The Classicist: The Collective Accused

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show, the classicist.

I'm Jack Fowler, the host.

We are recording on Wednesday, October 27th, 2021.

The star and namesake Victor Davis-Hansen is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, the Wayne and Marsha Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College, the best-selling author.

of many books, but the latest is The Dying Citizen, which came out earlier this this month, and it is already a New York Times bestseller.

To those who have read it and have purchased it, thank you.

I'm sure everyone's finding it a most rewarding book.

Victor, we have a number of things that we're going to talk about on The Classicist.

A couple of your pieces from American Greatness, one of the pieces you've written for your website, victorhanson.com, and then another subject.

I'm going to try and get you in trouble with your boss, but I'm going to do this right after this message.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson show, The Classicist Victor.

I lied.

I'm not going to try and get you in trouble with your boss.

Condoleezza Rice, I think you'd consider her

boss, right?

She is.

She's the director of the Hoover Institute.

Absolutely.

So she got some attention this week.

She talked about critical race theory and was kind of viciously attacked by a couple of leading social media young black ideologues.

Would you like to talk about what she said and the value of it to this cultural debate we're undergoing?

Yeah, I would.

I think that she resonates because

she's trying to remind people that she grew up at ground zero of not just segregation, Jim Crow, but the violent interaction between the authorities and the African-American community that

was trying to reform it.

And so she's not a privileged person in the sense that she's looking at it back through time and space or through contemporary lenses.

She was there.

And she knows that in her own case, due to her superb parenting, she was very lucky by her own admission.

She had wonderful parents.

She had a wonderful family structure.

And she believes that that was representative of the vast majority of African Americans.

And she succeeded on her own merits.

And she, while she understands and contextualizes, and she has at the Hoover Institution, a long history of discrimination and racism, she's not a tribalist.

She's like anybody else that has sense.

And she believes that our superficial appearance is incidental to who we are.

And that the hope of America is that we're a multiracial society bound by a civic, uniform collective identity.

And so when she goes on there, she says that, you know, if you're going to go blame white students or white children for something that happened in the past in a way I think she was implying of leveraging political interests in the present, it's not going to work.

It doesn't work.

It's counterproductive.

It gets people angry.

It increases tribalism.

And so as a senior statesman, as a former national security advisor to the United States, former Secretary of State, she speaks with enormous authority.

And a lot of people

who what was bothersome to me is that a lot of people who don't have that experience with the actuality of racism and institutionalized racism then attack her as somehow being soft because if you put it this way jack what would have made them happy what would have said conda leisure rice is really wonderful people what would have made the media if she had said something like i just think we have to take a 15 year old or a 12 year old in school and tell them you know what you're racist racist and you're systemically racist and your parents are.

You may not know it, but I'm here to teach you that and you owe me.

And that's never worked.

That's the Yugoslavian tribal attitude.

And it will only increase tribalism.

So I was very impressed with her answers.

I thought it was admirable.

I thought she represented our institution in superb fashion.

And, you know, sometimes we disagree on things, but I've always found her to be, you know, sober, judicious, and willing to take criticism and to give it back.

And that's what the Hoover Institution is supposed to be about.

And so

I think the people who criticized her embarrassed her.

I really do.

And I think the reaction to most Americans, to the degree they knew what happened, was not to side with her critics, but to side with her.

Yeah.

Victor, here's what actually the critic said, this Torre Neblet, who I have some, I know, I've been on a television exchange with him, and I know a little bit about him.

I watched him debate Shelby Steele a couple of times.

Well, he said about Condoleezza Rice's appearance on The View, where she made those statements that you said, just repeated.

He writes for a thing called The Griot.

Condoleezza Rice's recent appearance on The View was offensive and disgusting for many reasons, but she was who we thought she was, a soldier for white supremacy.

Her thoughts on critical race theory are completely white-centric, as in they revolve around the thoughts and needs of white people.

One other thing this

Dufus said in his argument, Nebliss continued, white children and adults should absolutely feel bad about the past atrocities.

committed by white Americans.

They should feel guilty.

They should cringe at what their ancestors did.

They should also understand that modern white power is directly related to those atrocities.

I wonder if he really believes that.

So he's saying that, so he is, Mr.

Ture, and by the way, he was fired, as I remember.

I don't want to traffic in rumor, but I'm pretty clear that he was fired from his television billet for sexually harassing his makeup artist that was assigned to him, not momentarily or

episodically, but serially.

And so I think he even had to apologize.

So that would be like me saying, I think you owe apology because you perpetuate the entire history of misogyny in America and you're emblematic of it.

And so I don't think I should even reply to this question.

And he also,

he said a lot of other words I can't repeat on the air.

So he has no credibility.

But in his warped view of history, and it doesn't really, that's to

euphemize his ignorance of, he doesn't know any history.

He doesn't know what history is.

But in his sick worldview, let's just take an example from history.

So William Decumps of Sherman marches down to Georgia in August of 1864.

He takes Atlanta.

And guess what?

The 218 regiments of the Army of the West are about 90%.

They're not the Army of the Potomac.

They're not immigrants.

They're not people who live in the big cities of America.

They're rural people from Michigan.

They're rural people from Minnesota, Wisconsin.

They're rural people from Ohio.

And when they get down there and they're volunteers, 65,000 of them, what do they do?

If you read their diaries, they have never seen an African-American person.

They never saw one in rural Ohio.

They never saw one in northern Michigan or Minneapolis.

They know that people of different colors exist in the United States, but these are rural people.

But they do know that it's wrong and that you cannot destroy the Union.

And they're going down there singing, what, the battle hymn of the Republic?

And they're freeing African-American slaves from plantations run by white people.

And they're pulling up to Hal Cobb's plantation.

And he's fled to Savannah.

And

his wife comes up.

Please don't destroy our

quote unquote, I won't mention the word they use, are treated very well.

And Sherman says, burn it.

And they burned it.

And they did, they cut a six, they didn't attack the white middle class.

It did not own slavery, contrary to popular belief, but they destroyed armories.

They destroyed the whole infrastructure 50 miles wide from atlanta savannah and then they repeated the entire process going to the carolinas and we know that and so according to his history why would they do that because he says it's just a monolithic white class that did oppress blacks but 700 000 people got killed 400 000 of them plus were from the north and as in the case of sherman's army many of them had never they've never seen an african american but they did not like the the idea that in the united states a southern plantation owner could as a bondsman hold another person against their will and do so on the basis of pseudoscience and race so even then

you know a long time ago 150 years ago there were people that risked their lives a lot of them got killed bentonville at the end they got killed they got killed by john bill hood

and so they did it and he can't explain that And he just can't explain that at all.

He doesn't understand that the United States has never been a monolithic country and that it tore itself apart over slavery.

And there were people who wanted to have a civil war and get it over with in 1776.

And they had this compromise about the three-fifths.

Well, we're not going to reward the slave owners

who get

the bondage and the labor of an African American, then turn around and give them one person representation, credit in the census, so they can get more representatives to perpetuate this foul system.

On the other hand, if we don't do it, we're going to be in a civil war as soon as we finish the Revolutionary War.

So let's compromise in three-fifths.

Well, that was a union demand.

And suddenly that because, oh, we're only three-fifths people.

No, no, it wasn't that at all.

And so this whole misconception and perpetuates, it would be like some white person saying to Ture,

you know, there's been $20 trillion

spent on the great society that was predicated, federal spending that was predicated on great society, racial set-asides, affirmative action, Head Start, inner cities, program dream this, dream that, model cities.

Okay, and that went largely to this.

And then you know what happened?

We have rare interracial violence.

It's about, I don't know, four to six percent of all violent cries.

But of that 4% or 6%, which represents many thousands, African Americans that are 12% of the population commit crimes more than six times more likely against white people than white people do against African Americans.

And I've totaled all that up, and I'm going to hold you responsible for that.

Who would ever think that?

And so that's what happens when you get in this tribalism, this idea that this tribe forever, ever demands this from this tribe, rather than just saying history was tragic.

It was unfair.

The Irish were treated unfairly.

The Chinese Americans were treated unfairly.

Blacks were treated unfairly.

Indentured servants in colonial America that had nothing were worked to death.

That's the way the human

species unfortunately functions and civilization tries to ameliorate that sometimes slowly and inadequately.

But they can't do that.

And what do you do when you cannot face that reality?

You end up like Juicy Smollett saying, you know, that bleach was thrown at you and froze.

I mean, did not freeze at freezing level.

And then a bunch of people with MAGA hats are running all over the most liberal areas of Chicago looking for empire cast members.

That's ludicrous.

And people accept that.

Or you get the Covington Kids deal.

Or you get...

As I say before, Oprah whining to Megan Markle, not about how many hundreds of millions of dollars are worth from their multi-million dollar castles, but how insensitive and unfair things.

Or you get Michelle Obama saying, you know, I went to a store and I was incognito and somebody asked me because I was taller to pick up an item and give it to a shorter woman, but she did that because I was black.

And so if you want to live your life that way and just fixate on your tribal affiliation, you can.

And Ture

is doing that because what else would he do?

I mean, come on, what else would he do?

Had his books been stellar?

No.

Was he a good television personality?

No.

Was he given an opportunity to do both?

Yes.

But he can just generate this venom and hate toward Condoleezza Rice.

She acted very professionally.

She did.

She did.

She did.

Yeah.

I would believe that, though, despite your...

cold dose of uh reality and truth here victor that if a college wanted to invite someone to speak they'd probably pick toriblet uh before they pick condoleisa rice so just how yeah he's crazy yes i would yeah i would say whenever he's

a practitioner of projectionism.

That is people on the left have pathologies.

They can't deal with them or they're embarrassed about them, so they project.

So he's suggesting that she soft-pedaled white racism.

This is the guy that said

that Holocaust survivors basically had it made or they had it easy.

when they got to the United States because they were white.

Now just think of that.

There's a long history of anti-Semitism in the United States.

We know what so-called white people did in Germany to Jews in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union and in Western Europe to a lesser extent.

So they're all, so we get six million people wiped out by white people.

And then he says with coming to the United States with nothing,

nothing.

after being treated that way and escaping.

And then he said, well, they made it and we didn't because they were white.

Well, who killed them?

White people did.

Who slaughtered Jews in Europe?

It was white people.

And who were the people in the Roosevelt administration that wouldn't let them come in numbers?

It was white people.

So white people do things to white people because it's not about race.

It's about humans and evil.

And they try to turn every single damn thing into race.

And you know where this is leading, Jock.

And finally, people are going to say, you know what?

You're right.

It's all about race.

So people who are in the poorest state in mexico oaxa

and they come across the

the border and they're told how awful it is but why are they coming there's no reason to why would you leave an indigenous familiar culture that's so wonderful with so many anti-western superior paradigms and then go visit this 70% evil white person place with all these evil things like the Bill of Rights and this terrible free market capitalism and this horrible private property and this pernicious independent judiciary and etc etc

why are they doing this it doesn't make any sense and so when you say white white white why you're begging the question you're forcing the question okay let's examine it right let's examine exactly what you mean who did this and who didn't do this and if they want that conversation they're going to get it and it's not going to be necessarily turn out the way they want it well Victor, you talked about two things you mentioned earlier.

One is tribalism and the other is projection.

And I want to recommend to our listeners, I'm going to, we'll talk right now about a piece you've written for your website.

It's one of the exclusive pieces.

And it's titled Remembering the Early Virus and the Wages of Tribalism.

A little salesmanship here, folks, victorhanson.com, and it's $5 a month or $50 for the year.

And there is a tremendous amount of material there, all that you can only read there.

And here's one of the pieces.

First sentence is, how did China become so sophisticated in its messaging to the racist world?

And this is a great elaboration, Victor, on how it exploited racist tendencies amongst the elite.

Here's something you wrote, that China manipulates.

Western obsessions with identity politics to deflect its own racism and predatory commercial policies, which now pose a global threat in the age of easy travel and communications.

And then you went on, you quoted this Indian journalist, Kapil Kormaretti,

and about Western vulnerabilities.

And here's what he wrote.

And after this, then please talk about this wonderful piece.

Komaretti wrote, quote, the infantile culture wars that have crippled the West, where preening tropes of virtue brandishers who cannot distinguish between the Chinese people and their tormentors parade themselves as enlightened tribunes of the oppressed, have also created a receptive audience for Beijing's insidious spin.

The Communist Party's news agency, that has a history of publishing hideously racist content, now feels comfortable trolling Washington in the language of a woke millennial.

Quote, racism is not the right tool to cover your own incompetence because it knows that, rather than being laughed at, its laughable message will be amplified earnestly in the West.

We are living through the phenomenon described by Susan Sontag as growing stupid together.

Victor, this is a great piece.

Would you talk about these themes that you raised in it, projectionism and tribalism?

Yes, I mean, we think that we're the world, but people who look at the United States,

whether they're in Rwanda, whether in the former Yugoslavia, whether they're in Iraq

or Latin America, they say, I don't quite understand these melodrama psychodramas.

Everybody wants to go to the United States precisely because race and blood and soil chauvinism doesn't exist as it does in the same degree everywhere else.

This is the utopia.

This is why I mentioned somebody from an indigenous person from Oaxaca will risk his life to come up here and live in a country that is 70% so-called white and reject a country where it's 100% indigenous people in Oaxaca.

Now, why is that?

And that's an issue that they do not want to talk about because we have learned slowly, two steps forward, one steps back, that tribalism doesn't work.

So we have this declaration and we have this constitution and we have this self-critical.

self-examination tradition in the West.

And the result is we have moral progress.

And other countries, for the most part, don't.

And yet people here who are beneficiaries of this wonderfully affluent market capitalism, private property, free market capitalism, and this wonderful freedom that creates opportunities and appetites to match our economic system, they are so entitled in comparison to other citizens that they have these psychodramas now.

And the rest of the world looks at it and they think we can't understand.

And it's not just a domestic matter, Jack.

It's a matter of national security.

So, what happened this week?

Vladimir Putin, Vladimir Putin, the thug, the autocrat, the strongman, looks at all this and then he comes up with this diabolically brilliant exegesis that serves his purposes and not ours.

And he says, you know, I don't want to tell you guys anything.

You're so ready to criticize us, but let's go down the list: tribalism, intolerance, atheism,

destroying your opponents, Trotsky basically depersonalizing, wiping them out, changing names, topping statues.

We did this.

It was called Bolshevism, and it made us very weak.

Now, we wouldn't want you to be a weak wink nod, but you're on the road that, you know, that's what you're going to end up as.

He's almost saying, who won the Cold War?

The Soviets or the Americans?

You say the Soviets lost, but you're acting like Soviets, and we in Russia don't do that.

Now, you can argue that they do in some ways under Putin, but the point I'm making is they love it.

And he has a Cheshire Cat smile about the whole thing.

Then we turn to our other existential enemy, China.

And what does China do every single time that when we want to bring up the Wuhan lab or a travel ban?

or an investigation about the origins of the SARS virus.

Racist, racist, racist.

And they're saying, basically, you people say that you're an inherently racist society.

We are not so-called white people as are 70% of your country.

You then, therefore, hate China because you're racist.

You call it the Wuhan virus, and

that's racist.

And we say, well,

Lyme disease.

Valley fever, Ebola, they're all Tapamans.

They come from the place they do.

This came from Wuhan, but they know they can channel that garbage because we give them the ammunition and they fire the bullet back at us.

And that's what they're doing.

And they love it because they think, you know what?

We went through this.

It was called the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, 1958 to 67, where we utterly destroyed our country.

We would go out and we would see a wheat field that was dying.

And we would say, oh, that was Mao.

Mao can cure it.

Let me just chant some stuff out of the red book.

And well, it looks better now.

And they lied on ideological grounds.

And they went and said, he's got more than I do.

I'm going to make him wear a dunce cone hat.

That person over there has got a nicer home than I do.

And Kamya, how can that happen?

He's got eyeglasses too.

He's a Western sop.

And that's what they did for nearly a decade.

They destroyed their own culture.

And now the Chinese who said, you know what, we're not going to go quite back like that.

We're going to steal the technology from these,

you Western devils, and we're going to steal what we can of their

market capitalist practices and glue it onto a communist agenda.

But we love the idea they're Maoists, just like Putin loves the idea they're Bolsheviks, because we are tearing our country apart.

And our enemies feel that they've gone through that and are not doing that right now.

and that they are in a much more strategically secure position because they don't allow that.

And I'd say to them, well, you have all your own pathologies and they will come back to haunt you, but you are right.

This is what we're witnessing is a Maoist-Bolshevik moment.

And there's no doubt about it.

And whether it's Maryland Garland, as we talked earlier, sicking the FBI on supposed

domestic quote-unquote terrorists, or whether it's,

you know, people saying like AOC that we're going to eliminate all fossil fuels within 10 years, period, or whether it's critical race theory that say we're all going to be racist and hate white people because that's the only way to stop racism.

That's Maoism.

That's all it is.

Well, Victor, we have time for one more kind of lengthy

discussion by you.

And it comes from a piece you've written for American Greatness, and you write twice a week.

for and that's amgreatness.com.

I want to recommend to our listeners that they visit there too and find regular content.

This is an essay.

Once a week you write an essay and then you write a smaller piece, but this is the essay written this week.

It's called Ground Zero of Woke.

And our mutual friend Dan Mahoney called me up and says, Did you read this Victor piece?

It's so terrific.

I didn't get to it yet, Dan, but I will.

And there are two things about this piece I'd like you to talk about.

I want to just read one, your indictment.

And then the second part, you talk about when you were a kid.

You've talked about this once on another podcast we we did, but about seeing Martin Luther King speak, I believe, in San Francisco.

But here's your indictment.

Let's begin with the indictment, and then if you want to talk about your

what you brought up in the essay, the king speech.

You wrote this, Victor.

For too long, America's higher education reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering.

In other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them.

The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic, and the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific.

Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States.

Indeed, much of the current Jacobin Revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.

Victor, I'm assuming that ground zero of woke is the campus.

I wasn't just ranting, although I did rant.

And by that I mean that I tried to look at it empirically.

So who thought up the idea that transgenderism was no longer transvestism or transsexualism?

ancient ideas that people knew that they were biologically mismatched people and there were other people who were no problem at all, but they had a particular fetish.

They liked to dress up in clothes of the opposite sex.

They were not homosexual.

And there were other people that were homosexual that liked to dress up in clothes of the opposite sex.

So we had a lot of gradations and the scientific literature and the psychological compendia all listed them.

And then all of a sudden we said, no, no, no, there is no such thing as transsexualism.

There's no transgenderism.

There's no cross-dress.

There's nothing.

It's called transgenderism.

And then all of a sudden we said gender or sex is not biologically determined.

It's constructed.

Where did that come from?

That came from the university.

I can tell you I first heard it 35 years ago.

Where did the idea that you had to be a racist to stop racism, wasn't just Kendi.

That came well, that goes back to Herbert Marcuse,

you know, this idea that you get an exemption from classical liberalism.

You can violate the tenets of liberalism because of your morally superior agenda.

Where did the idea that global warming is a fact that you cannot question and that

the rise in temperature will be such that will destroy civilization as we know it very soon?

So therefore we have to radically transform the industrial world and capitalism at whatever cost is necessary.

And to the degree that one year it's very cold and one year it's very very hot and global warming doesn't quite work because we're getting hot, we're going to call it climate change.

And now we're going to change that name again if it's violent and call it climate chaos.

Where did all that come from?

It came from the university.

And so what was the timeline, Jack, between an idea spouting, you know, sprouting in the faculty lounge or the symposium in the history department or the sociology get-together at coffee.

and being published and discussed and then making its way to left-wing political activists and then from political activists, pressure groups, money, foundations, left-wing philanthropy, and then being mainstreamed by Democratic politicians, I think it's about 25 years.

And so that's what I was trying to say.

And then when you look at the university itself, since it's the repository of criticism about every aspect of American life, So what does it say to us?

Don't criticize us.

We can only criticize you.

How about let's criticize the university?

Let's just say that when I go into Walmart in Selma and I see a greeter and she has a little badge that says, you know, it doesn't say employee, but member or co-member or associate, associate.

And she says hello to me.

And I look at her salary compared to what the associate manager that's going back and forth looking at the clerks or the clerk's salary.

I won't see as much wage disparity as I will when I go to a Sanford or a UC Berkeley or a Cal State Fresno and I see a part-time teacher, part-time teacher with a PhD teaching, let's say, introduction to Western versus a full professor with, you know, two or three classes at most a semester, maybe only one,

and tenured and with a lifetime array of guaranteed benefits, and yet they're teaching the same class.

So Where did that come?

That one person is going to make $50,000 and the other person is going to make $250,000.

And so are they culpable?

And when I look at their students, I say to myself, they've got 30 or 40,000 worth of debt, 1.7 trillion.

But how could that be?

Because Stanford's got nearly 30 billion dollar endowment.

Harvard's over 50.

So the more money that they pile up that's tax exempt and they can use for their budgetary dreams, the more students get indebted.

Why don't they just tell the federal government, get the hell out out of our domain?

We're going to guarantee our own loans.

Maybe that would then ensure that the rate of tuition increases does not exceed, as it always does, the rate of inflation.

Or maybe they would say, you know what, we're worried that a lot of these poor kids are leaving the higher education with debt and they have these studies degrees, gender studies, race studies, peace studies, green studies, whatever the studies, and they're not competitive.

And I'm worried about them.

So you know what we're going to do?

We're going to have a national exit test just like the sat that you have to get in you get a minimum score and then we're going to prepare them so that they can say to themselves here's a piece of paper i got 650 on the sat after four years in college so i am educated rather than just yeah you know what pay us all this money borrow it federal government you can default on it it's your business with the federal government here's all the cost and you know what i don't really give a damn whether you get a job or not i don't i could care less what you're not that's what the the university does.

And finally, in this rant, as I said in the article, we fought

for about 180 years for the idea that a person on a campus could have fair housing, that there would be no racial discrimination

and there would be no segregation.

And it would be the content of our character.

So now we have people, I just give an example, some of the Claremont colleges, but there's many others who do what?

They pick their future dorm mate on the basis of his or her race so i'm joe blow and i'm at pitzer college and i am going to be entering in the fall and check i'm white i want a white no no it's mostly i'm african american i'm latino i'm asian i do not want a white person being my roommate that's legal i go to certain places where I speak and I'm told you can't go there.

That is a racially segregated space.

I taught 21 years at Cal State Fresno, and I had a lot of students.

And a lot of students said, would you come to my graduation?

I'm graduating in classics.

I said, what do you mean?

They go, well, you can't go to the Latino graduate.

That's only for Latinos.

You can go to the general graduate.

I said, not this pig.

Non-hic borkus, not me.

I'm not going to play that game.

And so this is what I'm getting at.

That's the university and that's what it promulgates.

And what I really don't like about it is it can't do its primary mission, and that is to educate people and make them rational and analytical and have a body of knowledge and know the inductive method.

And I'm talking about the social sciences primarily in the humanities, but they have started to corrupt the hard sciences, math, engineering, STEM studies, etc.

But right now, the reason that Harvard and Stanford and Caltech and MIT and Berkeley and Yale and Princeton are rated in the top 10 universities in the world is not because of their stellar complete departments, not because of their classics departments, not because of their history departments, because of their medical schools, their math departments, their physics departments, their laws, not their law schools anymore, their MBA programs.

And they piggyback on that.

the humanities and the history.

So they have been abjectly derelict, and yet they produce the most sustained vehement criticism of American customs, traditions, and institutions.

And they will not allow any transparency.

To this day, Jack, if you just call up the admissions officer at Stanford, at Berkeley, at Harvard, and say, you know, I'm a reporter and we're writing about admissions.

Could you just give me the breakdown on who is entering the freshman class on the basis of race?

Because you always talk about race and you always brag that you're the most diverse campus that you're more diverse than that or yale is more diverse than harvard etc could you just tell me they will not do that if you say i would like the graduation rate of people who graduate in four years based on their admission they will not tell you that they'll never tell you that if you say i would like to know the number of people who got into Stanford on the basis of a legacy donation who otherwise did not meet the median test scores and would you please tell me the number they will not do that and so they can talk all they want about the corporate evil world and all this stuff but at my institution you know when they went after the hoover institution the stanford faculty i wrote a letter to the stanford daily people should look it up that was kind of i used this praetoratio the idea i won't mention this but then i did mention it and that is why is stanford so upset when they were selling admissions by these phony sports like lacrosse or sailing right why were they criticizing anybody when they hired a person as a visiting professor that was a member of the Chinese military?

Or why were they criticizing anybody when they had a series of sexual harassment scandals in the business school?

Or why were they criticizing anybody when they failed to report, according to the Department of Education, about $50 million from Chinese affiliated companies, i.e.

Chinese communist affiliated companies?

And why are they criticizing anyone when we had a Jewish speaker come and the students put out anti-Semitic

posters such as RAID or

any type of insecticide to kill the pathogen, the insect that's coming and good Hitlerian tropes.

And they didn't do anything.

And so they shouldn't criticize anybody.

They have suspended the First Amendment on campus.

If a speaker comes and says that, you know what, there's a lot of evidence about global warming, I want to discuss pro and con, he will be shouted down.

If somebody comes and says,

before affirmative action, this was the black trajectory and before the great society, and it has hampered what would have been parity by now, they will be shouted down, even if there's data that supports that, not just a loosely generic speech.

So there is no First Amendment, there is no Fourth Amendment or Fifth Amendment.

So if you're accused of a particular ideological crime, you're not going to get due process on a campus.

It's just a fact.

And you won't be able to know who your accuser is.

You will not be able to cross-examine the accuser.

You will not be able to have the full testimony revealed for you.

You won't have the identity.

None of that will happen.

And so that's the world they created, Jack.

Yeah.

Would you, as an aside, would you just mention about when you saw Martin Luther King speak in San Francisco when you were a young boy?

Yeah, I will.

And so I'm just hesitating for a a second because I want to get the date roughly correctly.

I was between 11 and 12.

I think it was 1964.

You say 65 in your piece.

64, 65, yeah.

It was 65.

And I say that because I was born in 53.

I wasn't 12 yet.

It was in the spring, as I recall.

And so we had a friend in San Francisco.

Her name was Ralphine.

I won't give her last name.

She's probably passed away now.

And she called my mother up and said, Martin Luther King is speaking at the Grace Cathedral, the new Grace Cathedral.

It had been, you know, it had been the Episcopalian Church had been refurbished, or it was never quite finished.

It was a grand opening.

Would you come up?

And that was a long drive, and we didn't have a very good car.

So she got us all little suits.

We didn't have any suits.

We didn't have any money.

And she got us dressed up.

And my father and she got in this old 1956 Dodge station wagon.

And we started putt-putt-putting.

And we pulled over in Los Banos to make sure we got there up i mean talking about four in the morning

and we called her up said oh i have a another request we have three african-american friends in hunters point

will you pick them up and my dad said well we're on schedule to get there before and they said no they have no transportation so that was a pretty rough neighborhood so we were just these kind of bumpkins although my mom had gone to stanford my father had gone to the university pacific but we went into hunters point there were three most lovely ladies african-american in their 70s.

And we three in the back jumped in the cargo section.

No such thing in those days as three seats.

They sat there.

My mom and dad and the three ladies got along wonderfully.

And we putt-putt.

My dad being kind of an old navigator.

Nothing bothered him, even though he was a farmer and a high school teacher or college ministry.

He just went right into San Francisco and we looked at.

And then we could not believe it.

We were still, we had planned to be there two hours early.

We ended up being about 20 minutes early.

And the line jack is just like a snake.

It went just on and on, the number of people there.

And in those days, there were some white people, but it was mostly African Americans.

So we got in this line

and,

you know, kids are just loudmouths.

And I think one of us, maybe it was me, said, well, we would have been here if we didn't have to pick these people up.

And I think my mother said, shame on you.

Don't ever say that again.

People who don't have transportation can expect people who do to help them.

And she was that way.

And so we got there and we waited and we waited and we waited.

I think there were about four or five thousand people that crammed in there.

I can't remember.

But we got to the door

and they said, the fire marshal has said, this is the limit.

And I was kind of a big mouth.

I had glasses on.

I wasn't like my other brothers.

You know, I was left-handed.

I was nearsighted.

I always read.

And I thought, I think people in my family thought it was weird.

But anyway, my mother, was the doors closed.

She literally took both hands in between my shoulder beige and pushed me.

And she said, remember what you heard and tell us about it.

Never forget it.

And they closed the door on me.

Here it was, this little 11-year-old in this huge cathedral.

And I listened to this guy.

And it was sort of Sermon on the Mount stuff.

And I remember that he walked around.

the entire group in the aisles after his speech.

But I remember this.

He said, if you are a janitor, I'll never forget it.

If you are a carpenter, I don't care what you are, but you will excel.

You will be the best in your profession.

And he said that famous thing, be all you can be or be the best can you, the military expropriate, appropriate from.

So it was a quite moving experience.

And then he came right by the door.

And I was sitting in the rear door and he turned to me because I was about the only white guy around there.

And he turned around and he put his hand on my shoulder and he patted me.

And then he kind of winked and then he went to the next person and the next person shook their hands and hugged them and everything but and so they had played it out on a loudspeaker and my parents were the next people who would have gotten in and they never got in and so for you know a lot of my youth my mom would say there's victor you got to hear martin luther king in person

it was very it was very moving and i it made a deep impression on me and There was a line in there, and I haven't looked at the text since, so I'm just relying on my memory, but this line was not like we would hear today.

It wasn't that your foundational date is not 1776, but it's 1619, or you have a three-fifths clause in the Constitution, or you have to pay white kids out by hating them for their ancestors.

It was entirely different.

And it was something to the effect is, I can say what I'm saying to all of you because I am asking you to live up to your wonderful foundational documents.

It was you, not me, who said all men are created equal.

It was you who created this system.

It was us that came over.

And all we are saying as black people is we hold you to your principles that you're not following.

And you dreamed up this system and we think it's a great system, but why would you not adhere to it?

And that was a very powerful argument that won over white people.

But it wasn't accusatory.

It was, you had wonderful ancestors.

That's why we're in this church today.

That's why we have freedom of speech.

But you know what?

Something went wrong because there are large swaths of America that don't live up to your own speech.

I remember when I was in high school, I had to write a paper about great people I heard on TV or on the radio.

And I asked Mr.

Hodges if I could write about that.

And he said, yes.

And I did.

And then I remember that I had to do research.

So Alexander Stevens kind of made the counter argument.

He was the vice vice president of the Confederacy, and he wrote a very famous letter criticizing the North.

And his argument was, we're at war with you people because you don't understand the role of race.

I have searched the Constitution.

I have searched the Declaration of Independence.

There is not mention anywhere about the superiority of A, race, but B, particularly the white race.

And so if you were flawed at your beginning and you gave us the problem we had because you sent signals to people who are not your equal that they could be your equal.

That was a damning indictment of the present criticism of the Constitution to have people who hated the Constitution criticizing it because it was aspirational for all different races.

And I remember in high school I wrote that Alexander Stevens was right.

The Constitution did not suggest that one race was superior to the other.

And it was exactly what Martin Luther King had said when I heard him.

So it was a a wonderful, it was a wonderful moment.

And every time I go up to that area, the heights of the Nob Hill, that area, I always try to go by the Episcopalian Church.

And I knew one of the priests that was the rector or the director of Grace Cathedral at one point.

While you were talking, I just quickly googled, and here's part of what King said in that speech.

He said, he must seek to develop his inner power in a brilliant manner, no matter how small it may be according to the world's standards.

He must see that it has cosmic significance if it is for the building of humanity.

He must come to see that whatever he is called to do has significance if it is for the making of a better world.

So if you can't be a pine at the top of the hill, be a scrub in the valley, but be the best little scrub on the side of the hill.

Be a bush.

If you can be, be a tree.

If you can't be a highway, just be a trail.

If you can't be a sun, be a star.

For it isn't the size that you win or fall.

Be the best of whatever you are.

Terrific.

It is.

And I know that when I came back on the way back, I think everybody was sick of me because, I mean, my two brothers were, I mean, we had sibling rivalry, but that's all I talked about.

I was the privileged guy who actually heard Martin Luther King.

When I said, I related what I could remember, and they had heard a lot of it on a very inadequate speaker system.

My mom said to me something that has also struck me, and I've never forgotten that she was the first female student body president of Selma High School.

And she came home and she told her father, Dad, guess what?

I got elected to be student body president next year of Salma High School.

And I'm the first woman in, you know, 50 years since the founding.

This was, this was probably about 1939.

And I'm the first woman.

And she said that my grandfather, whom I knew well and really admired, said to her, well, it doesn't really matter that you're the first woman.

What matters is if you're the best student body president.

If you were a bad president, they would say the first woman was a bad president.

But you have to be the best president.

You can be that best president.

Just say to yourself, this is the beginning.

It's not the end of it.

So be the best student body president in the history of Selma High School.

Then they'll be known for that.

And then incidentally, you'll be also accorded, you know, adulations because you're the first woman.

But the primary thing to be is the best.

And I think those experiences really affected me because when I was a professor at Fresno State, I soon noticed that I had about 50% of my students were Mexican-American, about 15% were Southeast Asian, about 5% were Black, and 10 to 25% were the children of the Oklahoma diaspora from Tulare or Bakersfield or Dunlap.

And I said to myself, to all of them, we don't really care that we're not at Berkeley or Stanford.

We can have a program here.

And I could say that because I had brilliant people like Bruce Thornton, UCLA PhD in classics and comparative literature.

And I had others.

And you know, there's an old distinguished professor, Stephen Binko, in history.

I could say to them, we can give you an instruction that is superior to, we're going to learn Greek and Latin, but better than if you were an undergraduate.

I'm going to teach you Greek and Latin composition, which they don't teach at Yale anymore at the undergraduate level.

You're going to have to write in Greek and Latin.

I'm going to give you independent studies in epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology.

And we're going to then give you a master's program so you can go anywhere and they will say of you that if you came from this program, you will be better.

And if you don't want to go into graduate school, you will be the best lawyer.

So that was the idea.

And it was.

you know, it was the idea that we were going to teach people from a non-traditional background that didn't have the same opportunities, that they didn't need the same opportunities because they could be superior.

And I'd always say to my students, I'd say, John, you work at the car wash.

I'd say, Elizabeth, you're a waitress.

I'd say, hey, Hernando, you help your dad in the transmission shop.

But these are practical skills.

These people don't have practical skills that are learning classics otherwise.

So you have an enormous advantage.

You're practical.

You can look at the ancient world in a practical sense.

So that was the idea.

And then somewhere along the road, I kind of got disillusioned because I saw that there were other enticements or discouragements where people were saying to my students,

You will go to Harvard, Victor will get you into Harvard,

but you will not get into Harvard.

You will get into Berkeley, but you will not get in Berkeley.

And it wasn't based on their hard work or their record, but on their gender or race.

I noticed that those enticements started to suggest to the students

that they also had an entitlement.

And I said to myself, this is a noble lie.

I said, we're back to the noble lies of the Republic, that we're going to tell people

that race matters, right?

No, it doesn't, shouldn't, because it'll make, you know, it'll make a more diverse or more ecumenical society.

And a lot of people are going to be hurt and disillusioned.

It was a shipwreck on my dreams, but a lot of my impetus was based on what I heard from King as a little kid and from what my mom had related, my grandfather had told me.

And then my mother had, and also had transmitted that to me when I went to Stanford.

I said, you know, I went to Selma High School.

I never had any Latin or Greek.

Then I went to UC Santa Cruz and I just took all Latin or Greek, but it was kind of a hippie school.

And I went to Yale for summer school.

And now I'm only 21.

I got to go to Stanford and PhD program.

And she said, well, don't worry that you got into Stanford.

Who cares if you're at Stanford?

Who cares you're at Santa Cruz?

You just make sure that you're the best Latin and Greek student there.

And that's all I thought I should do.

And that I do, I think, is essential.

Everybody had that idea in America.

And I think we really got to return to it, that each person says, if I'm a tree trimmer, I'm going to do the best damn job I can.

And there's still people like that.

I know a lot of people in Salma,

many among the Mexican-American communities, that I have a friend.

that comes out and does tree work.

Not so much a friend, he's a professional licensed tree surgeon.

And when we agree on a deal about the price and the estimate, then you should see he looks like a skilled surgeon, the way he cuts limbs.

And he does exactly what he's supposed to.

And then the cleanup looks like it's a carpet when he's done.

And he doesn't do that.

to make money necessarily.

He does it because he has a certain code.

A guy just put a roof on my house up in the Sierra and he did it perfectly.

He took the old one off.

He put a fiberglass blanket.

He got this 50-year thing, but he would communicate with me and text me and showed me what he was doing.

And he never said to me, you know, this is what I want.

I said, for me to do my job as an artist, I need this amount of money, but not a penny more.

So he was into the idea that under his name, under his brand, he was going to make the best possible roof possible.

And that's what we need to get back.

And that's what made this country great.

It wasn't sitting home and saying, I'm owed 600 bucks.

Well, Victor, I don't think your ship was wrecked, as you said before.

It happened, and it is an example that is known and hopefully will be replicated.

And maybe we're at that, as they say, inflection point for returning to sanity and things such as that that really affect our culture importantly.

But Victor, this is all the time we've got.

Actually, Mrs.

Fowler just showed up.

She's got to

take me home.

But before we go, before we go, first I'd like to recommend to folks who are listeners, visit American Greatness.

Visit victorhanson.com, sign up for the exclusive content.

If you want to just stick your toe in the water, try one month at five bucks and you'll realize you should become a year-long and probably a lifelong member.

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

I would encourage our listeners to check out centerforcivilsociety.com.

And I write a weekly email newsletter that I think is fun.

It's called Civil Thoughts, and you can find that at civilthoughts.com.

And, you know, we thank our listeners who go to iTunes.

No matter what platform you listen to these podcasts on, the traditionalists, classes, culturalists, thank you.

Those who go to iTunes, on average, except for a handful of people, over 2,000 people have left stars.

And but for a handful, everyone's left five stars.

It is average five-star review.

Thank folks who do that.

And then on top of that, those who leave a message.

So here's a message from Alan Los Angeles.

Victor is funnier than Dave Chappelle.

Does VDH even realize how funny he is on a comedic level?

His bit about the marginalized victim calculator had me laughing out loud in my car on the way to work.

When he called the Taliban the indigenous people of Afghanistan, I started to wonder, does he even realize how funny this stuff is?

Or is he just telling it like it is?

Has Netflix contacted him yet about a comedy special of his own?

Yes, I want to thank that reader.

That's a Helen of Los Angeles.

Jack, Jack.

Yes, yes, my comedic friend.

Yes.

Have you ever told me that I was comedic?

I have.

No, you've told me that I was a downer.

I'm Debbie Downer.

I said that, but I also told you

you should go on Gut Velt because you'd be funny there.

I went on Gut Velt.

And I wasn't very funny.

You were funny.

You were funny enough, Victor, for a classicist.

Okay, Mr.

Non-Hick Porcus, thank you very much to all of our listeners.

God bless.

Thank you.

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

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

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