Pathology and the Ivy League | Victor Davis Hanson | EP 325

I was very surprised at how the translation of biblical writings boosted the development of literacy around the world. Illiteracy was the norm. The pastor's house was the first school and every morning he began singing. The Christian faith is probably a sung religion. 80 percent of Scripps memorization today exists only because of what is sung. This is amazing. Here we have a Gutenberg Bible printed on the Johan Gutenberg press. Science and religion are opposing forces in the world, but historically that has not been the case. Now the book is. Available to everyone, from Shakespeare to modern education, medicine and science, to civilization itself, it is the most influential book in all of history and hopefully people can come away with at least a sense of it if they The aim is to facilitate people's ability to make positive decisions. changes in their own life, there is nothing you can do that is more helpful for that than educating them and if you want to help them understand who they are in the deepest sense, beyond the superficial attractions of tribalism, let's say you have to educate. deeply into this historical realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being and that was the appropriate role of universities for years.

As I imagine it, our role was twofold and we were going to teach a mathematics of the inductive method as opposed to the deductive method so that people, when they looked at The Human Experience through art, literature or history, would look at Exempla and then come to an overriding general conclusion drawn from the evidence. Instead of saying I have an idea and I'm going to select the evidence that one thing was that we taught them Socratic inductive medicine and the other was that we had to give them some kind of arsenal or scope of knowledge or reference points, so that was Some of the things that are most pragmatic since the humanities were able to do were being able to give a person a complete reference of knowledge so that they didn't have to live and learn something by writing or by having an example.

Hello everyone. Today I have a guest I've wanted to talk to for a long time, Dr. Victor Davis Hansen. He is the Martin and Illy Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, focusing on classics and military history. He is an accomplished academic teacher. and author, he has taught at Stanford Hillsdale College, the US Naval Academy at Pepperdine University, his books, many of them 26, I think include World War II, The End of Sparta, The Soul of Battle, carnage and culture and a case for Trump in 2019, but I think I'll start today with a discussion about citizenship. I'll just make a couple of comments.

You know, one of the things I've noticed in the last few years. I guess in the course of my life it really is that during my life the word citizenship seems like or citizen. It seems to be replaced by the word consumer, which I always thought was a bad replacement given that citizen has this. You know, it has an unconditional, traditional, dignified connotation that the word consumer seems to completely lack. Well, you recently wrote an entire book on citizenship. and then I thought we could work our way through that and you contrast citizens with pre-citizens (the book, by the way, is called The Dying Citizen), how the tribalism and globalism of progressive elites are destroying the idea of ​​states United and, first of all, the book begins well.

They all denounce that destruction, but they also contrast the modern idea of ​​citizenship of a citizen with the pre-modern idea of, say, a peasant or a resident or a tribe, so let's delve into that a little bit, yes, I'm talking about the idea of ​​citizenship, which is quite recent. In the long history of civilization, it appeared around 700 BC. C. in rural Greece and spread quite quickly, but by the 5th century there were 1,500 city-states and it was the first time that citizens were self-governing and that meant they were clearly defined they formed their own militias they determined the circumstances under which Those who would go to war voted for their own officials and, more importantly, had property rights and could pass on property.

I think that was a catalyst for citizenship. right of inheritance that the estate could not expropriate or possess property of the individual and me and then that long Odyssey took us, of course, to the founding of the United States and there were clear distinctions between a resident living in the United States. States in a citizen a single citizen could vote a single citizen could hold office a single citizen could leave the borders and return to the United States of his or her own free will a single citizen was eligible for federal services or in most states and the citizen served in the military, I don't think any of them still apply those distinctions between a resident and a citizen with the exception of holding office and that is under attack.

I know here in California people who are not only non-citizens but are here illegally can vote in, say, a Berkeley School Board election and there are efforts now to ensure that non-citizens can run for public office, sit Non-citizens, serving in the military, non-citizens can, in fact, cross the border more easily than you or me. probably and that's why we are a nation that we have never had before this 50 million people in the United States who were born in a foreign country of different statuses some were legal residents some are illegal residents some are citizens some ordinary are round-trip immigrants and that is the highest in real numbers and in percentages of the population and unfortunately there comes a time when we, the hosts, have lost confidence in the traditional Melting Pot of assimilation integration in your marriage and therefore we are beginning to return to a situation before civilization.

Tribalism I think large swaths of the United States are tribal now, okay, so let's start addressing that anthropologically and psychologically, so in 600 BC. C., something like that, it seems like you get something like a transformation of the idea of ​​the tribe that wouldn't really have been an idea, right? A tribe is not an idea, a tribe is a natural branch of our primate heritage, that's a good way to think about it and a tribe would have been something like an extended kinship group and was held together by our our primate social biology is something similar to a troop of chimpanzees or perhaps a troop of bonobos and then, as we became more able to formalize abstract formal forms, that idea or that reality of tribal membership transmuted into something that actually had stable properties and that would be the idea of ​​a citizen and therefore you get a layer of abstraction on top of that that starts to technically and explicitly state what it means to be a member of a group and then along with that you get a set of rights and responsibilities that are associated. with that group, but also the possibility of an expanded, expanded and limited membership, which is also formalized and, as the Greeks did with so many things, they took something that was part and parcel of our biological propensity, so that propensity to kinship and tribalism and converted it. in an explicit philosophical notion and from that I suppose that both the idea of ​​intrinsic human rights and human responsibilities developed and all of that was linked to the notion of citizenship and even now, when you hear people talk about citizenship, they focus a lot more in the rights on the right than in the responsibilities they assume, the great advance was that that person replaced their primary loyalty to someone who had blood ties or looked like them or the same place and they transferred it to an abstraction of the state and What that meant was for the first time there was an embryonic sense of meritocracy, you know, and you can really see it today.

I have traveled almost, I think, to every country in the Middle East except Iran, and I am always curious when I was in Libya, Egypt or Tunisia, why they don't work, even considering that some countries have enormous natural resources and I always hear a chorus, well, you know, we hire our first cousin or we hire our second cousin, that there is still a tribal loyalty there and what is tragic. America is that meritocracy and that multiracial, multiracial, multireligious body politic was united by a primary loyalty to the idea of ​​America, where people you know enriched America with their food, their fashion, or their art, among others. music and that enriched the United States culturally, but they did not incorporate the Mexican ideas of constitutional government as they were or they did not bring the Russian ideas of individual freedom, they did not touch the core and that core united us and now we can see that that is no longer true , that people are retribalizing and they're starting to identify with their Ken group, their ethnic group or their religious group, and what's scary now in the United States is that we've seen when you have a geographic Force multiplier and we're starting to see that with the red-blue migration it's something similar to what happened in the 1850s where there was a Mason-Dixon line, so to speak, of a very different culture that branched off from the north and if this continues, I think that we're going to see a kind of traditionalist America that claims to follow the founding principles in red states of limited government, less regulation, small taxes, and the idea of ​​a citizen giving up their primary allegiance to the State versus the Blue State model California Illinois New York where various identity politics groups or special interest groups lobby for influence and you can see what happens at the hot mic scene at Los Angeles City Hall where all these people from the Latino Council got a microphone caught hot where they explicitly defined the new idea of ​​citizen and it was that their main identity group was at war with the people of Oaxaca, they were at war with the blacks, they were at war with the gays and they were angry about their representation.

They are not demographically proportional to their number in the population, that's what they said, and I think that was a future for the country and that is what is happening in California at the present. The current administration's New Year's goals are to tax spending and turn a blind eye to inflation if this is at odds with your goals. If you are tired of the government playing with your savings and retirement plans, then you need to get in touch. Contact the experts at Birch Gold today For over 5,000 years, gold has withstood inflation, geopolitical turmoil, and stocks. market crashes with the help of the experts at Birch Gold, you can own gold and attack a protected retirement account.

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You know, because the postmodern critique is that all unifying narratives are what you would call expressions of arbitrary power and domination of a nation, and I really don't think that's true. I don't think that's true in Western societies and the reason I think that's technically false is because there's an idea in Western society that I think is fundamentally that the spaced logo is part Greek and part Judeo-Christian that the individual is the appropriate level of analysis in some real sense and that the individual has intrinsic value and dignity, but there is more to it than that is that it is necessary that the intrinsic dignity and value of the individual be recognized and set aside by law in some sense . honored by the law because the individual has something to offer the group and that is the uniqueness of his being, let's say, and that if you allow people to be free or encourage their freedom, then they can exchange that uniqueness with everyone else and freely and that in that commerce must be found both in peace and, let's say, inabundance, and I think that principle is not just another narrative.

I think it is the predicate of both peace and economic well-being, but conservatives and that's okay, that's okay my friend, I think. you comment on all that or another way of saying it is that the United States was based on an idea of ​​a quality of opportunity that because we are not born equal or have different life experiences or we inherit or we do not inherit or We are healthy or we are long-lived or not, we don't try to match that in terms of economic reward, we just let people follow their own trajectories and then we have other methods of appealing to their magnaminity, so the philanthropic, the religious, uh.

In humanism we have all these ways where if people do better than others, we allow them to be creative and try to give something back to society or at least use their talents, even if it's for profit, build a better bridge or a dam instead of the alternative, which is the tension in Western civilization that begins, in reality, the socialist impulse begins with the Greeks, there is a tension of that with the Pythagoreans, but the other idea and that is what What we are fighting now is the equality of outcomes that we are going to name some Platonic Guardians and give them untold power and then their Infinity.

Wisdom, they are going to do two things, they are going to force people to be equal, what they call Equity and they are never going to be subject to the consequences of their own ideology because they need special exemptions given their enormous responsibilities and their talent and what What we see now is that the Coastal Elite in the United States is beginning to demand behaviors, principles, issues and policies that they themselves would never follow and have no intention of following and is based on each person having an innate right to be equal to another person or was what Aristotle once said a man in a democracy and he feared that this feels the same when voting with another man so he feels that by extension he should be equal in all other aspects of his life and that was what the philosophical concern about the democracy, so it always evolved towards a more radical form of equality.

I think we are now in the final stage where almost everyone feels that they have a grievance against the State and therefore are entitled to compensatory money or repertoire or land here in California, when we were discussing reparations, suddenly people were bidding at Oakland City Hall and suggesting they were owed eight hundred thousand dollars and apparently they had a grievance even though they were six generations away from slavery and maybe four generations away from uh they were in the fourth generation of Civil Rights Movement they had complaints against people who had never owned slaves in California, for example, they had never been a slave state, but it was that mentality um and you know, a lot of people warned us about this.

Tocqueville said that the problem we would face in the United States is that most people would innately prefer to be poorer and equal to everyone who is better off, but some are better off than others, and he felt that if Well, that was, that would be a very dangerous development. I think we've already reached that point. Yeah, well, I guess that's to some extent why there's a mandate against greed. Greed in the Ten Commandments. You know you are. You're not supposed to covet or envy your neighbor's donkey or his wife or his house, and yeah, I mean, part of the reason is that if no one can have anything more than anyone else, then no one can have anything. at all, and that has generally been the case.

The state of humanity during the longest stretches of human history is a lot like if we are going to allow a rising tide to lift all boats, we have to allow some people to rise faster than others in multiple dimensions, and like that, and I don't see any way out of that and it's certainly not the case that these hypothetically egalitarian systems of government like communism would ever produce anything that had less of a Pareto distribution or an unequal distribution than capitalist societies. I mean, everyone was much poorer, but the rich were still much richer than everyone else and there's also something there, you talked about identity and I've seen this happen on the pathological thinking front, so the leftists who are pushing for equality of outcomes insisted that if there were differences in socioeconomic outcomes that could be identified by group, then that was prior evidence of systemic oppression, say, but they deviated from a certain peculiarity regarding group identity, which is that group identity is actually infinitely fragmentable and therefore outside of the initial identity political theorists were the intersectionalists who argued that while you were oppressed, say if you were Latino and you were oppressed if you were a woman, but the joint interaction between Latinos and women made you even more especially oppressed and then you could add gay to that or any other and what you see happening on multiple fronts as a result is that the litany of potential ethnic groups increases the number of them and then the number of interactions increases and that increases exponentially as you add more identity categories and What that essentially means is that the problem of calculating equity starts to become technically impossible because each person's identity is so complex on the intersectional front that it doesn't even exist a hypothetical way of deciding whether a given socioeconomic outcome is equitable and so when I looked at that, I thought well, Western culture solved that problem several thousand years ago by pointing out that the appropriate level of analysis is the individual because the individual has a unique identity that is in some sense a consequence of older, but singularly, multiplicity group identities.

What would you say if it was uniquely representative of each individual and then you let individuals compete and cooperate in a fair market and that's the best possible way to move toward the right balance between equity and wealth? That is what it seems. I think it's right and you. I can see where this leads - it is logical that we end up with a ward of Churchill or Elizabeth Warren who would of necessity fabricate a victimized identity; she was the first, quote-unquote, Native American law professor at Harvard just on that basis and then in the other realm, when you start replacing class interest or economic status with race, then the left really hit on something , I think it was really Barack Obama between 2009 and 2016.

He took a pretty ossified word, diversity, and recalibrated it to mean that we're no longer going to look for victims based on their income because that's mutable. In fact, Marxism never worked in the United States because this free-market capitalism and lots of free land in the 19th century was always an upward movement. mobility and therefore we would never have a continually oppressed class; In fact, today people rise and fall in and out of the middle and upper middle classes, so what I think Obama did was redefine race in America, it's not a binary between 88 percent white and 12 percent white. percent black, but he came up with this word diversity that replaced class differentiation or class oppressions or class grievances and said it's 30 percent of the population, we'll call them non-white and therefore they're diverse. and then we end up in this ridiculous situation where, to take a caricature, you have Meghan Markle, the duchess, who was half black, lamenting to Oprah Winfrey, who is a billionaire, about their shared grievances about not being white or Lebron James complaining and So that was a very brilliant thing that the left did because once they made race the arbiter of oppression and being the oppressed and the victimized then class no longer mattered and now we have this elite that says they are not white in A particular. percentage and suddenly we no longer care about the circumstances of their home, their car, their wealth, their income, it doesn't matter anymore, they are going to be perpetual victims because they are diverse and the left is really massaged. that in such a way that I don't think anyone knew what was going on until they told us, well, there's a real attraction to a kind of deep narcissism there and I think I first encountered it probably in the Ivy League. schools in the US, so I'm Canadian and I'm not very familiar with the more differentiated class structure in the US, so when I went to teach at Harvard it was an anthropological adventure for me and let's call it, an investigation. oriented adventure and an intellectual adventure and uh, I didn't understand as much as I do now how the Ivy League schools played in the US in terms of ensuring upward mobility and I learned that at Harvard, I think it was when I was there.

In the '90s, the estimate was that 40 percent of Harvard undergraduates would be multimillionaires by the age of 40 and that was 30 years ago, so it was a pretty substantial amount of money back then and the point is that Yes I got into an Ivy League school as soon as you got in, you were basically a member of the one percent. Now you might have been a junior member, but you were definitely a member and I thought that was perfectly fine because, in a sense, the Ivy Leagues did a very good job of selection based on merit, now it wasn't perfect, there were Legacy students, for example, and you know there was some gaming in the system there, but fundamentally Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues had transformed from the old ones. boys clubs in the 1960s in elite intellectual institutions in the 1990s, but what I also saw and this was very interesting was that being young members of the one percent with something almost certain is a hallmark of long-term success. term as a consequence of the Ivy League. admission was not enough for many students and their idiot teachers had to be labeled oppressed.

Working for them too, so as far as I was concerned, we had this strange spectacle of these incredibly lucky Ivy League students being offered an opportunity. Well, is it really incomparable in the history of humanity to not only benefit as a consequence of being the beneficiaries of this amazing system, but at the same time claim the status of poor and oppressed and claim at the same time to be avatars and representatives of that oppressed group? me too? I thought, Jesus, you like being rich and powerful in your youthful way is not enough for you, you must have all the virtues of the rich and all the privileges and opportunities, and you must have all the virtues of the poor and oppressed at the same time. time.

Time is like that, it seems a little excessive to me and that is reflected in the people that you are describing, who have this incredible wealth and opportunity and yet they present themselves as, you know, canonical victims of an oppressive system. I think in our lifetime we are going to see the end of Stanford Berkeley's Ivy League winning mark as a one percent entry mark and so we are no longer in the meaning when we had proportional representation in Admissions and Recruiting. that was kind of the modus operandi until George Floyd. So 12 of the students were African American, even if they averaged 200 points less than Asian students on the sat or we had about 65 percent white Asians, of course, they were treated like Jews in the 1930s they were discriminated against, so their number would only be about 20 percent; otherwise it would have been 40 and Latinos are about 12, but after George Floyd we went into compensatory or radical repertory admission, so Stanford, where I worked, just announced their new class profile is 23 percent white and of them 55 54 are women, so there are about 12 percent white men and the SAT to accommodate that became optional instead of required, but this was what was interesting about some of the statistics they would do.

I did not allow anyone to have information on how many students who were admitted this year actually took the optional option. They didn't publish it, but for some reason they did publish the fact. I think they were proud of it. I think one of those very rare students. it's 0.1 or something like that who get a perfect score, which is almost impossible to do on the SAT in math and in analysis and of course in English and composition they rejected 70 percent of them 70 wow and then what are? You can see it in free fall because what happens when you bring in a lot of students who were not competitive from K-12 and almost instantly and arbitrarily declare that they are Ivy League students, then they walk into these classes and then the teachers are in this dilemma because either they have to do one of two things, one of three things, or they have to radically change the curriculum to facilitate people who were not adequately prepared and are doing it in part, or they are going to have to radically change the system of grades uh so a person who would have gotten a d or a C gets a b or a and they're doing it in some cases or some feel like they're going to die on the altar of standards and they're starting to grade. according to what people really earn, but when we have 15,000 administrators oradministrative staff and sixteen thousand students you can see that we have a kind of curator system and many of these are these new diversity equity inclusions of ours and so if a member faculty holds on to the standards it holds on I guess that's a good word , then it has a systemic racist pedigree because it's deliberately giving lower marks in this narrative to people of color and the result of how it all works, I think in the end is that Silicon Valley and all these people privately, when you talk to them, prefer say a coder from Georgia Tech who from Stanford or themselves, they are actually giving tests to people in a stealthy way, so if you want to go work at Google or you want to go to a startup and you come with the degree from Stanford that no longer is entry because they know that the race is not competitive with Cal State San Luis Obispo or many left Hillsdale College and then what they are doing is they are offering exams or should I say requiring them, so I think that in a brief summary Yale let in that 50 percent of its student body was white.

I think 55 percent were women, so about 25 percent were white men from that campus and so on. they have deliberately taken an entire demographic and when I think you wisely pointed out the legacies and the athletes of that small narrow demographic or many or if not most of the legacies, so what we have done now in the space of three years is practically disenfranchising the working class white man who had a chance to go to these Blue Chip colleges based on merocratic s.a.t scores or gpas and they are no longer on campus, they have disappeared into the space where they don't There is room for them given the demands of this identity profile.

So, we could define, let's talk technically for a minute, so that everyone can understand what these selection criteria really mean, so that you can technically define a meritocratic selection process, you could say imagine that you have a result, so first you need a outcome that could be job performance or lifetime net productivity, something like that and you can argue a lot about what the outcome variable should be, but it's usually associated with something like economic productivity and having made that measurement, It could be income, it could be the number of people you employ. in your life it may be the number of businesses you generate it may be the number of creative ventures you engage in there are a variety of different measures of, say, the productive and creative output of your life and then you could say that you use a process of meritocratic selection if you lose a statistical procedure that has been linked to that outcome measure, so you could say, for example, are there things that we can measure that predict lifelong creative or productive ability? and the answer is yes, we actually know what they are, so one of them is general cognitive ability. which is often assessed with IQ tests or SAT or mcouts or Gres standardized tests and the other is personality with a secondary interest factor, what would you say?

Therefore, people who are productive have high general cognitive ability that can be assessed fairly quickly. They tend to be conscientious, which is a personality trait and that makes them good managers and administrators, or they tend to be very open and that makes them creative entrepreneurs and it also helps to some extent to be somewhat free of negative emotions and those are basically the category of predictors on the interest front have interest in people versus interest in things and the types of interesting things tend to be more frequently male and tend to follow the streams of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, so that we really know how to select people on the basis of merit, we do general tests of cognitive ability, personality and interest, and you can provide a very economically valuable service to each individual and to the state as a whole by selecting according to those criteria because then you select to the people who can benefit the most. radically from being placed with their peers and from education and the data on this is now very clear the alternative.

I've talked to people like Adrian Wooldridge about this and you mention it in your book on citizenship as well, you might say, well, what is the alternative to meritocracy and Wooldridge's hypothesis was that in the absence of a technical meritocracy, returned to Dynasty, so there was already talk of aristocratic transmission of status or nepotism in relation to kinship, so as soon as the principle of Merit was abandoned, the path to meritocracy was opened. in all likelihood to all kinds of corrupt admissions processes, so universities are going to be fighting without already being corrupt because one of the ways they discriminate against Asians is that we all lose the right not to maximize our exploitation of the productive sectors and competent Asians, let's say that the way they discriminate against them is by considering certain stereotypical Asian personality traits as not appropriate on the personality front and they do this to manipulate all the admission criteria based on race and I think that have even in the last two years, everything would be based on the old complaint against them was on this emission profile test, standardized test scores, GPA and what they called community service or character, whatever we want to talk about , it was amorphous, so they would. go after Asian students with that and they would say, Well, they're robotic or yeah, they're one-dimensional, okay, but now they've gotten rid of all the standardized testing and they don't even do any so they don't need to do that anymore, so they've basically increased Asian admissions, they have Asian admissions between 20 and 25 based on the principle that they are about 12 percent of the population, they will not sue if they are between 20 and 25 years old. 25 and they can exclude them any way they want now because there is no sat and there is and what is the next Horizon as you saw in the I think at Cornell right now there is a big movement to abolish grades and in the new school everyone in In New York, everyone wants to get an A and automatically into the new school and we're going to see that because what's happening in these Ivy Leagues very quickly is almost surprising at the speed of light, that graduation and admission are now synonymous, in other words, once you're admitted and that was true to some extent in the past when we go back to what you mentioned, the old C Ivy League gentleman from the '40s or the 19th century and now we're saying that if you get into Harvard, Yale or Stanford and you can't do the job, you have the right to graduate, it doesn't matter and we will make the necessary adjustments, you have to get something for your three hundred thousand dollars. on tuition and then why not go so you can think about it?

Think of it this way, you can think of it biologically, as I tend to think is a fun metaphor, but I tend to think of a whale carcass and here's why. It takes a long time for a whale to develop a full body and then if it comes to the beach there is enough for everyone to eat for a while, and what you see in all kinds of large organizations is that they build a brand on the La Ivy League definitely built a brand in the US and that brand has tremendous value for a long time because the Ivy League admissions standards were so high that you can be virtually certain that if you hired a graduate, statistically they will probably have the better performance. and all of that was a consequence of the admissions, the rigor of the admissions policy, very little consequence of the quality of the education, by the way, almost each and every business school knows this too, they know perfectly well that a large proportion of the value to offer potential employers is a 99th percentile score on the MCAT upon admission for their MBA students, they know very well that I have spoken to dozens of them and so on for a long time because the IVs were so meritocratic that they could justify what they were charging and they could justify their rigorous selection because there was immense demand for their graduates, especially in the financial industries front.

Most of the kids I taught at Harvard, interestingly enough, went on to pursue careers in finance, which I thought was a shame. I know this because Harvard wasn't producing many scientists, for example, but whatever their cognitive ability and work ethic were highly valued by potential employers, so now you have a group there that is basically a trademark and is valuable. to take and therefore because IVs have generated this reputation of high quality that can be exploited and what is happening right now is a huge invasion of parasitic exploiters and a large part of them are administrators.

You said there are 15,000 administrators at Stanford for sixteen thousand students. Yes, that's hilarious. that's funny, there's no way that can last for a man, so no, I mean, it's very similar to the Russian army, uh, and it was a disastrous year in 1940, at the end of 1941, when we had so many commissars that they oversaw military operations that had no intrinsic value other than preventing and supposedly making sure that everyone was proper Marxist, that the German army almost reached Moscow and then of course Stalin stopped it in the extremists, he said, you know what we're going to start getting with people like Konyev. and zhukov and go back to a merit system and what's wrong with the university, they are adopting almost something like the commissioner system where we have these intrusives and here in California almost every university has a diversity oath where a member of the faculty has to explicitly state what they have done and what they will do to foster diversity, equitable inclusion and each candidate has to make a statement about what they have done in the past and show their commitment, like loyal Leos, as you remember . in the United States in the 50s and what is this destruction of meritocracy is taking over all the aspects and the past that failed, so we have a comasar system that failed, we had the oath of loyalty, that was, you know . it was a war, it was the antithesis of meritocracy, and then going into this on the basis of race, and then not having to be held to merocratic performance standards, it's kind of like the British military in the 19th century or late , especially at the end of the 18th century. where you could buy a captain and see that, in fact, it was okay to be an officer, you had to put up money and the irony was that one of the reasons for the surprising success of the Napoleonic system was that after the Revolution they had a bureaucratic standard. for the officer corps and marshals of France they were not all aristocratic, they were based on merit and the French army ran wild for 15 years on that basis until it was exhausted, but the point I want to make is did you think you could do it .

You couldn't think of a better system if you planned for years to destroy this Ivy League brand than to destroy standardized testing by admitting people who can't take the test and perform at a level that would be easy. I guess you'd say admissible almost anywhere else I taught at Cal State Fresno and Cal State Fresno for 20 years. I taught those standards at the time. I was there where the admission standards are more rigorous than the Ivy League. Now everyone had to take the S.A.T. You don't have to do that anymore and we never had people who were, it was politically correct, but we never had people looking over our shoulders, we never had students who reported us for the language or the woke language or never A dean called us and told us that they were late to their diversity statement, so yes, you are inviting a level of corruption.

The corruption of this system is simply because we have these people who are writing these statements and I have seen them and I mean it is tragic it is tragic if not pathetic where they say and I and when I was eight years old I sat on a bus with people who they were not white or on the other hand I was 15 someone called me a name and since then I have been aware of the racist nature of America and none of this has anything to do with being able to teach a classical language or build a bridge or design a coding system and it's going to have consequences if you haven't done it yet I think you already have we'll come back in a moment first we wanted to give you a preview of Jordan's new series, Exodus, for the Hebrews to create history as we know it, don't get away with anything and then you might think that you can twist the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow down to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost, you will pay the piper who will take you out of that slavery to Freedom even if it takes you to the desert and we will see that there is something else happening here that is much more cosmic and deeper than you can imagine.

The highest Spirit to whom we are indebted appears precisely as that spirit. who allies himself with the cause of freedom against tyranny I want the villains to be punished but you want the villainslearn before you have to pay the maximum price that is such a Christian question well I know that in the ucal system that 75 of the applicants for junior teaching positions have their applications rejected on the basis of inadequate statements of Dei before have your research records evaluated, so it's good here, I guess it's the optimistic side, so tell me what you think about it, so I'm starting.

I'm involved. At two university startups, one at Ralston College in Savannah, we're trying to build a Humanities research or Humanities Institute there and we had our first class this year and it went extremely well, very, very carefully selected students, we had a group of thousand applicants. So we were able to choose 25 students and we selected them in every way possible and we had a great class and that is a kind of physical institution and we will see how it goes because it is complicated, but I am going to start an academy that my daughter is working in this in November, we have about 30 teachers on board, it is now called Peterson Academy and we hope to reduce the cost of a bachelor's degree, we will start with humanities and social sciences at four thousand. dollars in total now it's hard to replicate the social element of college and that's a big part of college: the new peer group and the people you meet and all that and the learning element is hard to virtualize, but when I hear that kind Of the things that you're talking about, what comes to mind in some part is the market opportunity because the fact that students are now paying an enormous amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to go to an Ivy League Institute that is simultaneously failing. to educate themdivert their future profits into the pockets of greedy managers and more and more of them and sabotage their own brand simultaneously, it just seems to me that that is not a sustainable model and you said you know you believe that larger companies, for example Google and and other companies that are really concerned about performance will still stop considering an Ivy League degree as a mark of ability and that means they will know over a 10 or 15 year period that they are going to go under. your own economic model maybe I also think there are opportunities for a new education I think there is I agree I totally agree with you that there are 650,000 fewer students in the United States than last year and about two million fewer than 10 years ago and I mean they say it's demographic but it's not demographic because the country increases by about 2 million people a year and what's happening is especially I think with the zoom phenomenon uh during the coveted lockdowns we're getting people like what you and I are. doing or what your podcast or Prager University, which offers an alternative for automotive PhDs and people who want continuing education and then we're getting a much greater emphasis on vocational education.

Yes, when the lockdown happened, sociology majors didn't save us, you know? taking six units in eight years and, you know, sixty thousand dollars in student loans, we needed qualified carpenters, plumbers, electricians and roofers, and they pay, and real dollars are generating more than ever, so we're getting a bunch more large number of people saying, "No, I don't want to be burdened by these student loans and I'm going to have a vocational career and then, as you say, the third alternative is these schools, a university like Hillsdale traditionally had about a thousand students, I think they are up to sixteen hundred and their The dilemma right now, as I understand it and I teach there a couple of weeks every year for the last 20 years, is that they are being inundated by applicants who have not gotten into Harvard, Yale, Princeton or Stanford and They require studies that they had already obtained.

In terms of academic rigor or admissions rigor, it has been comparable to Oberlin or Williams or Amherst, but now they have a real dilemma because they have this traditionalist idea, I think very deservedly, that they teach the person in. its entirety, so if you go to Hillsdale College you learn to shoot and you study the Second Amendment and you lift weights, you absolutely lift weights, it's a hundred percent 360 degree, 24/7 idea of ​​citizenship. , but when you bring in all these people who are now looking at a Hillsdale because it's merocratic and because it has high standards, but many of them are in no way conservative, then what do you do if you're Hillsdale when I think you are?

I think they're interviewing them and you mentioned that's why I thought it was fascinating that you were interviewing your applicants, they're interviewing 95 of the people that are applying and now they have to enforce it pretty rigorously at Hillsdale and you know we're also in conversations with Hillsdale regarding possible accreditation for these online courses because I really like the Hillsdale model and you know, there's something to think about here on the technology front as well, so you know, I learned that I spent a lot of time analyzing the relationship between psychological tests and productivity and creativity in all aspects.

I guess I know quite a bit about that and one of the things I learned was that part of the reason why universities have valuable degrees is because they were very careful in terms of meritocratic admission and they also have There is a lock on accreditation and so So, once you have an MBA, you're obviously accredited as an MBA graduate from a certain school and that means that you had a certain peer network and a certain level of intellectual competence to even get into the program, a certain degree of conscientiousness to rigorously follow the program and pass it and pass it, so that the value in universities is largely nested within the accreditation.

Now you can imagine, and I don't think this is technically impossible. You could imagine a blockchain accreditation testing system that would be freely available to people you know. I would do it for profit, but so that if you wanted to claim Bachelor of Arts equivalents regarding your knowledge of the humanities, you could take a series of objective tests that don't. The administrators won't bother me and I'll get their proxy that way, so imagine that it is a company that I have envisioned and that we are carrying out right now. Imagine you could get a um uh and produce a data set of ten thousand multiple choices.

The questions say that in American history you could do that by purchasing multiple choice tests from high school and college teachers across the country. Well, now we would have to administer them to several thousand people and then we could analyze each question for its accuracy. a general knowledge domain predictor you can do, you can sort them, then imagine you have a program that can randomly pick questions of equivalent difficulty level from that entire set of ten thousand, you could set up a system that could produce random tests for that it couldn't exactly be falsified or easily fooled and people could be classified in terms of their domains of knowledge with respect to those tests and it could be locked so that it was completely impenetrable to administrative interference and universities could have their accreditation stolen. .

And I think I don't see any reason why that wouldn't be technically possible, but that's been brought up before in the United States and that's the third rail as far as universities are concerned because I think they suspect that given the state of education current higher education that a person's entrance SAT score can be static or actually decline after four years, and that the idea that everyone would take an SAT as an exit exam and is quite logical because remember what they said about the sat in In the '50s and '60s, this was a merocratic device so that people from different backgrounds, economically or racially disadvantaged, and who didn't go to competitive schools, wouldn't be punished, so even if they got A's, Harvard would say, well , you got A's from Fresno, but it's not the same as Saint Paul's and then they responded and said, but we took the s.a.t exam and this student did too, but when you get rid of all that and say okay, you took the s.a.t because he said that there were different levels of prior education in high schools, we want to reintroduce that at the end because we believe that there are different levels of quality of instruction in universities, so just as I suspected that high schools were of the same quality, we now suspect that universities, i.e.

Stanford Harvard Yale is of uneven quality and we can't, the ba wouldn't mean anything, just like you said GPA means nothing unless it's combined with your SAT score, so to get a ba everyone has to take the exam that you described, whether you went to school or not and another thing is you talked about accreditation if we could give every student who graduates in the United States the option to go to school of education and that's really the catalyst for awakening because it trains all of our K- 12 Pub or yes, yes, but you have the alternative of going and getting a master's degree for one year in an academic subject in chemistry, biology, English.

I think the vast majority of Bas would prefer to get a master's degree in an academic subject and I think Let's talk about that, let's talk about that for a minute, and I talked to Larry Arn about who the president of Hillsdale is, from what I understand right now , about 50 percent of American state budgets are dedicated to education broadly speaking. That is an enormous amount of money now, curiously and let's say quite pathologically, the faculties of Education have a block on the accreditation of teachers and that seems absolutely absurd to me, it is a form of Monopoly, that's all and there is no excuse some for it now.

I have watched colleges of education for 60 years and they are not credible academic institutions. Colleges of education are not credible academic institutions. In general, they have been responsible for some of the worst fraud ever perpetrated against the buying public, so whole word reading is a good example. From that, the whole bloody self-esteem movement that was a complete catastrophe, the idea of ​​different learning styles, the idea of ​​multiple intelligences, etc., we can expose it all at the foot of the faculties of education and, in general, they attract students quite bad. and there is no evidence that their supposed educational training produces better teachers; have been 100 percent not only neglected in their duties for about 60 years, but actually what they have done has been the antithesis of the general research tradition, very low quality research, most of it unreproducible, most of it based on idiotic ideology and definitely not in the public interest, so here's an idea of ​​whether every governor in the United States simply eliminates the requirement of having a teaching certificate to be able to teach.

You don't even need a master's degree. Could you say we're going to open up the teaching profession to anyone who graduates in the top 20 percent of their class and then poof, you no longer have colleges of education and you don't have these institutions? If you think about the idea of ​​the Long March through institutions, the place where it is being focused most intensely and most efficiently with respect to the spread of woke ideology is definitely through the faculties of education and the only reason why they have a single cent of the dollar value is because they have a monopolistic hammer lock on teacher certification and that should be discarded;

There is a teacher shortage in the US anyway and there is no bloody evidence that Ed schools have produced teachers who know how to teach. this Orwellian system in the United States where you can be 18 in May at a high school, graduate and your teacher has to have a credential and then over the summer you enroll for the fall at a community college supposedly of a higher level of instruction and the Community College teacher doesn't need a credential, they need to master the qualification, in some cases they can get waivers, so there is no logic other than teachers union self interest, but I guess what I'm getting.

The question is whether it was the coveted blocking or lighting up of Inter by George Floyd or the acceleration of the woke movement. We are in truly revolutionary times when it comes to higher education and the economy. I don't think it is due to the smaller pool of applicants and people not choosing to go for the scam there is no economic justification for supporting these universities and their current course and I think there is going to be a radical change radical change I used to talk to people in Silicon Valley and they said Victor, we know that Stanford doesn't teach very well, but they do a, they do invaluable research for us when we hire a Stanford graduate, we know that he had to be very, very brilliant in the results of the exams and GPA, and yes, and now yes. taking that away, nothey have reason to turn to their graduates since they're not going to learn much and their admissions are no longer merocratic so I don't know yeah well that's it and then the other thing they sold was they sold one and they said to the employer that we will train people and they will like them, but even if we don't, we were so strict and careful in our admissions that you will get someone who is naturally talented, but they too with a wink. and a nod, I told this to the parents and we're going to have the seons and the elite kids and we're going to have them all here, so you mentioned the social interaction of an on-campus experience, yes, but they can.

I don't even offer that anymore because if you made your criteria based on gender, race, and sexual orientation and not Merit for whatever reason, then chances are people at Harvard, Yale, or Princeton wouldn't have a classmate. fourth whose father owned a corporation. I wanted to work at or a coder, all those links that with a wink and a stranger they sell to parents because they are no longer parents, they are not even a clearinghouse for the elite where they establish these relationships that last throughout their entire life. life. life for their own benefit and advantage, they can't even sell that, so in a very selfless way, you know, I don't see what they have to offer anyone anymore.

Well, I don't really agree with what they're after. that a little further because there are other points of failure on the university front that we could also focus on, so as I moved up the ranks at Harvard and then at the University of Toronto, I also watched the multiplication of adjunct professors and so Everyone Who is listening knows that most departments, instigated by their administrators but also pursuing a very narrow and foolish self-interest, have entrusted much of their teaching to so-called adjuncts and therefore in some places that represents 50 percent of the teaching population, so now if you are a full professor at a research-intensive institution, you have to do research, so you need a laboratory, you have to have graduate students doing original research, and you have to teach, You have to do a certain amount of administrative work and you are evaluated based on your research, your teaching and your work administrator basically in that order now if you are a full professor you are in the 10 year stream and you will be guaranteed a certain degree job security after you do your apprenticeship, but if you're an adjunct professor, then you're a part-time professor and that's 50 percent of professors now, you don't have a research company you don't have graduate students you don't have a permanent offense They don't pay you anything, they only pay you an absolute pittance, not even enough to live off of you, and now you do 50% of the teaching at the universities.

This is very convenient for administrators because adjunct professors have zero political power, like zero or even less than zero, and they can be fired or treated in any way at any time without any problem and, as there are more and more attached. There are fewer and fewer full-time professors and therefore universities not only fail to adequately assess students and then group them into peer groups that would be of some economic use over time while at the same time raising tuition fees in full. Beyond understanding. At the same time, they are also radically decreasing the quality and influence of the faculty, at precisely the same time, in addition to not hiring enough members because the administrators have multiplied like rabbits and the number of professors has remained relatively constant, so they are reducing the quality of teaching staff. the students, on the one hand, as fast as they can, but they are doing exactly the same thing with the Faculty on at least two fronts, the Dei front plus the adjunct faculty front, and you know, I complained about this at the University of Toronto for For years I used to tell my col

league

s why don't we demand that the administration set a limit for adjuncts, such as 20 percent of the teaching staff, forcing them to hire more full-time equivalent teachers because they are the ones They must be hired to adequately serve students. and uh, the response from my col

league

s was always something like well, you know, it's quite convenient for us to have these adjuncts take on the excess teaching load, we don't want to put too much pressure on the administration.

I thought okay, guys, that's hell. of good long term strategies like good luck with that for 20 years and here we are now universities are making I would say 10 fatal mistakes on the business front, not just one, there are just so many mistakes that it's almost a it's a miracle of incompetence and I think it is going to produce a precipitous collapse. I believe it too and I believe that, in conclusion, they do all this egalitarianly. These are people who are very critical of Walmart and salary gradations, but in fact, there are much greater degrees of inequality and exploitation in college by so-called liberals than in American workplaces.

That's what's so ironic, and I speak as a person who was a farmer and then was a hard worker. an adjunct faculty for two years and suddenly I was made a full professor and I realized that I was teaching the same teaching load but I was making three times four times the amount of money and I had benefits and suddenly I was allowed to use the Xerox machine, something that I hadn't been allowed before and all of a sudden I hadn't changed at all, but for the rest of my teaching career I was very understanding of these people who lived in their cars and went from community college to state college and were exploited and everything. this was done by very, very left-wing enlightened people, so to speak, and that's another story, well, you said so many things wrong, you said something very interesting and I just want to mention this, so you just said that after you were promoted from redneck adjunct professor who lived in your car, so to speak, you know, reasonable 10-year faculty member, you have to use the photocopier, so this is the level of pettiness. tyranny that these people, uh, what would you say, are in the university system?

You are an adjunct faculty. You're so far down the damn social totem pole it's almost incomprehensible and for someone to implement a rule like that you can only imagine the mentality it requires. implement a rule which is that our adjunct professors are of so little use that it's perfectly reasonable for administrators to prohibit them from using the photocopier because you know how often people do that for fun and wouldn't photocopy them like they were pamphlets. for their students or something they would just be sitting at their I don't know what playing with the photocopier which is exactly what adjuncts do if you don't supervise them 100 of the time and that's a good snapshot of exactly the way universities treat to their adjunct professors is beyond pathetic and the fact that it is these hypothetical egalitarians who are doing it tells me that what we are seeing is much more of a war against the idea of ​​competence and quality itself than it is. any push towards some hypothetical bloody egalitarian utopia is like we destroy universities in the name of egalitarianism and universities are participating en masse in their own destruction, you know, it's hard not to sit outside and think that you, so to speak, are going to get exactly what you're looking for and that's not going to be something yeah, I don't think they were.

I mean, I was great at one point in my life. I started a Classical Languages ​​program in one state. university for mostly minority students and I felt like it gave a huge advantage to people who had been disadvantaged in mastering languages ​​archeology History Literature but I don't know, that was a different era and I don't see that the University is a positive force in society, it is already pathological. Almost all bad ideas reified. America has its origins in the University, whether it's critical legal theory, critical race theory, or critical penal theory, or whatever, it came, it came from the University.

I was watching a clip of a break uh Smash and grab in San Francisco it was on YouTube, yeah, yeah, and I and I remember a conversation I had with a professor 20 years ago when I was trying to explain critical legal theory and he said, you know? what we do? We're going to change the legal system because the only reason it's illegal to take a chocolate bar out of a store is because rich white straight Christians don't need to steal chocolate bars, so they made a law and I said no, no. No, theft is innate to the human species, that is pathological, you cannot have a civilization with theft of any kind, but that idea that was common has filtered down to the street, yes, and that is why the Universities are a burden on the economy, they are a burden on culture, they are a burden on collective morality, and they have to be radically changed or destroyed.

Those ideas are so pathological that only a middle-class intellectual could believe them, so I studied the development of antisocial behavior in children Criminal behavior for a long time, so one of the things we found is that antisocial behavior is extremely stable and once it manifests itself, it says it is very, very difficult to do anything about it to improve it. There is virtually no evidence on the psychological front of any successful program in relation to improving antisocial personality, so it was not run by my research team, but it was a research team that I was associated with at Mcgill and at the University of Montreal continued to go back to childhood development to find the origins of antisocial behavior because childhood conduct disorder in children is seen as a precursor to criminality in adults and we could delay it by being the largest research community at two years of age , so at two years of age there is a subset of children, almost all of them are boys, about five percent of boys have a fairly predatory temperament in their aggression, so they kick, bite and steal, and if you group to children in same age groups, the most violent offenders are two years old.

Older, violent two-year-olds are a subset of two-year-olds, so you see that kind of adult life because about one percent of offenders are responsible for 65 percent of typical crimes in the distribution. Pareto, but We have a subset of children who will use predatory aggression as their primary mode of adaptation. Now it turns out that the vast majority of those two-year-olds are socialized by the age of four, but some of them aren't and some of them are. They don't get rejected by their peers because who the hell wants to play with someone who kicks, hits, bites and steals and then maybe also throws tantrums if they don't get their way?

That doesn't make you popular, it doesn't give you friends, and then what happens to these children is that they fall further and further behind in their social development because they don't enter peer networks and retain their primordial predatory aggression as their central means of survival. adaptation and that is why the idea that theft and crime is a secondary consequence of a pathological social system seems fine. I imagine there are cases where that is true, but fundamentally it seems to be flawed. There is a propensity for predatory aggression that is part and parcel of the panoply of human possibilities and of most people.

They are socialized from that, so you know that the opposite is some kind of strange Resilianism right that proclaims that every human being is innately good and that it is only the corrupt social system that introduces any

pathology

into reality and that you you know and only one French intellectual idiot could believe that and, although they are American acolytes, I think the worrying thing about everything we are talking about is that it is not abstract, it has real consequences that seep in and by that I mean that it is so pervasive the US Army now. They have lowered physical standards in combat and special forces units to accommodate women who, on average, have innately not in all cases, but less physical rigor and strength, and feel there will be no downside .

They've spent around five million hours collectively rising through the ranks to find out what Mark Milley and Lloyd Allston and their congressional testimonies characterize white rage, white supremacy, and white privilege, and the funny thing about this is that they haven't met their recruiting standards, suddenly none of the three branches and have not met there. The academies have not met their enrollment goals this year and the reason probably and there is no scientific data, but I think most people agree is that, for one reason or another, the military almost like the British who depended of the Gurkhas or the Indian army depended on the Sikhs.

One could argue that the US Army was based on rural Americans, mostly white men and south of the marks on the Dixon Line; In fact, if you look at death records in Iraq and Afghanistan, approximately 75 percent of allCombat deaths were white men, and yet they only made up 35 percent of the population, so here were Millie and Austin suggesting that they were going to be proportional in every aspect of the military or a Repertoire, except they never mentioned the data about those killed in combat and that they essentially have done in the space of about a year and a half, they have told all these families, even though you sent your son, even though he went to Vietnam and despite that his son went to the first Gulf War and even though it is a family tradition that you fought, your grandson fought in Afghanistan, now your great-grandson is going to be 18 years old.

We still suspect that you suffer from white rage and even though you died with double your Rubik's numbers, we're not going to count that and you and So they just said we're done, we're not joining, let's find someone else from one of these and that It's happening everywhere in this country right now, and when it's not just the military, you can see it with the airlines. pilot training can be seen with medical school admissions we used to make a joke in the United States, well, they're never going to do this where nuclear plant operators are pilots, they are, yeah, right, yeah, so I think we're getting to a Let's see we're looking at civilizations, I mean it's like that line from Hemingway The Sun Also Rises when he asks about bankruptcy, he said how did you get bankrupt, Mike, and he said gradually and then suddenly and then suddenly, I think so, yes. right, yeah, right, and that's what I think is what's happening with the United States, we've gone for this awakening diversity thing and now it was gradual and now it's just accelerated to the point where all of a sudden and not we're looking at core competency in our network and our transportation system and our education, so I think the data supports that and you know, when people measure the quality of the freedom or the business environment of the United States compared to others countries, we've really fallen and and Hey, let's look at the military thing for a minute, so the American military is a very interesting institution because it had an amazingly meritocratic foundation and it started more or less in World War I, when the U.S. military . began using tests of general cognitive ability. to select for officer training and the US military pioneered meritocratic assessment for decades, they did a lot of basic research on general cognitive ability and they are strictly meritocratic and there are some really interesting things in that because one of the things meant that Americans Blacks are disproportionately likely to also serve in the armed forces, which is quite interesting, which is why the United States has established its military system not only to be available in times of war but also to be a means of social progress in times of war. peacetime and that has been part of an explicit policy and therefore the military was very good at finding children who had a certain ability, especially on the officer front and who had a certain competence and a certain diligence and then putting them through an evaluation meritocratic and a training process and promote them up the socioeconomic hierarchy and it's quite remarkable to see that and you know I know a lot of military people and especially at the The higher ends of the performance spectrum are a very unique type of person.

I mean a guy I know, for example, a Texas Ranger. I talked to him when he decided he wanted to be a Texas Ranger and he said it was like. five years uh when he knew he wanted to do something that was military and specialized and he was one of those people who was only interested in training if it was almost impossible incredibly rigorous and strictly meritocratic, it's actually what he was looking for, right and So, one One of the problems with producing, say, a military apparatus that dispenses with meritocracy is that you fail to attract the very people you absolutely want to attract, who are incredibly ambitious about narrow achievements, which is especially true for special forces etc.

You can imagine that simply decimating the military by excluding the very people who would likely prosper temperamentally and practically is a true catastrophe, and that's why you've lost. The Reagan Foundation just did a survey last year and traditionally 75 percent of Americans surveyed had great confidence in the military now it's 45 and the same is true when we look at this, what weaponry you know, I don't need to get into that big issue of the FBI, the CIA, we are beginning to see that these institutions that we have all revered, especially on the conservative side, have completely lost all their traditional conservative support and become almost timid in the way they act, they have been weaponized and I feel like we're starting to see what's private and what's private. public sector everything that worked and made the United States unique and exceptional suddenly I mean we can trace its genesis back decades, but suddenly it accelerated to such a point and whether we're talking about district attorneys in Chicago or Baltimore or San Francisco or Los Angeles reporting criminals the day they commit a violent crime, we are starting to see society relax and what we don't realize is that this happens frequently.

In Rome there was no reason for the Western Empire. had to fall at the end of the 5th century in the same way that the Eastern Byzantine house survived for a thousand years, but once trust in these institutions was lost and once they were no longer bureaucratic and once the main loyalties of the people are no longer towards the state, everything We have talked about this morning and then the end result is a very rapid implosion and I think not. I think well, this is a real conundrum for conservatives, let's just say maybe we can start talking a little bit about Mr.

Trump. A little bit because of this, so here's the dilemma I see regarding conservatives, especially on the populist front, and Trump was very good at talking to disaffected working class Americans and certainly the Democrats completely abandoned them on the hill in the Clinton campaign and I had been preparing to do that for years like the socialist idiots with champagne on campuses, but in any case, Trump was pretty good at talking to working class Americans, but here's the danger, as far as As far as I'm concerned, on the classically conservative front and I don't really know what to do about it, it's like radical leftists have this fundamental proposition that all institutions are corrupt and based on dominance and power, and that's their reason for jumping, but now you have people like Trump who arrive as outsiders. and let's say you know, on the populist front, listen to everyone on the right, on the conservative side, we're on the working class side, let's say now, all of your institutions are corrupt and they're basically based on, you know, dominance and power, and I think well, this is a big problem is that conservatives oppose corruption, corruption of institutions in the way that you just described, they are captured by woke ideology, but the message underlying people is more or less the same: our fundamental institutions can no longer be trusted. and the problem with overcoming that drama on the conservative side, as far as I know, is that it adds more fuel to the fire on the left side and then you're in the position and we can talk about the role of the humanities and education.

There you are in the position of asking yourself well: if you are conservative and have a traditional base but believe that the institutions have been corrupt, how on earth can you chart a path forward without falling prey to the exaggeration of exactly the concerns that radical leftists are proposing because they say the same thing: you cannot trust the institutions, it is as if you could trust the spirit of the institutions. Maybe I would differ only in two respects, one is that I think they used to say that institutions can't be trusted, but it was the left that incited the Russian Collusion Hoax, the Laptop Hoax, the Ping Hoax and the Alfa Bank hoax, and it was a left that said that James Clapper, who lied under oath once, and John Brennan, who lied under oath twice and James Comey, who made Amnesia famous 245 times under oath, Andrew McCabe , who lied four times under oath, and Anthony Fauci, whose last interrogation was just a hodgepodge of I don't remember, I don't remember, and they're all iconic on the left, so the left is basically saying that these institutions became very difficult driving and two million people working for the federal government and regulators.

The regulators who weren't elected on their own had the experience of this huge Byzantine complex because elected officials come and go, but the EPA guy is always there. and he knows every judge, jury, executioner, legislative, judicial, uh, executive branch, all in one person, mode of operation, that the conservative said we have to break this, we have to take the FBI office and put it in Kansas City, we have to cut 10 percent of the workforce we have to make sure that HHS we have uh, if it shouldn't even be in Washington, we have to get rid of the Department of Energy.

I remember Miss Perry said the governor of Texas. I'm getting rid of three agencies, unfortunately I couldn't remember which ones were on the debate stage, but that's what the conservatives were doing, but the left says, well, you know, you've lost trust because they're so-so. on Regulation and they are intrusive and they are unconstitutional and they go after the individual, we now find them for the first time quite attractive because in our Davos agenda or our great reset agenda, whether it demands green energy or demands Equity or demands vaccines, suddenly we found these institutions for the first time in our lives very, very attractive and so they have been, they have inherited them and adopted them now and okay, okay, okay, so it's incredible to note that I mean one of the most miraculous thing that What I've seen in my life is the insistence from people on the left side of the spectrum that drug companies can be trusted, so it's like you know everything is absolutely upside down when that happens, okay, but now you're taking out something that is very paradoxical because, on the one hand, we have already established the case that this fundamental criticism that has emerged from universities is a criticism of institutional reliability and the basic doctrine is that of the powers on which all universities are based. institutions. the expression of arbitrary power and they cannot be trusted, especially if you are not in the power elite, but then you say that there is a paradoxical side to that which is that, at the same time, the same people at least as far as Their political and philosophical orientation are increasingly willing to use large-scale social institutions to propose a particular agenda.

I guess maybe the difference is that the left is perfectly willing to trust large-scale institutions if they operate under the rubric of their ideological theory absolutely. Well then you could do it in that case or you can get rid of all this, yes absolutely, they get rid of all the fuss and resistance of the discussion and Congress, when they take control of the military, they love the chain of command because if is transgender is subsidized. surgeries or women in combat units can affect social change in a Fiat authoritarian chain of command, so anything that makes these institutions skeptical or suspicious to the traditional supporters they become has taken power away from the individual in which they are commissioners.

They are ideologically armed by the left, all those things make it attractive to the left, so I think it is one of the strangest things in the history of the country how the right has distanced itself from all these military investigative agencies that no longer They don't trust them because they have been, they have been. I guess their DNA is like a virus that has been recalibrated against the individual in traditional America and the left comes in and says we like what they're doing, we like it. their overreach of civil liberties because it's the only way we can affect these changes that 51 percent of the people don't want and they do it because they're stupid, but when you control Silicon Valley and K-12 in Hollywood now the military and the The FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice can now finally implement changes without public support, so I don't know where it will all end, but conservatives have stepped back into that vacuum that the left is operating in, so you know, one of What I really appreciated about reading Solution's Gulag Archipelago was his insistence that what happened in the Soviet Union was not an aberration in relation to the set of ideas that made up the communist utopian vision, but rather a fulfillment of what was I would call the core. content that was implicit in the original doctrines, because leftist apologists constantly and to this day say that real communism has never been proven, which I think is one of the most appalling excuses in the world, by the way, butRegardless of that, the real notion was that a system of ideas had been produced that had a certain degree of internal coherence and then if you released that system into the world it would run algorithmically and produce certain results and it did in country after country. and the problem in some The sense of the discussion we are having now is that we are not making a distinction between those who propose these ideas and the algorithmic ones.

Yes, what would you say about the impulse of the idea system itself? Because it's not exactly a Cabell in the shadows. of conspirators are operating behind the scenes to achieve this, which is a set of ideas, most of which emerged in France and Germany and were later adopted in the United States, that have a certain spirit built into them and the spirit is partly group. identity uh predicated correctly, the fundamental predicate is that the most important distinction between people is some element of their group identity and then there are ideas associated with that like all outcomes should be equal or that is evidence of the dominance of something like power arbitrary and other The ethos would be the fundamental motivating principle of the human race: power and domination, so those ideas have an ethos that is made known over time and is elaborated and then becomes a system of ideas that has to individuals and then act in concert. with the ideas, but you don't need a formal conspiracy, no, I think I think you know, I think I just think I agree similarly, I think what we're witnessing now is the final stage of what was Wilsonian progressivism . elements of the New Deal the Great Society program, all of which could be justified by the left to address the needs of the moment and perhaps to rectify some of the rigidity of the American system, but ultimately it was built into them that eventually appears in this last manifestation because always on the horizon was the idea that we are marching towards radical egalitarianism through Fiat and that requires a level of coercion that is the antithesis of a democratic society and the magnificent Plato, I think Socrates. won at one point says that Athens won't be happy until dogs and donkeys can vote and what he's trying to say is that every element of franchise expansion, justified as it was ultimately, will end in the Absurd because it doesn't There will always be someone who says they don't have the same franchise as someone else and I think it's very similar, well it's always the same case.

I think it's built into this mentality or ideology, once you get through the Bourbons, that was justified, then you had the constitutional republic, yes, and you can see that that's how it was and then you had made a dent, but ultimately, whether you knew it or No, you had a date with the Jacobins, just like them, you had a date with Mao. he was right, just like karensky and the minshevx had a date with the bolsheviks, he was going in that direction until if someone didn't derail him and i think that's where we are today, well, this allows us to return to a topic that we didn't develop.

Enough, which is part of the purpose of a true liberal arts education, is to convey hard-to-acquire knowledge that actually enables people to become wise enough to prevent that inevitable deterioration into idiotic and vindictive egalitarianism. Yes, of course, it takes a lot of training. I know you said you'd taught ancient languages ​​for exams, for example, to minority students and people listening might think well, what the hell is that? and let me make a case what it's for that's very brief because it's a case for the Humanities and you can comment on that, well first of all there's nothing you can do to empower people which is a word I hate most effectively what to teach them. how to be deeply literate and historically knowledgeable if you are looking to facilitate people's ability to make positive changes in their own lives, there is nothing you can do that is more helpful than making them literate and if you want to help them understand who they are in the deeper sense above the superficial attractions of tribalism, let's say that they must be deeply educated in this historical realm that requires the acquisition of explicit knowledge about the central nature of the human being and that would be the Distinguished Citizen.

Let's say someone capable of assuming the responsibilities of a citizen and someone worthy of the rights that are an integral part of that and without a deep education in the Humanities all that disappears because it has to be transmitted explicitly and so that was the proper role of In universities for years It was as I imagined it, our role was twofold: we were going to teach a method, the inductive method as opposed to the deductive method, so that people, when they looked at the human experience through art, literature or history, would look at Exempla and then they would come to an overarching general conclusion that took the evidence instead of saying I have an idea and I'm going to select the evidence which was one thing we taught with Socratic Inductive Medicine and the other was We had to give them some kind of Arsenal or scope of knowledge. or reference point, so I know I used to photocopy maybe 500 terms of ionic order or non-composite Mentos, anything I could give as architecture and then we all made fun of it.

At Multiplex we had mainly essay tests, but I always thought there was value in a multiple choice test and general key dates. I would always tell the student when you leave right when you leave here. I want you to know how far Sparta is from Athens I want you to quickly give me three reasons why the Mycenaean Empire collapsed and it was funny because some of our graduate students were going to Ivy League professor interviews and asking these questions and these professors. , I should say, abds didn't. I have some answer for them, they had no practical knowledge and then a student said to me, well, why are we doing this?

And I said, well, it's so you don't have to repeat every life, every life experience you have. learn what is wise and what is stupid by experience and often that experience will be detrimental to your character, your fortune, but it is not necessary, you are fatal, yes, you don't have to do that all the time if you think that. sometimes people who are right or are punished the more moral a person is, the more they hate them it is not just you who experiences what you can, it is not necessary, you can find comfort and Antigone or if you can say, racial is not for the Swift then why and how the students came in and said you know I'm the best tackle on the team but I never get a chance to play because I don't kiss and I said so you're old Ajax and what are you going to do about it?

But that's the dilemma of Ajax and the game Sofa Glim, so those were some of the things that are most pragmatic since the humanities were able to do, they were able to give a person a complete reference of knowledge. so that they didn't have to live and learn something by writing or having an example and the other thing is that it gave them a feeling of yes, well, no, Beauty, that's not, that's not optional, that's not optional for human beings. I mean, we. They are linguistic creatures and I think we need a lot of cultural programs, and all cultures know this, so you were definitely in this situation where if we don't instill the wisdom of the past in our young people, then they will be forced to regenerate that wisdom through painful and often fatal experiences those are the options and to study history in the humanities is to arm yourself against the sea of ​​problems and become literate and that is the core of universities and universities have softly defined I abandoned that in favor of this idiotic narrative, You know, here's something you might find interesting, so I did a research study with one of my students right before I basically got kicked out of college for being a non-free person and, uh, we did research. two mysteries, the first was whether there was a coherent set of beliefs that could be described as politically correct and the way we investigated that was to produce a very large set of political statements and then find out the degree to which people agreed with them and then we analyzed them statistically to see if there were patterns of beliefs and we found two patterns of beliefs that were obviously proportional to the notion of a politically correct set of beliefs and one of them was like a politically correct liberalism and the other one was politically correct. authoritarianism and there has been quite a bit of research on the psychological front regarding politically correct authoritarianism in recent years, so first of all, there are politically correct beliefs and there is an authoritarian version, but then you might also ask what predicts whether or not people will believe these theories you know which was the biggest predictor this is so horrible it was low verbal intelligence it was more it was more it was a bigger predictor than verbal intelligence is it a predictor of grades or socioeconomic outcomes it was 0.45 a correlation whose magnitude was never known obtains in the social science study a devastating effect and then the subsidiary predictors were female well-being, one of them was having a pleasant temperament, which is a feminine personality temperament, and then having taken any course that was essentially propaganda in nature and So part of the reason people fall in love with this simplistic set of ideas is because they are simple and very attractive to people who want or require a one-dimensional view of the world in light of both. its simplicity, let's say, but also its underlying propensity to identify a convenient enemy.

I think it s true. I had a student. I mentioned it in Dying Citizen, but I had a student once say to me, "Well, you know, this country is very unfair because Wyoming." has one senator, I think at that time it was for two hundred thousand 400,000 residents and California at that time we were 30 million, now it's 41, but we have to have 15 million people, we only have one senator and now I said, why would it be that? and he said because the founders weren't Democrats, I said yes, but why weren't they completely Democrats? And the chamber was going to be elected every time the chamber changes every two years?

It represents 750,000 people, so it's democratic, but it's balanced by the Senate that changes every three years, I mean only a third changes every two years, you have to be older, it represents the states, it's America as you see it. they define the 50 individual states, not the people, that's the house and this then. is balanced by the executive and the person was very arrogant because he was very ignorant, but he had this slogan in his mind that democratic America is a democracy and therefore this phrase is not democratic and so he was very interested in this and so I went When I was doing it, I didn't realize that there was a whole body of academic literature attacking the Senate from law schools and political science departments.

The Senate is a kind of last objective for the left. They are trying to change it. a whole body of research that shows how toxic and conservative and illiberal he is because he doesn't represent the people, he represents the states and that the representatives in some states, the senators in some states have larger electoral districts in the Senate and in others and in the Supreme Court. has already ruled that one man, one vote, when it comes to House districts and therefore must rule that the Senate, each senator must be proportionally equal, yes, well, you know that, no That's right, you can see that the idea of ​​a distributed democracy has an instantaneous effect. intuitive appeal it takes a lot of sophisticated thinking before you can understand that there have to be intermediary institutions, and part of the purpose of a liberal arts education was to give people that wisdom, he says: look, the problem with radical democracy is that it can degenerate in government. by the mafia like the impulsive government of the mafia and that is the danger of populism, for example, of a tram, so you need intermediary institutions, you can kill Socrates, they have to establish themselves, vote to kill Socrates by majority vote in court or you can vote. kill all the middle Indians on Monday and then decide the next day that you don't want to do it and send a ship after the first attempt because the entire assembly changes in 24 hours from murderous to similar murderous and that's what Our Founders knew it was very dangerous, but that knowledge is completely absent in this younger generation because the sources of that transmission in history departments or political science departments or in government no longer exists and is not there in K-12.

There is no longer civic education, there is no set of music, art, tradition, literature and poetry that do their part to make the citizen aware of how unique the system was, and that is what I find really terrifying: this Collective amnesia in this generation. This generation especially, uh, took a long time, but this generation is the first one that I've been aware of. It's completely Amnesia about the past. He hates the past. It feels like the story is a melodrama. Yes, those who forget the shepherd are condemned. repeat it and that wasthe University's role, so look, we've used up our 90 minutes of time here on YouTube, we couldn't talk too much about Donald Trump, but maybe we'll have a chance.

To do it again in the future, we covered a good bit of territory around the idea of ​​citizenship and the role of universities, so I think it was useful and appropriate and I think you know there are stellar opportunities in the future. educational front right now, as universities abdicate responsibility for proper education, there is an economic opportunity and a conceptual opportunity and you know that the United States is a pretty dynamic place on the business front and it could certainly be the case that new Institutions are emerging to fill the void left by universities as they collapse and it could be that places like Hillsdale are at the forefront of that, we will see if that happens.

Thank you very much for agreeing to speak with me today and with everyone. you who are watching listening on YouTube and associated podcasts. I'm going to talk to Dr. Hansen for another half hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform. I like to delve into people's biographies to see how their career started and how it developed. time so we'll delve into that and it's a pleasure to meet you sir and thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me and everyone else today and uh happy new year to you and we'll move on to the bright side of the Daily Wire.

Goodbye to everyone watching and listening. Hello everyone. I invite you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.