The Failure of Modern Tribalism

This summer, Fandool is the best place to bet on goals. Including equalizers. Uh huh. Followers. Yeah, petters. Every goal is worth more on fan double. So let there be goals. New customers get three hundred fifty in bonus bets guaranteed when you bet dollar five for seven days. twenty one plus in presence and select dates. First online real money wager only minimum five dollars wager required for seven consecutive days. First deposit required. Bonus issue as non withdrawal bonus bets which expires seven days after receipt. Restrictions applies see full terms at fanjool. com slash sports book. Gamblingm call Proble one hundred gambler or one eight hundred My Reset. We essentially won the Pacific War when Okinawa was declared secure in June of nineteen forty five. For ninety days they had destroyed eighty five percent of the Japanese economy, and they still held out. And then we dropped one, and they still held out. We dropped two, we still held out. When they finally landed on a Japanese air strip, they were met with flowers after they surrendered because the people were beaten but the regime wouldn't surrender and that's kind of where we are in Iran. Well, hello ladies and hello gentlemen and welcome to Victor Davis Hansen in his own words. I'm Jack Fowler. Victor is the Martin and E llersie And senionor fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marsha Buske distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College. I'm a senior contributor to the Daily Signal, which is the happy home of this podcast. And is that a daily signal? A new kind of I just noticed it, Victor, your lid, your hat. That is a new daily signal . Yeah, well they redesigned . I was suddenly trying to match my shirt Since I've been told for seventy two years I have no taste in clothes . As my father used to say to me, if you would just dress more so more suitably you would go far in this world . Look how far you've gone without dressing suitably . Well, when I was farming and I started , I think I told you that. I started I had no suit or anything. I hadn't worn anything in graduate school. I didn't even go to my graduate school PhD , but after five years , you know, I was kind of rusty . So I went up to the campus and I was wearing Levi's and T shirt and you know to interview. And then my dad said, this will mom, you're not going to get this part time job. Let me help you. So then he unloaded all of his polyester suits from the nineteen seventies. So I walked in there and I didn't know him at the time we turned out to be best friends, but the classicist Bruce Thornton said hey, the love boat entrance is that way . So that was a put down. So I didn't know how to tell my dad that I wore I tried to make him feel good. I wore the things about twice, but that was it . Yeah , I don't think there was that's a style that is ever coming back glory days of leisure suits. Well, Victor's Victor's got a website .be May he'll put a picture of himself with in a leisure suit up there someday . It's the blade of Perseus, Victor Hansen dot com is the web address at sixty five dollars a year to subscribe six hundred fifty a month , tons of exclusive content, articles, Victor writes, just for the Blade of Perseus. Do check it out. We are recording, I don't know if I said this already Sunday, june fourteenth, twenty twenty six, and this particular episode will be up on Thursday june eighteenth , and we have plenty to talk about today, European madness . Today was supposed to be the day Sunday . It was supposed to be the day the deal was signed between the US and Iran. And right now I'm talking to Victor at three o'clock Eastern time. Nothing's happened yet. I assume nothing will happen today. And Donald Trump has criticized and I don't know if a tax is the right word. He's certainly gone after Israel for some ongoing actions with Lebanon . I'd like Victor to take on the first minister of Scotland will do that we'll get to him to do that too and plenty more when we come back from these initial messages . America's going through a higher education transformation where students are realizing that what they want and need is a place that doesn't stifle their intellectual freedom. Standing out among the few graduate programs that value viewpoint diversity is Pepperdine's University School of Public Policy, where I've taught the last two years. Their master's of public policy is both applied and practical preparing the next generation of leaders to participate in government agencies, the business sector and think tanks. Pursue your MPP at Pepperdine, Daily Signal Listeners qualify for an automatic fifty to seventy five percent tuition scholarship and can learn more at go dot pepper dine dot edu slash daily signal. It's go dot pepperdine. edu slash daily signal . We are back with Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, but the way Victor this morning when I was looking to see if there was any breaking news on the Iran deal, something popped up on my ex feed and it was hashtag Obama Appreciation Day . And I think today is Donald Trump the day we're talking is Donald Trump's birthday. And I think some left ies have tried to hijack this and started to guess last year. Obama appreciation day and the outpouring of so I clicked on the hashtag and the flying monkeys that adore this guy on social media. It's breathtaking. And he has three appreciation days today, the fourteenth, some day in August, and I forget what the last one is, but I would appreciate him if you just tell me what he did that we should appreciate. I mean, Obamacare is down to what? seventeen percent of the population. It was an utter failure . And people say, well, the Iran deal, yeah, the Iran deal led to nuclear proliferation at the rate. I mean, it didn't it just expired in two thousand I guess twenty five , but it was a pathway they admitted it that they were cheating on it and there was no way to guarantee any compliance On his watch, Russia invaded Ukraine . And I mean, they took the Donbass and the Crimea right from under his nose. Nobody said a word, basically . Remember then there was the hot mic and I guess that was in March of twenty eleven. Tell Vladimir, President Med , that if you'll just give me space in my last election, I'll be flexible on missile defense. In other words, I'll yank it from the Czechs and the polls cancel it, and then you won't invade anybody until I'm elected. So both sides kept their deal. I don't know what he did that was so good. I think we could have recovered much quicker from the two thousand nine when he came into office if he had just let the market forces react, but he just spent so much he just borrowed all that money . We were making great racial progress, I thought , yeah. And we were making we were getting to the point where race was incidental. And then he came out of the blocks, you know , race, race, race, race, race, but we saw it in the campaign , Michelle, it's a downright mean country. Never been proud until he nominated Obama. Always raised the bar on me. Then we had the beer summit, Trayvon's a sum that I never had , apology to her wrappers on the White House with their ankle bracelets going off. It was just it was smoother than Al Sharpen, but it was basically the same message . Al Sharpen was the most frequent visitor, I think, to the White House . And yeah, I don't I'll be happy to, I mean, I can say that Bill Clinton did some good things , and JFK did good things . And I'm trying to think of Jimmy Carter if I mean, he was a sober and judicious guy. He brought dignity of the White House. He had a mean streak in him, but I can't think of anything he or Biden did that pos ititive's. That's my point . Right . Well , there was cash for clunkers . But by the way, the cash there was Obama phones too, the free phones. Yeah, I just don't get that. Well, anyway, I'm not going to celebrate Obama Appreciation Day and I doubt you will either Victor. So here's Donald Trump today on truth social . This morning's attack on Beirut, so Israel launched some rockets there, should not have happened, particularly on a special day. When we are so close to a peace deal with Iran, Israel has the right to defend itself against threats, but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless. Nobody was hurt, injured or killed, and should not disrupt this important process. We are very close to a deal that will bring peace to the region, including to Lebanon and all sides should stand down. There should be no more attacks by Israel anywhere in Lebanon, but there should also be no more attacks by any other party, including Hezbollah, against Israel, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, Victor Why did they why does he think that they attacked Hezbollah ? They attacked so that they were going to embarrass Trump . And they attacked because they thought that Trump would restrict and restrain the Israelis . And then they were going to do a little bit , then a little bit more, then a little bit more, and then a little bit more . And Israel responded and he feels upset that they responded disproportionately, but they didn't preempt. They responded. The whole point in war is to respond disproportionately and create deterrents . So there's been I'm a little worried because there are people on the right who have been staunch supporters . You saw Lee Smith has a long tabot argument that basically he compares this to the cash pallet part that Trump has promised to release sanctioned money and he don't know if that's a little extreme, but it's very critical of this negotiation . Yu has a tweet where he refers us to an Israeli scholar who gives Trump a great deal of cred it for the first bombing and the second and more extended in twenty twenty six, but is worried about the negotiations . And I think that's the rub that if this is a sixty day window and you're saying it's going to take place on Sunday today and they're saying no and you say that there will be no tolls, and they say there will be fees and you say that the uranium at some point will be given over. And they wink and nod and say we've already mined and sealed the entrances so you can't get in . Is this sixty days going to take us all to july fifteenth and then august fifteenth? And we've already had sixty days of this . I'm not a warm onger, but it seems to me that Trump has to make it very clear that if there's any mining of the strait , any missiles launched against our allies , then we are going to respond disproportionately, disproportionately . And we are willing to continue to do that, and then to call it all off and leave a carrier group to keep this straight open and do it militarily and put them back not eight to nine years or seven to eight years but put them back twenty years . And we can do that . But I think it's going to hurt him if he keeps announcing that there's going to be negotiations, negotiations, and then they either don't take place on the particular day he says or once they do take place, they cheat. And then he's forced to say they're tap tap or they're minor or they just vented . But they're still designed to show the world that Iran is defiant and they're not , you know, they' theyre haven't surrend . I don't know that we have a we have an idea of the scope of what disproportionate means, and I'm I'm going to read one of the listener viewer comments from YouTube , David Begley , he put this up the other day. People forget that after we dropped the first nuk on Japan, we had to drop a second. And then it took about five more days for Japan to surrender. I mean we can't go tit for tat and then tat tat times too, it sometimes has to be really disproportionate in order to get your enemies to buckle under. essentially won the Pacific War when Okanaba was declared secure in June of nineteen forty five and the B twenty nine's had been conducting since march eleventh all of april eleventh, may eleventh, june eleventh. For ninety days they had destroyed eighty five percent of the industrial area of the Japanese economy. And we had mined all the harbors , and submarines were let loose. They could not go to their empire and bring in any and they still , they still held out. And then we dropped one, and they still held out. We dropped two, we still held out. And there was a talk of a coup that the army was going to take over . And as my father said, the B twenty nine' weres in the air. They were in the air and they were told to start to resume bombing right after the second atomic bomb . And he said when they finally landed on a Japanese air strip , they were met with flowers after they surrendered because the people were beaten, but the regime wouldn't surrender . The people were and that's kind of where we are in Iran . The wild card in all of this to make it to be a reduction. The wild card in all of this is does Donald Trump and the administration have any information through back channels a that the economy is really devastated. We see these long gas lines, food prices, inflation, the devaluation of the Iranian currency , and do they really have a thousand two thousand missiles? Or are they just about depleted? Their launchers are about eighty five percent gone ? And is there a resistance? Is it ready to soon as as we stop the bombing and they feel they can go out in the streets without suffering injury? Are they going to take to the streets ? And if they did take to the streets and the Islamic revolutionary guard starts to kill them, what would we do ? Would we say as we did to the Israelis? Well, you know, we had a peace. That's what Obama said during the Green Revolution. It was right when his administration began and there was about a million Iranians on the street . And Obama said, kind of sort of kind of, you know , he wanted to appease that government. Trump doesn't want to do that , but there may be things that are going on right now that make him want to negotiate with the idea that Iran is in much worse condition than they profess , and the resistance is much stronger and resilient than we think. But I don't know that . Yeah . I don't think the whole key is whether he'll respond. Will he respond if they break? Because they will break the treaty. They cannot keep their word. They hate the West , they have utter contempt for us . They've never abided by any agreement, and they will break it. Well, Victor, we're going to look at some Hamas stuff , but terrible stuff. But first, to our listeners and our viewers, if you've studied enough history you start to see a pattern. Nations don't lose their way overnight. They drift through debt and division until one day you realize the foundations you thought were permanent were never permanent at all. Today, America is spending at levels once reserved for wartime. We've normalized deficits that would have stunned earlier generations, and policymakers now debate whether the only path forward is more intervention, more printing, more distortion. But here's the historical truth . Every society that pushed its currency beyond discipline eventually paid a price. 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Call eight four seven nine zero nine one nine one eight four seven nine zero nine one nine one or visit protect with . com That's eight four seven nine zero nine one nine one eight seven nine zero nine one nine one or visit protect or dot com history rewards those who take the long view and we're very appreciative and thankful for allegiance gold for sponsoring Victor Davis Hanson in his own words. By the way, there's also Victor Davis Hanson in a few words also at the Daily Signal, folks, you should check that out. Victor, here's a headline from Washington Free Beacon, Hamas turns Gaza hospitals and schools into torture chambers as it reest ablishes police state. Hamas has built makeshifts, that's the headline has built makeshift torture chambers inside Gazen hospitals and schools where its men are interrogating and abusing fellow Palestini ans suspected of disloyalty. The reign of terror comes as Hamas moves aggressively to reassert its power over the Gaza Strip, according to video and testimonials and official government documents reviewed by Washington Free Beacon. It goes on to talk about eyewitness accounts from three Gaz ans reveal that Hamas has again laid claim to Al Shifa Hospital, the Gazan group's largest medical complex , the Al Askwa Aksa, excuse me, Martyrs Hospital and Nashar Hospital, and the Alma Madani hospital in Gaza City. The terror group has done the same with schools across Gaza, turning classrooms into prisons and detention centers where civilians are often subjected to brutal beatings and more creative forms of torture. I can't believe that. That's the plank of the new Democratic Socialist Islamicist Party Graham Platiner, Madami , you name it, Talo Rico, they're all in favor of the Palestinians and they say the Israelis are not , I think I referred to that kind of vociferous debate that I had with Piers Morgan and some artifact guy from the UAE that was insisting that Israel was not a consensual democratic society and the Palestinians were on an abused victimized people. But I can't believe they would victimize their own people . And of course, we saw that during the Rocket Acat. Remember that when the war started three, I should say four, almost four weeks after october seventh? People forget that Israel did not go into Gaza on the ground for a long, long time. All they asked was give us the ringleaders who plan this attack , give us back the hostages. And we won't go in there. And they said no. And then when they went in there and you know there was the so called war , we learned that next thing we knew the Western press was saying they hit a hospital . Those Jews killed everybody in a hospital and then we found out no, it was a Hamas rocket that fell short . And then we learned that one of the reasons that Israel could not deal with the tunnels as easily as it might have. It would have been difficult in any case, but the entrance the entrance to all this subterranean kind of like the minotaurs labyrinth on Kinos was all the entrances were all beneath schools , mosque and hospitals What kind of people do that and people who are ill iberal do that . That's so I guess it's no surprise and I don't think it'll affect any of the people who are pro Hamas, pro Palestinian whatsoever. I don't hear anybody saying, Oh my gosh , I protested against the Israelis and now I'm going to protest on behalf of the Gazan people for free and fair elections . And so they're not tortured and kill ed and abused by Hamas . I don't I see more likely. Ask everybody that's listening . When school starts in the fall, it will be more likely there's going to be demonstrations against the brutality of Hamas upon its own people, or are they going to have Hamas flags and pro Hamas demonstration? No brainer . No what is it about militant Islam victim that just lends itself to barbarity . Well I don't know. Roger Kimbell , our friend has a great column where he extrapolates from another table all of the incidents of violence, you know, in the last forty years. I mean, you name it, San Bernardino, nine hundred and eleven , the shoe bomber , nightclub bomber , everything , the embassy, everything, and it's all radical Islam. And then we hear from the Apostate Wright . You know, I really didn't know this, but I think we've been sold a bill of goods by people, these nefar ious people in our midst that want us to think poorly of radical Islam . No, it's empirical . Every time there's a terrorist attack , people make the necessary adjustment. They know who's doing it in Europe especially, but here also . And nobody condemns it . Nobody can Mr. El Said, he's running for Michigan Senator on the Democratic Plankton. We have a hot mic where he said , Hey everybody , I know that it's controversial , but Komani, Komani , the supreme leader of Iran, was killed. So we got to be careful. Let's not celebrate that because my constituents would not like that . I need them. In other words, I have people in Michigan who are going to vote for me who were rooting for the Iranian theocracy to defeat us. By the way, which I think the majority of the Democratic Party is as well . Yeah . Well, let's get a little domestic before we take a break and hier . And this is a headline, Victor, I just couldn't resist pulling out and posing to you Stanford . You've heard of that place. Stanford awards student drag drag troop fifty thousand dollars five times more than veterans group . This is published at the College of Fix The students at Stanford, as well most colleges, they have to pay these student fees. two hundred forty dollars quarterly fee that the associated students of Stanford University activities , then they disperse it to various groups. So the Strag Troop got fifty grand, the Muslim student union got one hundred and seventy five grand, the Stanford Republican Club. I'm surprised it received any money. It did get seven thousand five hundred dollars . But yeah , I mean, mom and dad are sending , you know , little buffy to college and the money's being used for drag shows. It's crazy. They have a problem because you saw the UC professors , their counterparts across the Bay and Berkeley who are known to be pretty far left , especially they just signed a petition as other campuses doing. And the gist of the petition was, we can't teach these students . They can't read . Carlos Norania, who I think a classicist at Berkeley, I think he's either the son or grandson of Carlos Norania suseni Sr. whom I had in nineteen seventy two at UC Santa Cruz in a class on Aristotle, who was a wonderful teacher. He had been trained classically in Spain . And well, he was quoted as saying it's very hard to teach people . And they all mention in that the interviews about the letter they signed to please bring back the SA T. Most of it was STIM people, but also in the humanities that what used to take , you know, you could do a hundred pages a week. They can't read they being the students . And that's a breakdown of K through twelve, but it's also DEI admissions . And Stanford has introduced remedial math and for four years as, I said , they let in about nine percent white males . And the variance between those admitted with with in the past prior to George Floyd was about two hundred SAT points between African American students and non African American . And so when you and then after George Floyd, you never knew because there was no SAT. It was just recently reintroduced , which was a mission. It was a mistake to do that, that they bowed to pressure . But there's so many things going on now at Stanford and they're under, I mean, they're being looked at, especially the medical school about their admissions by the Trump administration, but we already have these Supreme Court rulings that says that for purposes of admission but applicable to all aspects of university life, you cannot use race to segregate people and use it to punish or reward particular people and yet they have these what they call quote unquote affinity graduations , segregated dorms, those are called euphemistically theme houses , segregated set aside places for particular races. That's called safe space. As if there's a bunch of white guys at two in the morning with Maga hats with bleach and a rope and they're roaming the Stanford campus looking for juicy smollett. And so they're going to have a safe space . And it's ultimately you know there's always these natural correctives for everything . So if these universities say they had these standards , as I said before, and we need top SAT score students and GPAs that are from top high schools . Then we can have this demanding curriculum and they can read three hundred pages a week per class and then they leave Stanford for medical school, law school, graduate school , or Silicon Valley, or whatever. And everybody says, Oh my gosh , I have a Stanford student . That BA is the gold standard. But if they don't, and they're saying to themselves , we made a bad mistake . Our curriculum was too demanding. It doesn't have to be that good. We have a name of over a hundred years , we'll just use the name and they will be fooled. So we're not going to have SAT. We're going to admit students that we never would admit before. They're not going to be able to do the work. So we're either going to give them all A's or special class es and remedial classes or we're just not going to require as much work. And these stupid employers in grad schools will not know the difference. Well, maybe the PhD programs and the medical schools won't, but the employers will . And that's that is who basically pressured them to bring back the SAT, that an alumni . So everybody should remember that the university in' tserrible position right now . Democrat except for the elite who sell not quality education anymore, but a brand like a cattle brand. I went to Yale . I went to Stanford. I went to Harvard. I went to that's their brand. It's like Co ke or Pepsi versus, you know , Kmart Coke or something from the old days . Or, you know , Bud Bud versus Brown Derby Beer . It was just a brand name, but it wasn't backed by reality anymore. But the demography everybody should remember is one point seven, it's not three point six of nineteen sixty . They're competing for half the number of eighteen year olds of that cohort. I know we have a bigger population. Number two , there's one point seven trillion dollars and the federal government is backing in student debt because these universities over the last fifty years tripled the price of tuition . It went three times higher than the annual rate of inflation every almost every year because at Stanford there's one administrator and one administrator staffer , either one, for every student, every graduate student and undergraduate, there's a commiserate number of administrators . And it's not that they just omit things by being a waste of money, but many of them are acts of commission. They have diversity or they have diversity. Tell us why if we hire you at Stanford, what have you done for equality of resolve ? That kind of stuff , or let me look at your curriculum. Or I want to look at that grade your grading patterns over two years. Do I see a pattern where people of color have not got the same grades as others? That's what they do. Or they do these videos that we all have to take three, two hours . You know what I mean? You see them and believe me, you can't just race through them and because they, you know, they have a certain time limit. Little quizzes during along the way or they're pretty ridiculous. They're things like Joe went into the office and he saw someone and he said he doesn't belong with us or he's from a group that commits crime or I don't want to be I don't want to be a boar, but I don't think or here's the fourth question. Joe was incorrect and you need to report him to human services. Which one is it or Professor X he put his hand on my rear end, what should I do? Professor Y said, You're looking good today. Professor Z said you know, you're not in my class, but maybe we can date, professor E if you have a problem, I think you should go to human resources and report this. And then you have to pick the one. You can do it blindfolded, but you can' t go to the next question because you have to wait five minutes or ten minutes . So that's what they do . And here we have this one point seven trillion dollars and then we have what five hundred thousand people short of the whole country is going AI with these new fusion plants and we need one thing electrician and plumbers and we're five hundred thousand dollars short and they make one hundred thousand bucks a year. And these universities say no, No, no,, this is nineteen sixty, nineteen seventy again . And you need that VA in sociology or psychology or environmental studies. Now it takes six years on average for you to graduate and you're going to end up with two hundred thousand dollars in debt at seven percent . However , wink, nod thirty percent are going to default . And half of you aren't going to get a BA anyway once you enter college . So that's the problem. And then do plumbers have tenure ? Do electricians have tenure? Do truck drivers have tenure ? Do farmers have tenure? Lifetime employment after six years prob,ation? No., they don't Yeah . And some guy when I started farming, I was going back and forth, you know, after four or five years. And I had a neighbor, he's deceased now and he said, tell me about this ten year stuff. And I said, I haven't got it yet. He said, When you get it, what is it? And I said, Well, I go through probation. And he said, Well, I've been farming for twenty years . Do I get it? And I said, Well, what would it mean to you? I said, Well, I would like a certain price every year .'s what That ten ure is. You're going to get this salary every year, right? No matter what you do. And I said, Yeah, and he said, Well, you're if you're a bad teacher, good teacher, do they review? I said, Well, we do have post tenure review. Is have ever fired anybody? I said, well, we had a I won't mention university, but we had a sex pervert who exposed himself , and we couldn't fire him because he is tenured, so we put him in a special room and he had to sit there and we'd wave to him and he would open the door and we'd wave stick around how you'd get along. And we had another person, Max Frank who was a murderer . He went down and rented he rented a chainsaw and he cut his victim's head off and then he threw the head up by Millerton Lake, I think it was. And then he was an academic, so he was tight , so he couldn't leave his deposit on the chainsaw in somebody else's hands, like forty bucks. So he took the chainsaw and they said, Wait a minute, there's hair in the chain and there's all this blood. And he said, Well, I hit an animal. And that's how they caught him. But the point I'm making is he was still in prison on his pension. We couldn't yeah , it took years to fire him or we put him on suspended leave with pay for during his trial . So it's a very funny place and when you add three hundred thousand Chinese students, probably a hundred and fifty from the Middle East, one million point one foreign students to pay the premium or you have in the equation thirty, forty percent of the units are taught by graduate students or part time with no job security subsidize these full professors who are getting record low teaching or your teaching loads. It used to be five or six at a university. Now it's down to four . Some are three . And then you look at price gouging forty percent on federal you use our phone, you use our electricity for that federal grant. You owe us forty percent of it . So everything about it has been exposed and it's in dire straits and these stories like this trans thing, I mean the people have just every once in a while you'll see a gallup poll, even a pew poll on what do you think of particular people and professions? And it used to be professors were pretty high and they're down way down there, you know , way way down there in the public's mind. And they're politicized. ninety five percent of them are from the left . Yeah . They don't they don't work hard or they hardly work. They have, as you say, job security, and you forgot about the Sabbatical Victor. You hears you get a year off. I mean, that's like yeah,, it's supposed to be every seventh year, but you can take leave of absences and things . I was at a meeting . I was twenty one years at this place and then they would say we're going to have a faculty meet . Where is Professor X? Well, you scheduled it too. He's playing tennis at the swim and racquet club. Come on. And then they would say, Well, where was Professor Y ? And they said, Well, she only comes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Come on . And where is Professor Z. Well, you know, he moonlights selling cars. And he sells luxury cars to people. I mean it was there was no accountability once you have to . It was very funny for one point. I think everybody should remember believe it or not , Gray Davis, I think it was right in that period between Jerry Brown and Grey Davis, whatever , and they passed, the CSU would have merit pay and they would have a committee that would say after you got tenure , if you have good teaching evaluations , and if you publish and do research , you will get a little bit more money. And the dean will adjudicate once the committee sends recommendation. You know what happened? All of a sudden I would walk down the hallway and on every professor's door , they would have I mean not that they did anything, but they would have things like attend a conference or normal office hours two to four on Wednesdays. However, I can be reached at home. Here's my private cell . And this went on for about two years . And some of us who did, you know, and I wrote about twelve or thirteen books during that period . And people would walk by you and they'd say, well, you know , I don't really like what you're doing . You know, you just, you know, that's not very we're all in this together . You're just being plain into the hands of the administration . And then of course they ended it . The union ended it , and the legislator revoked it. And then they came up with salary adjustment. And they were saying that any of you selfish people who published too much and got a little bit fifteen hundred more a year , I think you should just take a pay freeze and let everybody catch up for your inequality that you practice. that's the mentality of the state universities and then the unionized universities and the elite universities or let me just sum up this rant by saying if some of you feel that I'm being unfair . Clauding gay up for tenure the year that I came to the Hoover Institution and I was following that story in the political science department . She had basically no publication record . And as we know now , her thesis had elements of plagiarism in it . Maybe she had one or two and the political science had a big fight over . There were a lot of people who had good standards there . And they after a fight tenured her , and then she used that I'm a tenured professor and then she went to Harvard and she never did another thing in Harvard and she became president . And then that little IED came out in that hearing that she had because of that exposure , we found out that she was a plagiarist and what does universities do to plagiarists? If you are a student and you plagiarize, supposedly you are suspended. If you're a faculty member , she was relegated to meet she left the presidency and I think she made about five or or five four hundred thousand dollars . Yeah. She's still teaching there. Yeah. Yes. That was a position. Yes. There's no consequence for plagiarism if you're tenured professor . Yeah Well, Victor, we're going to look at Europe there's a lot going on there as you know and some commentary is necessary but first for our viewers and our listeners as we approach our fiftieth, is it possible for us to turn the Titanic of education to restore civic leadership and also to enjoy summer vacation with our family all at the same time? Mount Titano Media says yes . This is the book. Here it is . It's a nice book. This is the book for our two hundred fiftieth and for all ages, finding our words wor,ds that made America. It's a collection of the greatest speeches delivered in American history. Many almost entirely forgotten words that defined and can still drive the American mission. And we can take them with us anywhere we go this summer, also with the new Audible Edition. These words that move the world are read by leaders in America today, including Michael Knowles, Andrew Claivan, Spencer Clavin, Bill Whittle, U. S. Army Generals, and leaders in classical education. Every speech includes a beautifully written introductory essay written by acclaimed journalist and I will add scholar and dear friend, Tracey Lee Simmons, which sets the stage for understanding the speeches in ways we wouldn't otherwise. Mount ano Media founder Alison Ellis who reads these great words aloud with students of all ages, even from birth, has the motto . they If can hear you , they're learning. Mountitana Media publishes single works and compilations of the greatest works of Western civilization , for education at all levels and for independent lovers of learning and culture . Finding our words , words that made America , the book for our two hundred fiftieth and always is available now in paperback hardcover, Kindle Audible, and in the Spanish translation. You can find that at Amazon. com and on the Mountitano Media website that's Mountitano T IT A N O Mountitanomedia. com Visit WWW mountitanomedia. com read, listen and be inspired by these great words all summer yourself and with children of all ages and see where they take you. And we thank the good people from Mount Town Omenia for sponsoring Victor Davis Hansen in his own words and shout out again to Tracy. Simmons, just a great guy worked with him at ASH. Very fine . Oh yeah, big Tracy. Big promoter of classical education, effective promoter , not just big . The man behind me in the poster, Bill Buckley was a fan of Tracy He really thought very, very highly of them. So let me bring up one more education thing, Victor, and then we'll go to Europe . John Saylor wrote in a city journal about that the Mellon Foundation is funding a resistance against civic schools. So this is one of the bright spots in high red in recent years. Florida, Tennessee, Texas , North Carolina, Ohio. I may be missing a state here have created these civic schools within their major state universities and University of Florida, that's the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, UT Austin School of Civic Leadership. These are some of the examples . But now sailors writing for City Journal, in a recording that I obtained, Isaac Camola , he's the director of the Associ an Association of University Professors, the AAUP . Its Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom repeatedly states his desire to delegitimize the upstart civic centers. Of course, the reason is they have a reputation for being conservative or at least for being non liberal . Here's what Camola said. I would really love to see kind of a robust research project on these right wing centers and individuals like naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining to the right. I would love to strategically map who these efforts are. We don't curse on this show and figure out what the weaknesses are and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out. And Mellon Foundation , which is a huge foundation like Ford, Nepew, et cetera, is funding this guy. So troubling just anyway, the idea is that ninety five percent of if you walk across the Stanford campus, you will see cinn for this and cinnah for that and cinnah for that and cinnah for that and center for this . And no one will go after them that's conservative because they assume I think the Stanford zip code of faculty housing around very and I think the average price is three million dollars a home . For what somewhere in Michigan or , you know, upstate New York would be probably three hundred thousand . I mean, they're not palatial homes . So that went about ninety six percent for Camela Harris . Those were faculty members to be eligible . And my point is that nobody at the Hoober Institution, which is one of these places . We have civic programs as well . And we're center right , although I think if you took a poll and see who contributed in twenty twenty four to Harris versus Trump , it might be closer than you think, but I won't get into that . What I'm saying is nobody at the Hoober Institution it's live and let live, Lais Faire, if they want to do that ? le Justave us alone . But they don't. Almost year they try to bring in somebody, bring in Scott Atlas, bring in Neil Ferguson, bring in me and try to go after them and make life difficult for you because they 're completely intolerant people . So some of the people that are funding these programs are not right wing zealots . They're , you know, I mean Harl,an Crow is a weonderful person. He's an anti trump person, I think . He's helping the University of Texas Civic Program. Right. He's a collector of memorabilia. And he has a library. He's done a great public service as a philanthropist . But he's not what I'm getting at, he's not a right wing zealot. He just wants people to understand the unique nature of the United States and to appreciate it, and to know what the Constitution is and to know the branches of government. That's what these things are for . And to remind people of that, and they can't let that alone. They cannot the left can never leave something alone. They can't sleep at night . If there's anybody who disagrees with them and more importantly disagrees with them in a manner that is persuasive to the average person and they have to be eliminated and destroyed and you know sham,ed . And that's how they operate and they're bullies . They're terrible bullies . They have still not rescinded the censure of Scott Atlas for working for Donald Trump and questioning the efficacy of the COVID lockdown. When every single scientific study coming out of Europe, the United States said in a cost of benefit analysis , locking down one year olds to eighteen and shutting down schools , that was a cohort cohort. If they did get COVID, their immunity and the nature of the virus would not harm them . Maybe people my age, but not those people, and yet we locked them down. So my point is they won't rescind it. Is the Stanford State Senate faculty senate or is it yes Stanford Faculty Senate did it? And they've had a motion to basically they wouldn't say apologize to Scott, but to rescind it because he was proven right and they won't do it . They just completely , you know , and he suffered, I mean, he walked across campus and people were visibly mean and lecturing him and everything and he was right . And so the left is very intolerant and can be very mean spirited . And we can see that with these candidates like Graham Plattner and Talerico and all these people . And they're all and people say, Well Victor, that's kind of a prejudicial view. No it has something to do with the ideology. The ideology is that I am I have enough moral superiority and intellectual advantage and brains over you people that I can understand the way the world works and how you can change human nature and make the world a lovely place , and you don't. And therefore, I'm allowed to use certain methodologies to achieve my more noble end than you are because you're selfish and I'm for quality of result . And that's how they think. They're very dangerous people, the left wings zeal at literally dangerous. Well, Victor, we're going to talk about some of the reaction to leftism in Europe and get you to critique the typical leftist response to what's going on and we'll do that when we come back from these important messages . Hey, I'm Bradley Devlin, and just like you, I'm a huge fan of Victor Davis Hanson, whether it's his long form podcast, Victor Davis Hansen in his own words, or his short form content for the Daily Signal, Victor Davis Hansen in a few words, I always leave an episode learning something new. I think they forgot the nineteen eighty two Falklands War. And in the age of clickbait and rage bait, that's a really good feeling, right? The media, thank you. You can leave now. And if you agree, you might like my show, the Daily Signal's long form interview podcast called The Signal Sit Down. Every week we take you behind the scenes of the biggest battles in Washington, DC as they happen with some of the biggest names in politics. We explore big ideas and we analyze the policy making process from an unabashedly and unapologetically conservative perspective. And that's important now more than ever, especially with the Trump administration back in office because in twenty twenty four, you sent Washington a message it couldn't ignore. It's your government, and together we're taking it back. So check us out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you enjoy Victor Davis Hansen, we're there too. And drop me a follow on X at Bradley Devlin to stay updated with what's happening on the Signal Sit Hem. We are back with Victor Davis Hans on. In his own words, we're talking on Obama Appreciation Day, I'm sorry Sunday june fourteenth, and this episode is up on Thursday, june eighteenth . So Victor Scott, here's a headline and we have heard there first of all, there have been protests, significant protests against the murders of Henry No ak in England, the attempt beheading attempt of the gentleman, I forget his name, forgive me in Belfast . So throughout Ireland, throughout England , and including in Scotland, there have been these Glasgow there have been these protests. So here's a typical, I think a typical response from your typical Eurocrat. And this is John Swinney, and he's the first minister of Scotland. Here's the headline from it's from the Scotsman, the newspaper over there. Scotland must stand against racism, hatred, and intimidation. First Minister John Sweeney has said Scotland must stand against racism major intimidation after protests following a knife attack in Belfast. In a post on social media, Mr. Sweeney said the scenes we saw in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Ayr last night are unacceptable . Scotland is a welcoming nation, and those who choose to make their lives here are valued members of our community. Racism, hatred, intimidation have no place in Scotland. We must stand against it. Don't you what do they get? They have an AI thing that always turns out this boilerplate. This place has no place here. This isn't who we are, all that stuff. Why doesn't he just admit that there's no audit of the people coming in to the UK ? They come in illegally for the most part. They come from areas that are governed illiberally . They come with religious differences . They have ideas about women and homosexuals, other tribal not of their tribe , they have very negative views of them . And they won't assimilate or integrate or culturate at a pace that would be expected of any other immigrant. And so they have gotten a message that they're going to be subsidized with housing, education , food , medicine . And the host feels that they feel that the host owes them that . And then when they're deterred from the consequences of their behavior, whether it's a rape gang or walking down the street and hitting somebody , then they go to the next level , they being that's a collective stereotype generalization . But then this demagogic politician , then he doesn't say anything about this, but he wants to give a soap box platitude so that he feels good about himself, but he doesn't understand that no one's listened to him anymore. There's an entire Europe an movement that if they don't if they don't intervene and say , We expect every single person in the UK to have come legally and they must reside legally . And if you're an immigrant, you must be self supporting and fully employed , and you will face the full force of the law just like subjects of the crown . Now , if you can't do that, would you please leave ? But they can't say that . And I don't know why they can't say it. How do they got in this position where some cities are twenty, thirty percent and on indigenous people ? I don't know, but it's not working and it's going to spread. So the next thing that's going to happen is if they won't address it in a sober and moderate fashion, then you're going to get people frustrated. We saw those two girls. I think they were from Scotland. Remember that they were defending themselves from that predator and everything a knife and a hatchet? Yeah . And she was trying to protect protect was it her sister or her friend sister and everybody demonized her and said, Oh this, is you know, , and then he was found guilty the other day of actually trying to attack them or solicit them in some fashion. But if you don't, if you don't, if you allow rape grooming gangs and you don't do anything about it, then the people are going to get frustrated and do that and they're going to get violent. And so you have to treat everybody equally under the law and you have to have the rule of law. That's where we learn the rule of law from the Western tradition via Britain and if there's no rule of law . And you know, here in the United States, there was just a poll that said that it was overwhelmingly . It was seventy percent wanted everybody deported who was here illegally that committed a crime. And I thought, well, that doesn't do any good and who wouldn't. Then I read down fifty six percent , fifty six percent of the population want everybody deported who came here illegally. How could that be when we're told by the leftist media that all these people that are spitting at ice and throwing rocks at them and waving plastic fabric symbols . How could that be? Well, the public is tired of that. And they look at the ice people and they don't see demonic figures. They see largely minority people who want a living and want to protect their communities that are the most impacted from illegal immigration. Yeah . Look, why is an elitist type, whether you're government or media in England say say who believe they have the right you , lower middle class, white dude, are a racist for this and this reason. So they have some racism calibration , but they won't apply it to they won't because they have to who are they have this Marxist, Fukotian, Lakan Derida postmodern France Fannon idea that there is a binary . There's no middle. There's a victim and there's a oppressed and there's a victimizer and an oppressor. And the duty of all good Marxists is to and they have redefined that. Marx didn't talk about race, he talked about class and they said class doesn't matter. They said class doesn't matter because many, many, many people on their side of the binary are wealthier than the other oppressors . Barack Obama is much, much, much wealthier than Joe Biden . His children are much shaped than Hunter Biden , you know , and so but they are in the oppressed side . Nobody can define it. We don't know what makes a person on the oppressed side, but I guess it's the one Confederate drop, one sixteenth of non white blood or non Christian faith or whatever they use . And once they went down that road to be racially essential , they have to have something . I mean, even the tribe the Native American tribes who went down that side and said nobody can be in charge of this casino unless they have tribal blood. Well, in our society, what does that mean? That means they have to have DNA and I think it's one sixteenth or one eighth . And you can see how absurd this is. It's going back to the antebellum south . And that's what they're doing. And you can be very, very wealthy. You can be very privileged. You can have every advantage. And Cory Booker's parents were corporate grandees . He grew up in a very upscale, and we're supposed to think that he is a champion of the oppressed Jasmine Crocket t has two accents, one that reflects her middle class, upscale private schooling, and the other that she puts on when she wants to be authentically in her city . And it's a joke. The whole thing is a performance joke, performance art . And everybody's tired of it . And so this guy's going to get up and lecture, lecture, lecture, but he should ask himself, if you say black today or you say non white or the other, it's it's in a positive sense. But if you hear a government bureaucrat or a person in the media or a celebrity and they say white, it's almost always in a negative context. It's a pejorative and people who are somewhere between sixty seven and seventy one percent. And by the way, I think it's a ridiculous rub ric anyway because I live in a Hispanic area and in the summer I am darker than many of my Hispanic friends . So and I see people at the bank every day who are speaking Spanish and they're pure white. I don't know why we call them non white or I don't know why anybody calls anybody white or non white, but that's another story . But the point I'm making is that it's always in a pejorative and that's not sustainable. People will not put up with that if they and when you add the deplorables and irredeemables and Peter's struck, oh man, I smelled them all at Walmart. And the guy at CNN said I have more teeth and everybody in the Trump rally and Joe Biden , Ultra Maga, semi fascists, garbage, chumps and then clingers, they clean cling their guns, they cling their religion it's time to quit that because there's a big revolt and you don't want it to get like it is in Europe. But you keep, you know , when you have the young Ukrainian woman butchered and this conniver now he's suing the FBI Cody Carlos Brown. And then you had just recently the young kid walking outside his in Philadelphia and he was murdered and you had the woman set on fire in Chicago , these high profile black on white. And then the reaction is , I don't know what the reaction is, but you know, in the case of Carmelo Anthony , you had counter demonstrations where they basically said that he was the victim and the man he murdered was the oppressor . And when you have AI imagery of people urinating on Metcalf's supposed grave, I guess it was manufactured by AI, but still the message was hatred . And we got to get this university idea that if you're on the victim side of the binary, you're incapable of racism or oppression . That's just a get out of jail free card. That is just an invitation to be racist . The only thing that keeps us from behaving is some kind of deterrence, whether that's religious or legal or whatever or social or shame, but you remove some of those deterrents , and you're going to see human nature in the raw with a veneer stripped off . And you keep pushing it in Scotland, you know, you have a guy and he's out in the middle of the street and he says he starts screaming that he's going to behead this man as he puts his eye out because of the color of his skin . Or you have this immigrant family who's hiding the murder weapon and claiming that the man who's bleeding before them all is a racist when he was the victim of an assault and you don't do anything about it and you arrest you're going to have a reaction . Yeah . You know, Eli Steele, our friend, had a really interesting comment on all this Victor, maybe we can close out but let me just read this and you say what you wish. He this was on X. He wrote our white guilt leaders will seize upon this violence this is the protests as proof that they must double down on their anti racist policies, they will say, Oh look at those racists we knew all along they will never see their own complicity in creating this monster for years . These elites made certain questions unspeakable. They called you a racist, if you pointed out policy failures, if you saw patterns or told the truth, you were a bigot. Now it looks like the words have stopped. So we shouldn't be surprised when force fills the void where honest speech was denied . Will these elites ever admit that what they built was not redemption but a new tribalism, one that they sacr ifice cohesion and color blindedness , not for justice but for their own selfish innocence . And is it worth what? I thought it was very good what you like. Yeah. I think it is. And he's I like the word tribalism because in every seminal text of the West, historical or philosophical , it's very clear that tribalism is pre civilizational . You read Tacitus Germania, which is kind of favorable to the Germans, but they're tribal people. They're not Romans. I don't mean racially, they're inferior. What I'm trying to tell you is that they don't have a system of laws and open descent and protected habas corpus . So in the West, the idea is that we emerge from being tribal people to a Western tradition started with Greece and Rome , enhanced through Europe in the medieval period, expanded with seminal documents like the Magna Carta, enriched by the Renaissance , the Florentine Venetian republics , all the way to the French, Scottish and British Enlightenment, and then to where we are. And what's the common theme? We are not tribal people . We don't just judge people by their race . And people who do that are pre civilizational . And you know it doesn't work. That's why half the world does not work. And that's why people are coming here. That's so weird because the people who came from Somalia were a tribal people that were killing each other. two hundred thousand deaths and the people coming from Nigeria are killing Christians , and the people coming from Rwanda are killing people. And the people coming from southern Mexico are the victim of cartel violence. And often that's directed at particular tribal people in Mexico . And I don't understand why anybody would want to introduce that in a Western society because it's very dangerous because that's the innate American, that's the innate human essence without civilization, without religion, without shame, without culture. Strip it all away and you get to I'm going to be on that guy's side because he looks like me . Yeah it doesn't work . That's you that then we get the state of nature, right? Life becomes nasty . That's what's so strange about the Democratic Party today with the anti Semitis and the pro Islamic stuff, it's really a pre civilizational movement. Yeah. It's very criminal pro criminal. It is pro criminal. Yeah. Well, Victor, you've been terrific. Got a couple comments of to read . I want to say ahead of times , you'll be on with the great Samuy Wink, but happy forthcoming Father's Day to all those. Thank you . You too . Yeah, thank you. So a couple of comments. Robert Julian Blair writes very short and sweet. I'm impressed with VD Hanson. It's obvious that he's quite brilliant. Of course it is. Then Sylvia Coates writes , as always, fantastic conversation VDH a true scholar with true insight into the history and politics of the world. Never miss a program and final mente solutions three writes. Thank you for saying it, Victor. The bad black stereotyping has now been extended another two hundred years by our own black behaviors. Thank you for the sympathetic understanding of blacks who want nothing to do with this race . I think the majority want nothing to do with it. I really one of the the uplifting things is so many people have come out and for the first time in my life said yes , blacks in ordinarily are involved in crime given their demographic, and yes, they are anywhere from five to fifty times more likely to attack whites depending on the nature of the crime and the location than whites or blacks, but you don't understand. We're the victims of it too, the black community, the black middle class . And that's and then we get tarred generalization and stereotyping. And as I said , it's kind of ironic because where I work for most of my life there, the two closest friends I had, and I thought the two smartest people, I don't want to judge people by their intelligence or anything. It's just a value judgment. But the two most capable were Tom Soul and Shelby Steele . And Kondolysa Rice is our director. So there you have it. And three of the most accomplished people , probably the most accomplished at Hoober are all African American. Shelby is the father of the aforementioned Eli jah. Eli . And rel atively, none of them came from the upper aristocracy . They came from the middle class or the lower middle class, and they worked themselves up and most of them came before the era of affirmative action. So it's he's right. The black community is being unnecessary but that being said , it's going to be much easier for the black community to condemn this type of behavior than it is for the white community to do that . Absolutely We are everybody's self critical of the white community, you know, we just mentioned all of the words that have been used , deplorables, all these things. So we're very self critical, but we don't I mean when I grew up, there was a lot of racial disparagement granted , but now the word that is the most if you say black or white, black is usually more in academic circles are among the upper classes more of a positive word than white . Maybe not on the street. I don't know, but it's got to end and the way to end it is just not to take in consideration anything and let the market adjudicate Wow. If there's not one white football player , then I say practice football better if you want more white representation in the NBA . If you're upset about that, it's mostly black players . Maybe it's because meritocratically they're better . They track us harder or whatever their skill sets. If you want more non Asian Joe Biden got remember he said, can You't go into a donut shop and see somebody not from India. Remember that? India. Yeah. Yeah. If you want more non Indians in donut shop, then go open one and work harder. And the same thing about if you want to go to Stanford University and you think it's important to be able to get a Stanford BA, I'm not sure that that is true , then start opening SAT camps and school uniforms and teach Latin at K through twelve in the inner city and you will get into Stanford . You can do it . But don't look at certain groups and say it's unfair because this group is overrepresented . You know, well, amen, brother. Well, a final, final thing, I write civil thoughts comes out every week. It's a free email newsletter. I do that for the Center for Civil Society. It comes out on Fridays and has it fourteen recommended readings and I often cite articles from the European Conservative . And then there's another great website that covers Europe, the Brussels Signal, and I recommend folks check them out regardless of the newsletter I write. It's being overwhelmed by violent crime and illegal Islamic immigration. Yeah, there ain't no flames of looms there anymore. It's a Mecca, Mecca West. Well, Victor, you've been terrific. Thanks so much for all the wisdom you shared. Thank you folks for watching and for listening. Check out Victor's website, the blade of Perseus, Victorhansen. com on EXES at VD Hansen on Facebook, VDH's Morning Cup. Thanks to the good folks at Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club on Facebook. God bless every body. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening and watching . Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at Victorhansen. com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.