

angry dad kind of way of dealing with its children i'm not quoting him there but um it was a shocking uh act of of uh kowtowing lick spittling of course we know bridgewater and all these major american financial companies deal with china not only deal with them they genuflect to china so it was a real gross symbolic public act of uh

of such so we have ray dalio we have Chris Cuomo.

Victor, what are your thoughts on these two?

We put a Chinese Hall of Fame and we can put all of our so-called luminaries.

There's a place in the Hall of Fame.

Remember for Steve Kerr, the NBA coach, who said, why should we criticize China?

We have mass murders and shootings with automatic weapons.

I think there were that year he said it with 19 of them in the United States, 19 versus a million and a half.

And then we had LeBron, who won't mention a word about Nike.

Then we have Mike Bloomberg saying that China was basically a constitutional system and that Qi was accountable to, I guess he calls them, voters.

Then there was Bill Gates that said, oh, wow, China's done a great job.

The China that birthed the virus and sent it to us is doing a great job.

Delalio is just one of the, you know, the Bill Gates, the Anthony Fauci said, praise China.

And he's one of these people who, either psychologically or in his case, financially, is incapable of criticizing China.

And China, China understands something that's really brilliant about them in a sinister Machiavellian way.

They understand the liberal left-wing mind, especially in the high-end finance part of it.

And that is that they can be bought for 50 cents on the dollar.

And they'll always, always, they understand that their liberal sympathies of a J-Bean Diamond or

Dilaue or all of these people.

Mask is a contrived facade to show you that they're very liberal and caring and they feel so terrible about all the money they've made and they're going to give to liberal, but deep down inside there are SOBs and China knows that.

And so they just cut to the quick and they say, you know, if you want to do business with us, you're going to have to.

spout the stuff.

And they do.

And they know they can be bought easily.

And they know the basketball.

They're not fooled by LeBron James with his Malcolm X glasses reading a book.

You know what I mean?

It's just, that doesn't mean anything to them.

And so

they understand that they have a lot of people in the United States that will say or do anything.

And that includes Anthony Fauci,

the COVID czar, and it includes Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And it includes Bill Gates, it includes Michael Bromberg, and it includes Jamie Dimon and Delalio.

And we could go on.

So that's very frightening.

And this is not like Russia that was a bankrupt economy during the Cold War that had nothing that we wanted, that didn't, you know,

it was kind of like Boris and Atash from the old cartoon days.

I mean,

it was pretty obvious what they were doing, and they weren't good at it as far as being insidiously

offering us money and prestige in the way that the Chinese do.

And then we come to Chris Cuomo.

I don't think he,

I don't know what's wrong with the Cuomos.

You know, I had nothing against their father, but he didn't seem to be a pathological liar.

But Chris Cuomo has been lying repeatedly that he was not involved in the defense of his brother's

problems with sexual harassment.

You remember Jackie, he swore that he was in quarantine.

And then he filmed this weird entry out of his basement.

And then all these stories started circulating that, no, he'd been out before that.

And, you know, he lifts weights and shows his biceps and then he has kind of like, he hopes that you'll see him in his boxer shorts.

I mean, the guy is a complete egomaniac narcissist.

And he doesn't, he just yells and screams.

He doesn't have much to say.

And he's like,

and he's called Fredo, but

if you call somebody Fredo,

then you've got somebody in the family that knows what they're doing.

There is a sonny or something.

I mean, but

I don't know why he's called Fredo when

Andrew Cuomo is Fredo in some ways, but I don't know who they play to,

who's the Michael and who's the Sonny.

They don't exist in that family.

But

so if we were having this conversation a year ago, we would be talking about Andrew Cuomo winning the Emmy.

for his brilliant press conferences and how he turned down and said, I don't need your ventilators, Donald Trump.

I don't need your hospital ships.

I don't need your Javis Center hospital.

I'm doing it on my own, my way.

And that, you know, how that ended with 12 to 13,000 deaths that he covered up.

And now he's got the wrath of a really angry Attorney General that wants his job.

So she's not going to quit.

And we're going to hear more and more of this.

And, you know, I don't know what Andrew Cuomo did, but I think we all know what he did.

I don't know the details.

He just plays fast and loose with his speech, his hands, because he feels he has a sense of entitlement.

Exactly.

And he does.

And I've seen men my entire life that do that.

I mean, they just kind of go into a room and they hug and they get a cheap feel.

You know, you've had parties at your house, you know, huge family gatherings and everybody whispered, watch out for Uncle Buck over there.

Because

Once he gets going, he'll snap the bra straps of every woman and he'll hug them and then grab the bra straps and or he'll pat the rear end or he'll be at dinner and you'll have to, he has a crab legs and the knee goes, the crab goes up and then he's slapped and you look at him.

And so everybody knows those people and that's who he was, but we don't want those people as governor.

Right.

And he was protected for years.

So the both of them are.

And then there's a larger issue of CNN.

I mean, come on.

All of those reporters that got on there, and some of them were fired for lying, but not enough of them got on there for three years and said, the walls are closing in.

It's a bombshell revelation

from Robert Mueller's team, the dream team, the hunter-killer team, the all-stars.

They did that.

And then it was on to Ukraine, Ukraine, and then January.

They just completely lie.

And then think of the cast of characters.

We had

Miss Griffith with Donald Trump's head decapitated, a facsimile of it, holding it out.

I think she weighed in on Jeffrey Toobin.

She did.

She said she got fired.

But he, well, how come he didn't get fired?

I liked his excuse, you know.

And somebody actually wrote that, as I remember, that, you know, he was on Zoom and he was a New York writer.

And, you know, a lot of men, just maybe men and women, they just, you know, routinely masturbate at their desk and the date died.

I thought.

So multitasking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, and then what I liked about that was that when Kyle

Rittenhouse's trial came on, Tubin then started to pontificate and said, this was reckless.

This was reckless that he was trying to stop, you know, graffiti and arson.

This is horrible.

Reckless.

Okay, well, was it any reckless than a law, a person with a Harvard law degree masturbating in front of women on Zoom, you idiot?

So,

and then you go into that,

you know, everybody got, I wrote something in the dying citizen that Kirkus, I guess it was Kirkus or Publishers Weekly, one of them got mad at and said, I was, I was mean to Anthony Berdain, you know, that the chef.

Yeah.

He passed away, killed himself tragically.

Nothing against him, except he did say, they asked him, would you cook a meal for Donald Trump?

And he said, I would poison it if I did.

And that was acceptable.

And he was talking to, and so I mentioned that.

And then we had that, he was a CNN contributor.

Then we had the other guy, Reza Reza, the guy who

used to go to India and eat parts of with can, you know, he ate brain matter to tape, the religious scholar.

And he called, I think, Donald Trump, a piece of SHI

on the error.

And then we have

dear old Anderson Cooper.

Remember, he said, if Trump came in to you and said this and dumped a whole crap of feces on your desk, you wouldn't complain.

I mean, they have a pattern of that.

It was that CNN person that went to a Trump rally, that reporter, and said, I have more teeth than everybody in this whole.

Gosh.

So

it comes from the top, the ethos, the code.

And

they're pathetic.

I think they've yanked their contract for airports because I've been in lately and I haven't seen them on the TV.

Actually, I agree.

I haven't, not me neither.

I've been in a number of airports lately.

One last thing on Chris Cuomo.

By the way, he was also a heine grabber.

If you remember, you know, it wasn't all that long ago.

His former producer at ABC attacked him and it was, oh, you know, that was at a bar, remember?

Yeah, but in front of her husband.

Yeah.

And he, I think he apologized or weaseled out of it somehow.

He weaseled.

Yeah, he did.

It was a weasel routine.

well those are i think they qualify as churches uh victor under under uh parlance of the neighborhood so okay um we're gonna move on uh we have one other thing maybe we can get to squeeze a sec uh a second thing in to talk about uh but of course this week big week uh for for jurisprudence or the consideration of it supreme court had its hearings on Dobbs v.

Jackson.

That's the Mississippi law that many people believe will be used to overturn Roe v.

Wade, the 1973 decision legalizing abortion, and maybe even the Casey v.

Planned Parenthood decision, which in 1992,

another major pro

abortion case that came down against pro-lifers.

I don't know, Victor, I listened a little bit, about half an hour to the debate.

I found it fascinating that we could listen to the Supreme Court justices discussing this.

I don't know if you did or didn't, but

did you?

Did you read any of the analysis?

I did.

I did.

So, what did you make of, say, the Breyer, Sodomayer, Kagan

performance during the live hearing?

Well, Sodomayer was pathetic.

I mean, it was not even worthy of discussion.

But I guess the others, I guess, the elephant in the room is that they cannot talk about the viability of a fetus.

And that viability almost every year

becomes more and more pronounced.

And the gestation period from conception to viability outside the womb becomes not that conception doesn't mark the beginning of a life, but for the left wing, that was their gold standard.

If the so-called fetus cannot exist out of the womb, it's not a person.

I don't understand the logic of that because there's a lot of people with disabilities or they can't exist out of their home.

You know, they don't have a normal existence.

That doesn't mean they're not people.

But nevertheless, that was their goal.

And now, as science starts to erode that argument, and it will continue to erode it, they just have to go back to, well, everybody has a right to kill somebody.

I guess women have a right because it was conceived within them to kill them.

And so all the rest is rhetorical and legal gymnastics.

And I think everybody understands it's like the Second Amendment.

It's worse than the Second Amendment.

The Second Amendment is in the Constitution.

The right to bear arms shall not be infringed upon.

Okay, and they infringe upon it here in California all the time.

But the point is, there's no uniform application of the Second Amendment.

You can't ban guns entirely, but each state has different laws.

And when people say to the left, okay, you've been pretty successful in your blue states to modify the very Constitution, and Moby Wade has no constitutional inventory.

So, why don't you just let the states handle it?

And we would know.

I don't think it would be a big political issue because they claim that more people are against repealing Roe versus Wade than keeping.

I don't know if that's true or not.

But I think what would happen would be

most of the red states would restrict it in some fashion, some entirely, some in some fashion.

And then most of the blue states would, I don't know if they'd be be able to go into the third trimester, which they all want to do.

I don't think they would be able quite to do that in the post-Gosnell days, but who knows?

But the point is, then people would make the necessary adjustments.

If you're a left-wing person and you live in Texas or Tennessee, then I suppose you would go out of state to have an abortion.

I don't like that idea, but I think in the idea that...

people are doing that, but I don't think it's viable for the federal government to, with a court order, ban abortion.

You can't do it.

And you're not going to get an amendment to ban it.

You're not going to get a law to ban it.

So, why not turn it over to the states and let them deal with it?

Victor, we have time for one more topic.

We're going to talk about pushback on campuses against the foes of free speech, and we're going to do that right after this important message.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show, the traditionalist recording on December 3rd, Friday, December 3rd, 2021.

Victor, there was a piece last week in the Wall Street Journal by Douglas Belkin titled, Alumni Withhold Donations, Demand Colleges Enforce Free Speech.

The examples are plentiful and endless.

We know there was a University of Chicago professor who was supposed to be talking at MIT recently and was denied, not because of anything he said, I mean, he was blocked, but as you know, campuses have become intolerant of even the thought of somebody coming with an opposite viewpoint.

So long story short, a number of alumni of some means frustrated with what's been going on on college campuses.

And we remember, you know, free speech was founded, right?

Well, it was founded in the Constitution, but Berkeley, 1964, free speech movement, colleges, not anymore.

So anyway, a significant could-have-been donor at Cornell was PO'd about what was going on there and started an organization.

This has created some other groups.

So, I'm just going to read one quick paragraph here from the Wall Street Journal article.

In October, alumni groups from five schools, Princeton, Cornell, University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, and Davidson College, announced the creation of a national organization called the Alumni Free Speech Alliance.

By the way, it has a website.

People should check it out.

The group champions open inquiry on college campuses.

Edward Yingling, the leader and a founder of the alliance and a former president and chief executive of the American Bankers Association, said he's fielded inquiries from alumni at 75 schools in the last month.

So, Victor, you know, we've been talking a long time, these two anas.

Ani haribali, I don't know, two bad years we've gone through waiting for some kind of pushback to this broad front of madness and

assault against the things we believe in, our principles, Western civilization.

We saw that in the recent elections, Virginia, and in school board meetings with parents pushing back.

And here it seems to be, you know,

finally a pushback, coordinated maybe.

How successful, we don't know, but at least it's the beginning of something on the madness on college campuses.

What's your thoughts about this?

There's a lot of things going on, Jack.

First of all, it shows you that a lot of the alumni donors do not trust the university and they don't follow the day-to-day pulse.

So even in the liberal media, the word is getting out that there is no First Amendment on campus.

If a professor speaks, you know, in a kind fashion of Christianity or they invite somebody from, I don't know, Breitbart News to speak on campus, they're not going to be able to speak freely or they're going to be going to be harassed or if they say certain things or if you have a segregated space by race, or if you have a segregated, racially themed dorm, or if you object to somebody picking their roommate on the basis of race, or if there's no due process and there isn't when a person is accused of sexual harassment.

Okay, so they know all that.

They're starting to know that.

So they think, well,

I want to, you know, I have loyalty to my alma mater, but I want to also make sure that my degree still has currency and it's a top-rate university, et cetera, et cetera, for whatever reason that they don't believe anymore by giving the money to the university, the money is going to go where they think it is.

In other words, if they say, I want to support Western civilization, President X, oh, yes, of course we do.

We know you.

We're a strong defenders of Western civilization.

Just write us a check.

And they know that if they write that check, it's going to be filtered in and transmogrified into the history of Native American genocide.

The first week, and then the second week is going to be a history of endemic racism, and then the third week is homophobia, misogyny.

That's what it's going to get.

It's going to be called Western civilization.

So they don't trust it anymore, and they're trying to target money.

But there's not a lot of things you can target.

I've had this discussion with donors.

Where do you target when there's not very many conservative things to target?

So the next position, then, if you want to give money and

you want to target it so it's not misspent and you're not deceived or deluded, then you have to find a group that will honor the donor intent.

But if you can't find that group and there's not very many there, then you don't give it all.

And so, that's what's happening.

The problem, as I see it, Jack, is that when you look at these Ivy League schools and

you look at Stanford or Yale or Harvard, and you're talking anywhere from Princeton, you know, 20 to $60 billion in endowment.

And you look at their annual budgets and annual giving, I'm not sure they need any more money.

I mean, they always want more money, but if they just said right now, no more giving, and then you look at, you know, a 6% return on

60 billion at Harvard, you know, maybe they could, and you add annual giving, maybe a little bit, but they're getting to the point now where they

have so much money and it's on tax that they're not as in need of what I would call small gifts.

These are people who give 15, 20, 30, 40, 100,000.

And because there's such a magnitude of wealth, you know, a Jeff Bezos writes a check or a Martin Suit, that's what they're after.

And those people are all left and they all agree.

So

what I'm trying to explain is that the dynamics of wealth in general and donor giving to universities has so radically changed from just 30 years ago.

There are no more cigar chomping, southern accented oil men, you know, or the Bass family that can really make the great money fortunes or Google and Facebook and Amazon and Bloomberg and Apple, et cetera.

and Jamie Dimon and Delalio and all the people you've mentioned.

And they don't have a problem with it.

And then the second problem is that these people have so many billion dollars.

I've had people say to me, I wanted to endow a professorship in so-and-so university, and

they don't really want it.

They have so much money, why take it?

So, what's happening, though, I think you'll see a change.

This is the only change that I can see on the horizon that is salutary.

If you start to let in students, not on the basis of their proportions in the demographic, which was racism itself,

by limiting Asians to take one example, but you start to be repertorally admitting people, that means if you have 12%

African American, you're letting in 16%.

If you have 12% Latino, you're letting in 15%.

And you're cutting back other groups, like white males, 13% or 14%,

then the next data become very important, and that is what percentage of those targeted groups you're letting in would have fulfilled your prior but now dropped admission requirements in terms of ACT, SAT that don't exist anymore at a lot of universities, and GPA and classroom achievement while on campus versus the number of people you're not letting in.

And I think a person could make the argument, if you had the time,

that these universities have kind of created their own paradox.

They've let in 20 to 30 or maybe 40 percent of their incoming freshmen that would not be able to fulfill the data on academic preparation as required by that university and as required by the professors for their level of instruction.

So now they're left with two alternatives.

And I think it's happening as we're speaking right now in the fall semester at many colleges.

The professors can either grade with standards as they always have, and they're going to flunk disproportionately a number of people that will be fodder for charges of racism.

And they're going to go after those professors.

And they're saying, you know what?

I took your philosophy of the Western world class.

I took your introduction to rhetoric.

I took your systems analysis class.

And I've noticed something.

I got a D, and I know that all the people, marginalized people of color, did not do as well as Asians and whites.

And that was a persistent pattern of disparate impact.

And

what do you do?

So then the other alternative is, I know what you do.

You just say, not this pig, non-nick porkas.

I'm not going to do it.

So, you know what, Mr.

Smith, Mr.

Brown, Ms.

Jones,

if you

are getting a 50%,

that's a C in my class.

And they're going to do that.

They're going to inflate the grades and they're going to have no standards to get students through that have been admitted for reasons other than academic merit.

Okay.

And that becomes cumulative at some point.

You can get away with it with a great university like Harvard or Stanford or Yale or Princeton or

University of Michigan or Texas or Duke, et cetera, MIT, Caltech.

But eventually, the whole quality of instruction has to make adjustments.

And I saw this happen in the California state system.

When I started in 1984,

I had a syllabus for introduction of humanities of the Western world that had eight authors on it for a 15-week semester.

We would start with Homer's Iliad or Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, a historian, sometimes Livius, sometimes Tacitus, sometimes Venerable Bede.

And then we would move on to something like Beowulf, or we would go into Dante's Inferno, and then we would read something,

you know, Machiavelli or Montesquieu or in the Enlightenment, and then we go on in the second semester to modern stuff.

Okay.

20 years later, because of admissions policies that were the forerunner of what we're seeing in the good school, the prestigious schools, I'm not saying that the schools where I taught were bad.

I'm just saying that they were considered less prestigious.

20 years later, I only had two authors on that syllabus because people couldn't read.

And we were letting in people that literally couldn't read.

They couldn't speak English in many cases.

And then I would ask a student, he'd say, Professor Hansen, I can't read this Iliad.

I'd say, come into my office.

I'd open up the book and I'd say, I got a stopwatch.

It takes a little longer to read out loud.

I'll make the necessary adjustments.

You read me the first page of the Iliad.

And it would be, Sing, Goddess of the Wrath.

What does Wrath mean?

And then we get to say, what does Buckler mean?

What does Lance mean?

And

it's very hard when they did not have the

preparation in K through 12.

So, what's happening is these universities are, they're going to have a gut check time very soon.

They're either going to maintain their reputations as the world's best universities based on basically now its professional schools and STEM sciences, or

they're going to become mediocre and they're going to become like USC was 30 years ago.

USC was a good university now, but 30 years ago, it was a very expensive fraternity, athletic, jock place.

And I don't know what's going to happen to them because you cannot let in a large, large number of your students who, by traditional metrics, do not fulfill the requirement.

And the requirement was based on the assumption that you needed this minimal amount of

data, GPA or test scores to do that level of work.

And so then they throw it on the faculty.

And you get all of these professors and they think, oh,

I don't know what I'm going to do, but I'm not surely not going to be called a racist, I'll tell you that.

And so I've talked to a few of them, and

they deserve it because they're part of the system.

So that's what is behind all of this anger about the alumni.

They think, you know what?

I graduate from Harvard, I graduate from Princeton, I graduate from Yale, I graduate, but what does that mean anymore?

My credentials are being tarnished.

They're not so prestigious anymore.

And

the more that they deteriorate academic

excellence and the angrier I get, the more irrelevant I become.

They don't care.

They really don't.

I've had so many nice donors say to me, I'd sure like to write a check, but you know, I've talked to these people and they don't care.

Right.

And so I'm hoping that what donors do,

in this case, that he writes a big check to Hillsdale College, you know, or something, somebody like that.

There are other

colleges like that.

There's few and far between, but maybe, you know, because we only have a few minutes left here, Victor, you know, another topic for a related topic for another day may be

that the philanthropist who cares about education, who should do the assessment, like they need my money like they need a hole in it.

What is Yale going to do with another million dollars or another billion dollars?

But if the

hinge point of education to fix the kids coming through the system that, as you just described, can't read by the time they get in college, if that means we need to do stuff at the third grade somehow, a lot less emotionally appealing to give money to the third grade.

I mean, the emotion for many philanthropists at the college, you might hear maybe your spouse there, best friends, et cetera, really strong and powerful ties.

But I'd like to think that the philanthropic community that cares about education might redirect it to places where it might actually have a greater societal result.

But

anyway, we can talk about that another day.

Because we have just a minute or two left.

Victor, I want to remind our listeners to treat themselves.

Here's a great Christmas gift for yourself, your friend.

It's a subscription to the exclusive service, the ultra service at victorhanson.com.

Victor writes a ton of original content that is published there and only there.

It's $5 a month, $50 a year.

Please do consider it.

Visit the site.

You'll find links there for The Dying Citizen and other books Victor's written, many bestsellers, as I mentioned on a couple of recent previous podcasts.

If there's somebody in your life that loves military history, Victor's written a number of books on that.

If somebody really likes the Second World Wars, there is a book called The Second World Wars that Victor wrote a few years ago.

It's a make a great gift.

As for me, do check out civilthoughts.com.

It's free, weekly newsletter, and the Center for Civil Society, where I just pontificated about philanthropy, but we care about those things.

We care about strengthening civil society.

Do check it out.

Now, Victor, we have a lot of people who leave five-star reviews.

They'd leave more stars if they could.

Five's the limit at iTunes.

And here's one.

Here's an example of one.

It's Kamachka62.

That's the name used.

And it's titled Admitted Hanson Hoarder, because some people leave more than stars.

They leave comments.

Here's the comment: I love these podcasts so much and listen to them in bulk while I'm working as a musical instrument repairer.

I save up several episodes so I can have more to listen to one at a time, though I love to repeat ones I've already heard.

I'm reading The Dying Citizen and enjoy Professor Hansen's take on how we got to this point in our country.

Thank you so much and keep those interviews coming.

Happy holidays, Victor, and to Jack and Sammy as well.

Sammy, of course, is the great Sammy Wink, who is the host of the Culturalist, one of the three VDH show podcasts.

So, Victor, I guess that's about it,

other than to say thanks to folks for listening.

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

Thank you.

True, it sounds good.

Thank you, and thank everybody for listening.